Why You’re Onboarding Your Leads Wrong and What To Do About It - Perpetual Traffic

Summary

Podcast Summary: Perpetual Traffic – "Why You’re Onboarding Your Leads Wrong and What To Do About It"

Episode Information:

Title: Why You’re Onboarding Your Leads Wrong and What To Do About It
Release Date: June 24, 2025
Hosts: Lauren E. Petrullo (solo episode)

Introduction to Email Triage

In this in-depth episode of Perpetual Traffic, host Lauren E. Petrullo dives into the intricacies of lead onboarding, challenging conventional email marketing practices. Lauren emphasizes the importance of relevancy and personalization in onboarding new leads, introducing her proprietary system called Email Triage.

Lauren E. Petrullo [02:00]: "Most marketers are overwhelmed second guessing every decision, drowning in data because no one taught them to use attribution the right way."

Developing the Email Triage System

Lauren outlines the genesis of the Email Triage system, which she developed based on her extensive experience in marketing attribution and client management. The system is designed to streamline the onboarding process, ensuring that each lead receives personalized communication tailored to their specific relationship with the brand.

Lauren [05:30]: "With all of these templates sounding the same, can you truly achieve relevancy? I believe that with AI, we've removed the burden of operations and can now templatize a personalized email onboarding."

Key Questions for Onboarding

At the heart of Email Triage are four critical questions that determine how new leads are engaged:

Are they brand spanking new to our ecosystem?
Have they ever unsubscribed before?
Have they ever given us money?
Have they signed up for this exact asset before?

Lauren explains how these questions help categorize leads, allowing for targeted and meaningful interactions.

Lauren [12:15]: "The first question we ask is, are they brand spanking new to our ecosystem? If yes, proceed as usual. If not, we delve deeper to understand their previous interactions with our brand."

Implementing Email Triage

Lauren provides a step-by-step walkthrough of implementing the Email Triage system using Draw.io, a workflow mapping tool. She demonstrates how to create decision trees based on the four key questions, ensuring that each lead receives the appropriate sequence of emails or SMS messages.

Lauren [15:40]: "Once we know who they are and what device they're coming on, we start Email Triage One. If they're new, we focus on delivering the asset they signed up for. If they're returning or have interacted before, our approach shifts accordingly."

Proof of Life: Engaging Non-responsive Leads

A significant aspect of the Email Triage system is the concept of "Proof of Life." Lauren emphasizes the need to confirm a lead's engagement through actions like clicking a link or replying to an email. This ensures that marketing efforts are directed toward genuinely interested prospects.

Lauren [19:05]: "Proof of life is essential. If someone doesn't click or reply, it's like having an empty store—no conversation, no sales. We need to identify and engage only those who show genuine interest."

Handling Non-responsive Leads

Lauren details the multi-stage process for dealing with leads who do not respond to initial outreach. This involves sending multiple emails with varying subject lines, followed by SMS reminders, and ultimately decategorizing the lead if there's no engagement after several attempts.

Lauren [22:30]: "After sending three emails with different subject lines, we wait and check for proof of life. If there's still no response, we send a final SMS to reignite the conversation before removing them from active lead lists."

Benefits of the Email Triage System

The Email Triage system offers numerous advantages, including improved email deliverability, higher engagement rates, and more efficient allocation of marketing resources. By filtering out uninterested leads, businesses can focus their efforts on nurturing relationships that are more likely to convert.

Lauren [24:15]: "The best benefit is building a negative lookalike audience of people who are actually interested. Impressions don't mean anything without impact. This system ensures our marketing efforts are impactful and directed towards engaged leads."

Conclusion and Takeaways

Lauren wraps up the episode by reiterating the importance of personalized and relevant onboarding processes. She encourages listeners to assess their current email onboarding strategies and consider implementing the Email Triage system to enhance lead engagement and conversion rates.

Lauren [25:20]: "Micro moments create macro impacts. By tailoring our onboarding conversations based on where each lead is in their relationship with our brand, we foster stronger, more meaningful connections that drive long-term success."

Key Quotes:

Lauren E. Petrullo [00:01]: "Most marketers are overwhelmed second guessing every decision, drowning in data because no one taught them to use attribution the right way."
Lauren [05:30]: "With all of these templates sounding the same, can you truly achieve relevancy?"
Lauren [19:05]: "Proof of life is essential. If someone doesn't click or reply, it's like having an empty store—no conversation, no sales."
Lauren [24:15]: "Impressions don't mean anything without impact. This system ensures our marketing efforts are impactful and directed towards engaged leads."

Final Thoughts: This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for marketers seeking to refine their lead onboarding processes. Lauren E. Petrullo's Email Triage system offers a structured and effective approach to enhancing lead engagement, ensuring that marketing efforts are both efficient and impactful. By prioritizing relevancy and personalization, businesses can cultivate stronger relationships with their leads, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and sustained growth.

Transcript

Lauren E. Petrulo (0:01)

I spent over a decade in the trenches of marketing attribution, tracking over $5 billion in ad spend and over $10 billion in revenue. And here's the truth. Most marketers are overwhelmed second guessing every decision, drowning in data because no one taught them to use attribution the right way. That's why I built the Five Forces, a proven system to give you clarity, confidence and direction to use attribution data with a system Right now, Perpetual Traffic listeners can get $800 off the Five Forces course and system over at five forces.com just use the code PT. You don't need more tools, you need a system. Go to fiveforces.com and get the system. Use code PT to save $800 today.

Ralph (0:56)

You'Re listening to Perpetual Traffic.

Kasim (1:04)

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Ralph (2:26)

Hello, hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. I am your host, Lauren E. Petrulo and I am here running solo. So if you're looking for Ralph, or you're looking for John or the other Lauren, all those amazing folks, you'll have to head over to a different episode. But if you're tuning in and listening to yours truly, guess what? Today is a deep dive into something I specifically use at my agency. Perpetual Traffic is the Podcast where you can know how to grow and scale your systems, your teams and ultimately your brands for greater success. And what I'm showing today because Ralph is not here, so it's my rules, my podcast for today. I'm excited to show you all what I call email triage. If you listen to past episodes, you might have heard me talking about how I take email marketing, especially onboarding new leads into your system, quite differently than others. So if you're listening in, excited to have you here, there will not be any fun banter. I miss Ralph tremendously, but my show, my rules. Anyway, so I'm going to be sharing my screen a lot. So if you're able to join us at perpetualtraffic.com forward/YouTube, you'll be able to see the actual designs, like the workflows that I have built for my system. And I'm going to show you a walkthrough of what we have been doing and it's been working well for our clients. The goal of this episode is at the end you'll see how I change. What most people do is their very first email and their onboarding welcome sequence to all new leads. I turn that first email into 27, maybe 500. It's a lot, so bear with it. I hope you like it. And let's get right into it. So before I get into sharing the screen really quickly, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I developed the email triage and what does it mean for Mongoose Media and our clients. So everyone is super familiar with your welcome secrets, your onboarding emails, right? Someone comes into your ecosystem, they're like, hey, I'm interested. I raised my hand. You're like, awesome, let's talk. And typically you have between five to 14 emails that onboard them into your brand, into your product, into your services, and into why you're the bee's knees. Now, those sequences you can always find on like HubSpot or Mailchimp or there's a thousand and a half articles about what is that onboarding template look like? Well, I changed it. I realized that in a world of AI and personalized advertising, the most important thing is relevancy. And with all of these templates, all of these emails sounding the same when you're talking one to many, that has its benefits because you're able to do a lot with automation that you couldn't do individually. But can you? I believe that with AI you've removed the burden of operations and with this system it's allowed us to really templatize a personalized email onboarding. So this is really great. If you have a lead magnet of some source or someone signs up for a newsletter, I don't care if you're E commerce, B2B or SaaS, how someone interacts with your brand the very first time they sign up sets the tone of your relationship. We all know that first impressions are the hardest to overcome. If you don't have that impression, well. So I'm inviting you to challenge your current onboarding system and ask yourself four critical questions. And if you are answering them in your email onboarding system, amazing. Congratulations. I'm assuming you've already hired us. If you are not doing that, don't worry. That's what we have found to be true almost the entirety of our marketing existence. So in the I'm going to switch now again. If you're on YouTube, I'm going to share my screen. We have what we call triage entry. Triage being like, like when you're at an emergency scene, like what do you address first? This is where we want to address which email to send out first. So I'm sharing my screen now. Kevin, Kevin, I hope that you're going to make this so I don't sound like a demon and that it like looks super clean in the transition. Okay, so in sharing my screen right now you can see I'm using Draw IO, that's Draw D R A W I O. It's a free workflow mapping tool that I use extensively among us media for us and for our clients. Part of Google, I use Gmail G suite and it's free, so love it. I've used Miro in the past before lucidcharts. This is just one that allows me to do a lot quickly and save to various client folders. So what I've got on the screen now is my four questions to figure out who they are in our ecosystem. Right? So before someone even gets their very first email, before anything anything happens whatsoever, they have signed up and they've collected name, email, phone number. You'll see on my form there's in pink. Assuming we don't collect additional info on their form for a specific avatar. If we do, that comes up later in Triage three for us. But in today's episode we're just covering email marketing. Triage one. Right. So this is just what typically people do for the very first email in their onboarding sequence. You're going to see how I actually send 27 emails times four. So jumping into it, the first question I always ask before they get any type of communication, is this person brand spanking new to our ecosystem? Now, most of you are probably doing this and you're assuming everyone that gets hey, welcome. Glad you signed up, glad to be here. You're assuming that they're brand new to your ecosystem, but is that true? Maybe. But what if it's not? Wouldn't it be better to have a better experience? Think about it. To take me back to brick and mortar and to the times when everything wasn't so digital. You go into a store and they recognize you, oh my gosh, doesn't it make you feel more inclined to buy when that store employee is like, oh my gosh, Lauren, welcome back and they're asking about me? That's a personalized experience that has been traditionally hard to replicate online, but I argue is not as hard anymore. Especially because you can leverage AI to make the versions of your onboarding sequence so that it's not going to take you as long as it does the first one. Don't get me wrong, you're still going to have to write your initial emails and you can use AI tools to write it faster. But what's better is if you have like a copywriter, you have a brand tone of voice, you can take that email, throw in a quick prompt into GPT, Gemini or whatever you're using and say, hey, okay, can you please write these three emails but towards someone who's already bought from us or to someone who's already signed up for this exact asset before. So I'm going to. I know it's annoying and I'm going to keep repeating myself, but I'm challenging you that the very first email that someone gets in your ecosystem should be relevant to where they are with your brand and with their customer relationship with you. So the first question I ask before we send any communications is are they brand spanking new? So what that means is they are not in your CRM or ESP at all. I use high level in our ecosystem we white label it, we call it dolegal, but that's how we do all of our workflows. This works in HubSpot and mailchimp and some all of them. You can set these up, but what you want to do is you want to evaluate are they brand spanking new? Do you have them in your ecosystem at all? If they are amazing, proceed as usual. However, if they're not, we need to do some follow up questions. That first follow up question needs to be did they ever unsubscribe this is something that if you're listening, the easiest micro change that you can make for a big macro improvement is this. Always check if someone's unsubscribed to your system before. Why? Because if you don't have unsubscribe rules, someone might sign up for a lead magnet. Someone might sign up to be on your newsletter list but are blocked because you have a toggle on in your system that says when they've unsubbed they cannot resubscribe. So I can't tell you how many times we have done email marketing audits and gone into systems where people are like, give me this asset and then they hear radio silence from you. That's like you're walking into the brick and mortar store ready to buy. The store is open but there's just no one around and you don't even have like self automated checkouts. You're just like, hello, Bueller, Bueller. We don't want that situation for your leads, your prospects and future clients or customers. So what we want to do is we want to see have they ever unsubscribed before? Because if they have, instead of proceeding as usual, which on the screen we have, email triage, one avatar is none, right? So the first emails is going to be we don't know who you are, you're just brand new. But if they've unsubscribed from us before, we have a slightly variation on that first round of emails in our onboarding suicide where we're calling it deja vu. So it's like, oh, I have seen you already, your brand deja vu. So we are then going to have the first emails slightly different in the sense that we're welcoming them back. Sometimes people unsubscribe from your master list when they only meant to unsubscribe from one specific sequence of emails. Or sometimes your brand has evolved and they either don't remember you or you've changed so much that you're a brand new you, whatever that is. I just invite you to consider, if someone is unsubscribed, wouldn't it be great to talk to them a little bit differently because they're a little more sensitive to who you are in your brand. This allows you to reintroduce yourself in a way that someone new doesn't need to hear because they're brand new. You don't have to reintroduce yourself. You're introducing yourself. So I hope that makes sense. I'm going to jump into that next question so what if they've never unsubscribed? But we know they're not brands making new into our ecosystem, Right? They exist in our CRM or esp. Like they're here, we have their information and they've never unsubscribed. Okay, so let's jump into the next thing. You'll see that in the decision tree, did they ever unsub? Sorry, I'm over explaining. For those listening, if they say yes, they receive then email triage one towards the avatar. Deja vu. If not, we're like, okay, cool, they're not in our system, so let's figure it out. We ask, have they ever given us any money? This was like a light bulb moment. I've talked on this on stage before and every time I've had the chance to talk about this, everyone's like, oh my gosh, why are we talking to people that are customers signing up as leads? The same way they've already given us money. We don't have to actually introduce ourselves anymore because they know who we are in theory, because they've already given us money. Right? So if they've already given us money, let's introduce that asset or that newsletter a little bit differently so that we can again have that personalized relationship. Remember, going back to the store, I'm walking in. I'm not only recognized because I've come in a lot, but I'm recognized because I bought something like, oh my gosh, Lauren, how is that red scarf for you? Is it amazing? I wish you were wearing it today. I'm like, oh, thanks, Judy. Tell me more, show me more. And it encourages me to buy more because I feel connected to the brand. Some really small micro shift. If you know they've already purchased from you, if they've already given you a dollar, let's welcome them, let's celebrate them a little bit, right? And I imagine as we have seen with our results, we actually get an increase of replies because they're like, oh my gosh, hey, yeah, I am back. Or this is really cool. There's ways that you can get even more sophisticated to make sure that if you know what they are depending on if you have a large amount of skus or if you're in the coaching business and you've got like one or two items, you can really have personalized first hellos. The way that we wish our VAs or customer service teams are doing on socials, we can do that on email. And when you build it, once you really kind of get to Set it and forget it. Unless you want to go back and continue to create more avatars. But that's what we've got here. So the first question we ask to recover is like are they bread spanking new to our system? If yes, proceed as you typically do. Second question is they're not brand spanking new to our ecosystem. So have they ever unsubscribed before? If they've unsubscribed, let's, you know, welcome. They're a little bit more sensitive, let's hold their hand a bit more. But if they haven't unsubscribed, we'd need to check. Okay, well they haven't unsubscribed. They're here. But did they ever give us money? Now they haven't given us money. They're in our ecosystem, so haven't given us money yet. But they've already signed up in our system. So we want to check did they sign up for this exact asset yet? Right. Anyone that's listening that does lead generation. If you've got a calculator, if you've got a plan or if you've got any type of lead magnet. You know, we talk about if you go to petroltraffic.com NPIS you can download our NPI checklist, right? That's actually evolved a few times. So depending on when you downloaded it, you might actually see a newer version because it's got linked to videos with John Moran. It's pretty cool. So if you haven't signed up, easy plug on that. Regards, but if you have signed up for this exact asset, I'm sure a lot of you listening are thinking the same thing. You have signed up and you forgot that you signed up for it. You signed up for it because you wanted it and a lot of us that are marketing to them like why do all these people sign up and don't click? I've talked a lot about Proof of Life and email triage1 when we get into it, more is all about confirming proof of life. That's why the very first email and most onboarding sequence, the whole purpose of this is I'm not actually going to let you see the rest of my onboarding sequence until I get proof of life. Be that a reply or a click. If you're asking for this lead magnet, I'm going to give it to you, but I'm not going to introduce my services. My USPs tell you all this stuff, give you coupons. If you didn't even click on the Darn thing you signed up for. It's not that I'm not going to email you again later. You're going to get on my campaigns list, but I'm going to show you why these this first email which I actually sent three different emails with two recents each for a total of 27 potential emails which most of you do is one. I do it because I need to make sure that you're proof of life. I don't want bad lead bloat, but if you're someone in my system and you've already signed up for this exact asset before and you have asset deja vu, then I'm going to communicate with you in a slightly different manner, right? Maybe it went to spam, maybe you forgot about it, maybe it got lost and eaten by email. Gremlins Whatever it is, this is an opportunity for you to again have a personalized conversation based off of where they are with their brand and play with it. If it's on brand, you could then send them a text and be like hey, hey Lauren, looks like you previously signed up for this and you can be petty and put the dates. So we just want to check. I'm sending you it here via text in case the last time it went to spam or got eaten by email. Gremlins we hope this asset is good for you and wanted to be available if you had any follow up questions. Why does this matter? Anyone that has signed up for your lead magnet more than once has shown you, has demonstrated to you a higher quality of interest in your brand and services or product than someone who signed up for the first time. We think like what? 80% of people sign up for stuff and it sits in inbox graveyards. But when someone signs up again like they wanted it and we always look here like ah, all these leads, why aren't they doing anything? Well let's put it back on you. Why aren't you doing anything with them based on their relationship with your brand? Well that gets a change now. So after that, if they have asset deja vu, think about for yourself and your own experience or what's possible with your future customers. How much better would that relationship be with them if you had that more relevant conversation? So jumping into the last question that we're going to ask before our next one. So this is a set of questions to do avatar identification. Then we have another question to do distribution identification. So if they have not already signed up to this exact asset, what we know then is they're a stranger to this asset, but not to us. Therefore, we do email triage1 for avatar fam. If they've signed up and had asset deja vu, we do email triage1 for the avatar or repeat, sign up. Now, if they're totally new to this asset but not new to us and have never given us money and haven't already unsubscribed, we then do email triage1, which we call Avatar fan. So that gives you the chance to talk to them and be like, hey, welcome back. If you have personalization and like teams, you can list what they've signed up for before and be like, hey, we hope you like that blueprint. We think this calculator is going to be awesome. And then you can build even deeper relationships of how they can work together, but you're just recognizing for who they are. We have the data. This is totally possible to do. It does take a little bit of extra foundational setup work. But these micro moments that you create for that customer or that lead helps them become a better customer for you long term. So again, recap. I know, sorry, this is obnoxious. You can skip past some pieces, play around. But again, on YouTube, I'm showing the first question we ask after they've signed up is, are they brand staking new to our brand? If yes, email triage 1 with the avatar none. If they are not new to our brand, we check, did they unsubscribe? So then we say, okay, email Triage one avatar deja vu. But if they're in our system and we need to check, have they given us money yet? Because we're going to talk to our customers a little bit differently than we're going to talk to people who haven't paid us. Right. And if we do awesome, you're going to email Triage 1, which is about the avatar customer. Then we say, you haven't given us money. Have you signed up for this exact asset? If yes, email triage 1 avatar repeat sign up. And last but not least, if they are stranger to this asset but not to us, we do email Triage one Avatar fan. I hope this isn't confusing. I promise it's a lot easier if you're watching on YouTube. So if you go to perpetualtraffic.com YouTube I promise it'll be much easier. But if you're running, I love it. Let's be friends on Strava because I love listening to podcasts while running. And maybe you can, if you have questions or want me to, like email you the screen sheets or something, you can do that Laurenongous media, I'm happy to send you screenshots over so that you can see it later. But after we ask who they are, then we need to ask, what do they want? How are they coming to us? This is something that I invite you to think about, which is, if you signed up on your phone, do you have email notifications as prevalent as you have SMS notifications? Probably not. But if you sign up on desktop, say you're on your laptop or you're on your desktop device, you probably have email notifications on, because that's a work device. So what's really cool is you can then do a question, are they filling out this form on mobile or sms? If they're filling it out on mobile, then what we do is we start triage one based on the avatar with the first deliverable, the immediate one being an sms. And if they sign up on desktop, our first deliverable is then an email. They're still going to get both, but we're trying to capture their attention immediately. We want to say, hey, we know that you've signed up, we know that you're interested, so how can we be the most relevant and personalized to you? Because relevancy and personalization is going to win all day. So if they signed up on desktop, what we do is we actually add a hidden form field that shows what type of device they're on. If you want it, we coded it, we have a JavaScript, we code it, we sell it. Feel free to message me, I'm happy to give it to you. Or you can pass this along to your developers or if you have a team that they can do it, it's a snippet Of Code, some JavaScript that you can add depending on the type of email service provider you have or your form builder, but that allows you to have a hidden form field so you can know if they're signing up on mobile or desktop. There's lots that you can do with that later, of course, can get into that at later episodes if people are interested or continue the conversation. On our telegram group, which is perpetual.com for the which is perpetualtraffic.com telegram see Ralph, I miss you. It's hard to just monologue. Anyways, we'll keep going. So once we know who they are and what device they're coming on, we're allowed to then start email triage one. Right. So on that I'm going to zoom out a little bit and explain quickly some moments how it changes. So if they're coming in on email triage 1 and the avatar is none. We are going to make sure that email is focused on the asset. If they're avatar deja vu, remember they unsubscribed once. We're focusing on welcoming back and letting them know we're glad to see you again. If they're the customer, we're focusing on them as an individual and we are their fan. So those type of moments can be articulated really well. Again, micro moments that can have macro impact on your relationship with your customer. But what I'm going to switch now to is our bigger email Triage onboarding tab in Draw IO So it's a lot. Brace yourself, have a glass of wine, take a sip because it's going to be a little bit confusing, but I hope you're going to like it because so far it's been really well received and we have seen it have great impact on our clients and internally as well. So switching over to it, I know this is a lot. So this is an internal resource, this is what it looks like for us. So there's a lot here into it. But essentially what I've got on the screen is that Triage one, this is on your onboarding series, the only part of the Triage that changes every time. So every time someone signs up for anything in your ecosystem, you need to redo Triage one for that asset or for that signup experience. If it's like a newsletter sign up, that's a pop up similar to the one in your footer. You don't have to have differentiation between that. But if you're doing a tool versus a planner versus an audit or whatever the different things are, you want to have that first triage level personalized to what they're signing up for.