Email has been around since the 1970s, and even though it’s now extremely common, you might still be shocked to discover how powerful a marketing tool it is today.
Even though it’s a 50-year-old technology, companies still use email to communicate with followers, transform leads into customers, and engage audiences with news, promotions, information, and special offers. There are many ways that email marketing can help your business grow, and one of the most significant is that it helps you to reach out to people who have visited your site without converting, which means that you can target potential leads via email to get a second chance of a conversion.
However, in order to promote a lead like this, it is important that you personalize and tailor your messages, use the right types of emails at the right time, and use promotional emails strategically to avoid overwhelming leads that have not been completely cultivated.
Email Marketing Is Still An Extremely Powerful Method Of Communication
Email may no longer be the shining modern technology that everyone loves, but as it has gone out of the world of new technology, it has advanced into another domain and become something invaluable that people rely on every day for communication. So while email might not be exciting, it’s reliable: in 98% of cases emails are delivered.
By contrast, a social media post is likely to hit just about 2 percent of your followers, whereas an email is almost sure to reach your audience’s inboxes. In addition, email has an extremely large scope, as more than 90 % of adults use email and almost three-quarters of the country’s teenagers.
Email Reconnects You with Leads You Might Otherwise Lose
One of the best ways email can serve your business is by helping you target pre-qualified leads. Here’s how it works: a visitor comes to your site and surfs around for a while but doesn’t buy anything and eventually leaves the site, but not before signing up for a newsletter. That lead is now pre-qualified because you already know the prospect is interested, so any marketing effort you put into converting that lead is more likely to pay off.
And instead of thinking that the lead is gone for good when the prospect leaves your site, you can now use email to re-market the prospect, cultivate the lead, re-engage your attention, and turn the visitor to a paying customer.
Personalized E-mails Are Much More Likely To Be Noticed
Beyond hitting its intended targets, email marketing is also successful because you can customize messages, which makes it far more likely that the recipient will open your email. Plus, customized emails eliminate unsubscribe requests, are 75 percent more likely to open, and also have higher click-through rates.
There are several ways you can customize emails, like using the recipient’s name in the subject or greeting, using the sender’s actual employee name, and sending emails at the correct time of day (it may take some research before you can decide this).
Segment Leads So You Can Send Tailored and Relevant Content
Another way to further improve the efficacy of email marketing is to split the leads into different segments based on their buyer persona, including detailed information such as demographics, jobs, pain points, shopping preferences, the buyer’s journey level, and more. Once you have segmented your recipients, you can tailor your emails to the different segments to deliver highly personalized and customized content. Here are a few ways you can customize your segment-based emails:
- Altering the language to respond to different demographics
- Making customized offers based on buying and searching habits
- Writing different contents or topics
- Provision of special sales based on geography
- Suggested products or services on the basis of needs or past purchases
Send Various Types of Emails to Keep a Lead’s Attention and Build a Relationship
Just as there are different kinds of literature, so there are different types of emails, and not all emails are appropriate in all situations. In reality, when you are just embarking on a lead nurturing venture, it’s important to send emails that are education-based and information-based; otherwise you are at risk of getting too powerful and frightening your lead.
The first email you send should provide the lead with knowledge that applies to your company or your profession and that shows your experience in the field. The next email may illustrate a problem that your prospect may be facing or a pain point that is common to your customers. Only after sending these first few introductory emails can you start indicating that your company might well be the answer their need, but still mostly educational. After that, you can provide sales details and even promotions in your emails along with feedback or testimonials from other satisfied customers.
While this can sound like a long and drawn-out process, sending the right types of emails at the right time will help establish a relationship with your prospects. Using informational emails instead of commercial ones can help prospects see that you are not trying to sell to them, but you are there to help them solve a problem or make their lives easier. This will create trust and make prospects comfortable with your brand, and by the time you are ready to start marketing your goods or services, the prospect will be ready to listen.
Read Also: Tools To Help Increase Your Content Marketing Gains
Use Email to Send Promotional Content to Encourage Conversions
Once you have formed a connection with your prospects through a series of informational emails, you can aggressively start promoting your company as long as you are not too eager to sell . One good way to do this is to include a featured product in an email that is personalized to the prospective based on their segment. You can also provide customized sales and discounts, exclusive offers, insider details, and other data or promotional material that will tempt your prospects to click and convert.
There are two very important items to remember when you use email in a promotional way: the call to action and the landing page. It is important to have a simple and convincing call to action in the email to get the prospects to click through.
Also, the email must connect to a custom landing page that explicitly relates to the content of the email; otherwise, the prospect can become confused and rebound. For instance, if the email you sent promoted a special product that you have just launched, the landing page should relate to that product.
A landing page note: The landing page is a crucial part of your email marketing effort, because, without it, you won’t get any conversions. When prospects click through, they should not be routed to a random page, but rather to a landing page that has been built and optimized for conversion. This involves making a straightforward call to action on the landing page, making interesting headlines, using photos and videos to attract attention, and using other best practices to maximize conversion rates. A/B testing is a perfect way to make sure that all the elements on both your email and landing page work optimally, and this two-pronged approach to email marketing and landing page is the best way to ensure that you are effective in increasing conversions.
Conclusion
While email has been around for many decades, it is still an important digital marketing tool that can help all businesses. An email will bring you back in touch with visitors who have been to your website but have left without converting, and this offers you a great opportunity to re-market pre-qualified leads that you know are interested in what you have to offer.
Email is also highly successful because it can be personalized and targeted to particular individuals and to unique segments. High delivery rates also mean that email is a successful method of marketing, and you can also keep a close eye on which recipient open, select, convert, or unsubscribe. The secret to email marketing is to slow down and start your campaign with highly educational emails that provide prospects with details about the problems or obstacles they face, and to work your way to the promotional emails that are intended to convert.