Why using email marketing to attract and engage more leads
Email marketing involves communicating through frequent and purposeful email to a business representative with the end goal of informing, updating, and selling a product or service.
The aim is, through a structured email process, generate and progress leads by establishing a relationship with current and potential clients.
And email marketing, despite the rise of social media, remains crucial for businesses in their marketing strategies.
It is because our email address concentrates all the actions we do on other channels. Every time we create a login on any website, for example, we use the email address.
Thus, it is an essential part of a user’s activities on the Internet.
When someone gives permission to a company to send emails directly in their inbox, that person is giving an opening to conversations.
In a marketing strategy, email is the channel that allows you to communicate more personally with your potential customers.
And it may seem obvious, but many companies forget to maintain a constant relationship with their contact base via email!
So to start building this relationship, here are 5 basic key email marketing steps for you to follow:
- Personalization
- Timing and persistence
- Incorporate with content strategy
- Split testing
- Avoid becoming junk mail
1. Personalization
An Econsultancy survey on âWhy marketing should be personal, â found that only 5% of companies are personalizing âextensivelyâ.Â
It is wise when marketing through email that you do not treat everybody as one.
Individualisation will be the start of a strong relationship, which is what you want to establish throughout your emails.
Once a potential client can see that they are valued and more than just a number, they are far more likely to listen and take notice of what you have to say. Here are some great tips for detailed personalization.
Keep reading: How to get to know your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)?
2. Timing And Persistence
Your email timing is important as is your patience and persistence. Not everybody is going to become a guaranteed lead or sale from one, two, or three emails.
You must keep at it and keep providing variable content and information until you eventually succeed and make that breakthrough.
Email drip campaign tools are excellent for creating a process that can improve your results.
It will assist your responses when you are emailing to clients or leads in other timezones, scheduling so you can send at the optimum moment and not miss an opportunity.
3. Incorporate with Content Strategy
You need to be sure that you are providing an email with a purpose that is going to help, inform, and captivate.
One way which you can encourage more leads is to incorporate your email campaign with your content strategy and deliver informative reading for your email list.
Visibility and variance are what will get you noticed, eventually.
Apply an effective subject-line, as this is essentially your key to the email being noticed or not.
Also, ensure it is optimised for mobile devices!
4. Split testing
Split testing is a worthwhile investigation to discover which of your campaigns are going to be the most effective long-term.
Once you have divided your approaches with alternative techniques and strategies, you can see which outperforms the other.
You will want to leave both running for a respectable length of time so as to give the fairest result and sample size.
After your chosen period has ended, analyse the results with the key metrics and take what worked from each to conclude with an elite email strategy moving forward.
5. Avoid Becoming Junk Mail
The aim of your email campaign is to be seen and read, so the last thing which you want from your emails is to be diverted to the junk email box and lost and unopened forever, alongside a load of spam.
Therefore your email appearance and structure are key to hurdle the traps. Here are a whole host of spam trigger words to leave out of your emails.
How can you increase your emailing strategy by using content marketing
The basic strategy here is that people use their name and email to âpayâ for useful, small pieces of content.
Youâve probably signed up yourself to get a free mini eBook or whitepaper on a topic that is of interest to you.
Rather than just landing on your site and leaving, if you have a compelling piece of content that they will get in exchange for their name and email, then you can get permission to contact them further, and an opportunity to nurture this lead into a customer.
The free content they subscribe to becomes a commitment point which is less than a paid product, but more than a casual browser.
It gets them into your funnel, and should be an essential part of your overall content marketing strategy.
What Kind of Content Should You Give Away?
The level of content should be more detailed than your average blog post, but less than a full-on book or information product.
A mini PDF report or guide of 10-30 pages is something Iâve used with success in the past, but youâre limited only by your imagination here.
Videos, audio downloads, âcheat sheets,â spreadsheets, software, anything that you have that your audience will find valuable. The free content you give away should be genuinely useful to your list.
When they read it it should increase their trust. Youâll be proving your credibility in their eyes.
Make it useful, and it will get your relationship with your new subscribers off to a great start.
The Landing Page Strategy for Segmented Growth
One great way not only to supercharge your list building but also to intelligently segment your market based on interests is to have multiple âgiveawaysâ each targeted to a certain segment of your market.
Promote these giveaways with simple, one page landing pages that summarize the offer and contain a signup form so people can join your list and claim their content.
Letâs use a cute example that should make this idea obvious. If you were a pet store, you could have a free guide on dog training, one on cat grooming, one on teaching your parrot to speak, etc.
Youâd promote each free offer with a simple landing page that breaks down the benefits of the free offer, and asks for their name, email address and other details that you want.
Pro tip: the more information you ask for, the fewer subscribers youâll get, but the higher commitment and quality the leads will most likely be.
You can link to these landing pages from your home page, your blog posts, guest posts and other pieces of content.
Promote them on social media, and carefully track their conversation rates.
If successful, this is a tremendous way to rapidly grow your email list and intelligently segment based on the interests of your audience.
Other Places to Let People Subscribe
In addition to dedicated landing pages for each piece of content, there are many other places on your website where you can offer your free piece of content and use it to attract subscribers and grow your list.
Subscribing should be as easy and obvious as possible.
List building is a worthy goal of content marketing, and will allow you to use your content to build your audience and add qualified and interested leads to your funnel.
Be sure to get the right tool to segment your email list exactly how you want. Follow the tips above to create useful âbitesâ of content and use them to create an interested and segmented email list that will be a valuable asset to your business.
Some Essential Email Marketing Tool Kit
Finally, as emails are still such an important method for marketing, lead generation and communication, it is important that you continue to adapt with new ways to refresh your structure and assault.
There are so many factors to email marketing that one tool or form of software is not going to be enough – as we said before.
Keep reading: Essentials B2B Lead Generation Tips
To conclude, we have gathered the ultimate tools needed for your email marketing toolbox.
Including a range of basic platforms to more advanced ideas which can be used to develop your campaign to the best it can be.
A mixture of productivity hacks, response improvement tips and analytical tools which by incorporating together will deliver improved results.
Even better is the fact that all of these tools are available, in their most basic form, free of charge!
Alongside these tools, we would recommend checking out Jordie van Rijnâs curated list of email service providers over at the email vendor selection website.
1. Find That Email
One of the most important tools in your kit will be the one that allows you to identify a particular email address of a company/somebody you would like to begin communications with.
A modern-day Yellow Pages â it will allow you to search for and then gather the email contact of whom you wish. And all you have to do is enter the name of the individual and then the company.
It will even deliver a drop down when searching for a company name of suggestions.
Once you have hit search, it will respond with the email and the confidence % of that being correct.
2. Litmus Scope
This is a free extension from Litmusâ full application, which you will find really useful. You do not need to have a Litmus account to access this tool.
The âScope itâ button, which you can simply install by dragging into your browser or downloading, will give you access to view emails in various forms including desktop and tablet.
Itâs extremely practical and creates an accessible web-based version of emails for you to share, analyse and use how you want.
It prevents you having to paste together email screenshots, which can be extremely fiddly and irritating.
Scope also includes a code inspector which is very helpful for identifying how others have included certain features into their emails and it is clear to understand and easy to grasp.
3. WiseStamp
This tool will allow you to create your own email signature and stand out from the rest. The customization options enable you to design and create the perfect signature for purpose and achieve more positive results.
You can also include your own image as well as social links and meeting schedule âcall to actionsâ. This will increase your personalisation and therefore your email response.
This is a free tool, however, there is a Pro version available for upgrade with access to more tools and features.
4. ReplyUp
It is a brilliant Chrome extension which can be used to increase the response rate of your emails. It automates the follow-up process in a friendly way to give a greater chance of receiving a reply.
And with over 80% of emails requiring up to five follow-ups in order to gain a response, it stresses the importance of following-up your emails.
Despite this, 48% of people still fail to continue the process after the first follow-up.
So having a quick, easy and automated way to follow-up on your emails, closes more sales, improves your performance and maximizes your efficiency.
5. A/B Split and Multivariate Test Duration Calculator
We already mentioned the value of split testing your emails to discover which of your campaigns are going to be the most effective long-term.
Once you have divided your approaches with alternative techniques and strategies, you can see which outperforms the other.
With Visual Web Optimizerâs, A/B Split test duration calculator, you can determine a test length by including factors such as â Estimated existing conversion rate (%), minimum improvement in conversion rate (you want to detect) (%), and a number of variations/combinations (including control).
You can then apply the calculated time-scale to achieve the fairest result and sample size.
6. Email Spam Test
Along with avoiding spam keywords, you could test your copy with this handy tool. Simply email your copy to the spam test platform and run the test to evaluate your spam score. The site also provides tips to help your spam score.
7. The Hemingway App
For a tool to aid the writing and structure of your email copy, there is the Heminway app â Created by Adam and Ben Long, inspired by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, by simply copying your written email into the application, it will highlight over-complicated phrases and long sentences in your text.
There is a readability grade and other basic editing tools for you to chisel your text.
It is very simple to use and the intention is to bring more boldness and clarity to your writing and ultimately it could be very effective in getting your point across in your emails.
8. SalesHandy
SalesHandy is an email and document tracking, mail merging, all action sales tool which allows you to engage smartly with prospects & close more deals.
Providing analytical insights, seamless integration and practical automation making this a perfect tool for you to control and improve your email campaigns.
The free version is extremely valuable however there are reasonably priced packages that offer more complex integrations and features for the ultimate email outreach process. A free trial is available and recommended by us.
