8 minute read
Nurturing Your Email Contacts
The purpose of email marketing is to lead your contacts through their buyer decision process. While the end goal is to convert potential customers or upsell current customers, trying to sell them prematurely or coming off too pushy is likely to cause an increase in unsubscribe rates.
In order to improve the chances of success for your email campaigns, you must:
- Educate new email and blog subscribers
- Inform, upsell and delight existing customers
- Apprise, nurture and sell leads
By keeping your existing customers updated on your products and services via email, it generates interest in purchasing from you again.
Leads, on the other hand, receive items such as promotional offers, free trials and case studies. The point of these offers is to lead them from the consideration into the decision.
Moving leads that have not purchased after a certain number of communication attempts back to the beginning of their lifecycle prevents them from unsubscribing. One of the best marketing tools you can use is automated workflows to ensure the correct leads are downgraded after x amount of attempts set.
For example, automated workflow tools can tell if a recipient opened an email and in response, they trigger a series of actions based on that response. If the subscriber opened the email but did not click on the call-to-action within, automated workflows might change the recipient’s lifecycle stage or put them into a different segmented list for another follow-up.
Delighting potential and existing customers creates free promotion for your products or services from trusted sources. If they find doing business with you is a positive experience, they are likely to sing the praises of your brand to their friends and family. And people tend to trust other people more than they do companies. In fact, people are 90% more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by a friend.
In order to delight your prospects and existing customers, you must create a memorable, overwhelmingly positive experience for them through proper email marketing services. Using the data collected, you must analyze it all to figure out what kind of gestures each segmented list would appreciate most.
Examples include asking them to submit an online review or fill out a brief email survey on your service or product, which lets them know their satisfaction is important to you. This, in turn, fosters customer loyalty and provides you with valuable feedback to improve on your products and services in the future.
When Developing An Email Marketing Strategy, Ask Yourself…
In order to generate the most qualified leads, an email marketing strategy must address the following:
- Who are your target audiences?
- What are their pain points?
- What are their shared characteristics?
- When is the best time to send specific types of emails?
- What defines a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that can be handed off to your sales department (SQL)?
Begin by conducting research to understand your target audiences better. This allows you to craft emails that will appeal to their shared characteristics and clearly explain how your product or service can solve their pain points.
From there, determine what kind of messaging will generate interest and when the best times are to send emails to prospects according to their progress through your sales funnel. Part of this process involves analyzing email contacts who have not converted or upgraded yet to devise strategies for remarketing them. Remarketing – also called retargeting – gives you a second chance to convert them.
Studying Reactions to Improve Email Campaigns
Using advanced tools, you are able today to see how many recipients opened each email and how many of those people clicked on the CTA. This data is critical because it reveals whether or not two very important elements are working.
- A low open rate – the percentage of people who opened the email – indicates that the subject line was weak. As part of the email recipients see first, the subject line is crucial for success. It must capture the target audience’s interest.
- The call-to-action is equally important. It exists to compel recipients to take action that will move them to the next stage in your sales funnel. A low click-through rate – the percentage of people who click on the call-to-action – is a sign of a weak call-to-action.
Utilizing A/B testing will help you determine which subject lines and calls-to-action are effective and which ones fail to elicit action. A/B testing is, quite simply, testing two elements of a campaign against each other to see which one fares better. Any element including the subject line, call-to-action and images can be A/B tested, but only one at a time. Half of the recipients receive one version and half of the recipients receive the other version.
By measuring the results of each email campaign, you can then figure out what is working and what needs improvement. This allows you to consistently achieve a better ROI with each emailing marketing campaign you develop.
Growing Your Email Contact List
Prospects are much more likely to give you their contact information if you provide them with something of value. In marketing, this incentive is called a lead magnet. Examples include eBooks, expert guides, free trials, checklists, case studies, and webinars.
Start by creating new lead magnets or leveraging the content pieces you may already have. From there, devise the best way to make the lead magnets available to your audiences such as a well optimized landing page, social media, paid LinkedIn ads, and of course emailing your current lists and making it easy to share with their contacts.
Prospects will provide their information in exchange for the lead magnets, thereby building your email list.
Hitting a Homerun with Email Personalization
Think about it. When your inbox is full, which email messages are you most inclined to open and respond to? Those that apply to your situation in some way. This is where personalization comes in.
Segmentation is critical for personalizing emails. The first step in separating your contacts into segments is creating different lead magnets and opt-in forms for each part of the buyer’s decision process. Then, using the information collected from your leads magnets and forms, break your email contacts into segments according to factors such as industry, content viewed, location, job title, lifecycle, and more. Lastly, create emails that appeal specifically to them.
Gathering Data to Increase Email Conversions
During remarketing efforts – the practice of engaging leads that failed to convert previously – leads are tracked using cookies embedded in browsers. These cookies collect data that teaches you and algorithms about their shopping behavior such as the service pages they visited, products they showed interest in, and where they spend their time online.
Why are cookies so important for remarketing? The data is used to figure out more effective ways to influence leads into purchasing. Their valuable data drives email campaigns and marketing efforts for each specific segmented group, thereby improving the chances of converting them.
Timing Is Everything When Sending Emails
When it comes to email marketing, timing is everything. If you contact leads too often, they may get annoyed. At the same time, you do not want to let leads go cold.
Working with cutting edge marketing software, it automatically predict the best time and day to send an email for that list, along with automating the process of sending emails based off triggers. This allows you to set up how often you want certain contacts to receive communication based on where they are in the sales funnel. Once a frequency is determined, emails are sent out automatically. You do not have to do anything except reap the rewards.
Email Marketing Services You Can Trust
At Tag Marketing, we thoroughly and constantly analyze and measure all of your email campaigns and share the results with you. Furthermore, we use this data to refine future campaigns, continuously improving to obtain the most ROI for your business.
When making improvements, we take into account factors including deliverability, open rate, click through rate and unsubscribes to ensure future emails are aligned with your brand, as well as your target audiences’ stage in the sales funnel, past behaviors, and demographics.