It is not enough to just market and advertise your brand and products. While it is important to let your prospective clients know about your products, you need to go a step ahead and convert these prospects into loyal customers. The traditional methods of converting leads into serious customers have since been outdated thanks to digital marketing. As technology advances, it continues creating effective and better ways of marketing. Such methods include social media marketing, websites, and email marketing among others.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy where you send emails to your leads with the hope of converting them into customers. Research indicates that about 91% of customers check their emails at least once every day and that approximately 66% of these consumers make purchases. This data shows that a well-crafted email can help you turn a prospect into an actual customer and significantly increase your sales.
It matters less which business you are doing. If you are not using email marketing, you are losing a significant amount of sales and profits. You should know, however, that not all emails you send will convince that individual to become your customer. It matters a lot how you craft your email. This article focuses on how to effectively use email marketing to convert your leads to loyal customers, and generate more leads.
Build an Email List
You obviously cannot use this strategy if you do not have emails to send your sales pitches to. You will need to collect emails from prospective clients, to begin with, but make sure they are the right addresses. There are software services available to help you collect and build a list of email addresses. These are not just random emails you collect from the internet. Since email marketing is permission-based, sending emails to random individuals without their consent is a waste of time. Most would-be clients consider such as spam or junk email, and will simply discard them. That means that it is also useless to buy emails. So, how do you get suitable addresses?
To ensure that the emails you collect belong to clients that will consider reading your emails, you can use lead-magnet opt-in forms. These come embedded into the software you choose to use, and then integrate the same into your website and social media accounts. You can offer your clients free offers on your site in exchange for their emails. Prospective clients will show interest by signing up on these forms. You can then pick up these emails and create or build a list. Just ensure that whatever you offer, whether it is a discount, a free newsletter, or a coupon, gives your potential customers some value for them to see the need of leaving their emails.
Segment Your List
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After building the list, you are still not ready yet to start sending the emails. You need adequate sales intelligence to know the kind of leads you have to tailor your mails according to their needs. It is at this point that email segmentation becomes important. Segmentation is simply categorizing your list of emails according to your leads’ attributes. You also categorize based on customer behavior, their engagement as well as their demographics.
With this information, you can send more targeted and personalized emails. This will increase your open rates, conversions, click-through rates and significantly decrease the number of those who unsubscribe. You get to send emails to only those who will be interested in them. When choosing software for email listing, ensure that it also has the functionality of tagging your leads or subscribers in terms of their attributes and demographics and list them as such.
You must know how a potential client got into your list, so that you can know how to approach them. There are a lot of ways in which you can categorize your list. Here are some segmentation that you can use
Lead Magnet
As mentioned earlier, you can use a lead magnet to attract potentials and then try to convert them. In your email list, you can have this as one of your segments or categories. If such a lead signed up using your coupon, you could send them an email with more offers and your products.
New Subscribers
These are users that have just signed up with you. You should not be quick to sell to them. You can start by sending them welcome emails and introducing them to your business.
Existing Customers
These are users that you have transacted with, in the past. They are those that have bought from your business before, and maybe are not as consistent. You can send emails them with special offers or invite them to participate in a customer referral program.
A great idea is to invite these leads to participate in your customer referral program and get rewards for recommending your products to their friends and online audience.
You can even make a simple QR code that will take them to a customer referral program page.
Demographics
These are users based on their gender, places of residence, and age among other demographics. You can tailor your emails based on these demographics to have a stronger effect or to elicit a better reaction.
User Activity
This category shows you who the active leads are. You can engage the more active potentials by offering more discounts to them than the latter group. They are more likely to respond positively. As more inactive users, you can send them reminder emails showing them what you have, while you try to re-engage them.
There are other many categories that you can place your potential leads to create effective emails, but you must have just a few key categories to enable you to be more specific when writing your emails and get more positive responses.
Automating Emails
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The more emails you add to your list, the more difficult it becomes to manage them. Since you are going to have a very long list, it will become impossible to manage all of them manually. This is where automation comes into play. Automation, when used in the right manner will work throughout, turning your visitors into potential clients, and potential clients into loyal customers. All this will happen without you having to put in a lot of work hours dealing with your emails. Automation makes use of an important function called an autoresponder.
So, how does an autoresponder work?
The autoresponder has a prewritten sequence of emails that are sent automatically to leads in specific segments based on their behavior. For instance, it could send a greeting email to a new client that subscribes to say a newsletter, or send a different type of email to another who makes an inquiry.
Autoresponder features three crucial elements to perform its actions effectively. These features are a goal, a sequence map as well as a trigger. The three features work together to ensure that the right emails are sent to leads in the right segments or categories as a response to a particular action.
Goals
You can define your autoresponder goals according to the nature of your business. Here are a few examples though of some common goals;
- Welcoming New Users/Subscribers
- Following a Lead Magnet
- Putting the Sales Process on Autopilot
This autoresponder goal is to send this segment of subscribers emails introducing them to your business. It is your chance to let them know what your business deals with, and what to expect going forward.
Autoresponder Goal
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This feature is connected to the lead-magnet opt-in that you have integrated into your website. The autoresponder will automatically send your offer if a user follows through your lead magnet. It can, for instance, send a newsletter or an eBook you created to give out for promotional purposes.
Sales Process Goal
Having a clear sales process will save you a lot of time and hassle. You simply engage the autoresponder to send such emails to prospective clients automatically and quickly have them as your sales target.
Trigger
A trigger is what propels an autoresponder to send an email to a particular client or lead. You should have well-defined triggers to avoid sending spam emails. Have the trigger identify the category that a particular lead is to ensure they only get the email they are supposed to get. Also, you should create lead generation campaigns to enhance your email marketing strategies.
Sequence Map
A sequence map helps you to determine the length of period a particular autoresponder will operate or run. It also sets the timing in between emails. You can also have an extra feature that notifies your respective departments depending on your leads’ responses. Ensure that you have emails sent during working hours of the week rather than during the weekend. Research shows that prospective clients tend to look at emails during work days rather than during weekends.
Conclusion
When you have all these actions in place, ensure that the content you send your prospective will trigger positive action. You already by now know how to tailor craft your emails based on different segments. If you follow these insights keenly, you are sure to turn a lot of leads into loyal customers.
About the author
Rithesh Raghavan is the Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency in India., and the co-founder of Acowebs, an online store for eCommerce plugins with 25000+ satisfied customers across the globe. Having a rich experience of 17+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.
Featured image: Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash