A comprehensive introduction to the strategy of email marketing, giving you the tools to begin cultivating and converting your client base in order to take your company to the next level. It’s easy to overlook how effective and important an email marketing plan is for a company when we live in a world where everyone is rushing to jump on the latest social media craze.
By 2023, the majority of emails will be opened on mobile devices, making it possible for you to communicate directly with your target consumers. The fact that individuals are more careful about who they let into their inboxes contributes to the fact that inboxes are less congested than outlets such as social media. You may increase client engagement with your company by utilizing the appropriate email marketing approach, as well as creating extra income streams and consistently driving sales with the help of sequences and funnels.
You may now exhale a sigh of relief since it turns out that your company does not need to always follow the latest TikTok dancing trend in order to attract new clients. Your company has the potential to consistently create leads and drive sales, even if you do not have a huge staff or a significant budget if you focus on core email marketing tasks such as expanding your email list, nurturing subscribers, and establishing conversion funnels.
In this piece, we will discuss the email marketing methods that have shown to be the most successful for companies that want to increase their number of leads and income. Using these strategies, you will be able to begin the process of nurturing and converting clients.
We have discussed the answer to the most crucial question, which is “what is email marketing,” but we have not yet discussed the reasons why email marketing is so extremely vital for your company. Let’s discuss this topic right now.
Email is still the most successful way to nurture leads and increase client loyalty, despite the rise of social media and unwanted spam email (which, by the way, is never a smart marketing approach).
Email marketing should be one of your top objectives for many different reasons, but here are the three most important ones to consider first:
That is a tremendous deal! And if you are thinking that social media converts even better, you should reconsider since the average order value of a customer who makes a purchase through email is at least three times larger than that of a customer who makes a purchase through social media. Simply put, email is by far the most effective method for making sales online. Now that you understand the significance of email marketing, let’s discuss the most effective strategies for doing it.
A marketing automation platform should be the starting point for every email marketing plan. Not only are you able to carry out all of your essential email operations from a single window, but the correct platform will also guarantee that you comply with all of the rules governing email.
It is natural that the sheer number of email marketing platforms now accessible has left you feeling confused and overwhelmed. In the previous two years, the marketing technology business has grown by 24 percent, bringing the total number of available solutions to a staggering 9,932. These solutions range from analytics to video platform software. If your company is interested in switching to a new email marketing automation platform, the following advice can make the platform decision process simpler, allowing you to return your attention to expanding your client base and bringing in more revenue:
Prioritize your own business’s model and objectives:
Before committing to an email marketing automation platform, it’s important to ask yourself and your team what you hope to achieve by using such a system, both immediately and as your business or organization grows.
Automating marketing processes is often done to achieve these aims:
Select a Marketing Automation system based on its ability to provide the things you value most. Use this checklist as a guide when you conduct your own investigation and speak with potential service providers.
Collecting email addresses and other information about subscribers in order to establish an email list is the phase in any email marketing plan that is considered to be the most essential. This list of subscribers will be compiled for you automatically by your marketing automation software, allowing you to start establishing relationships with them right now!
You will gather email addresses by having subscribers fill out an email form, sometimes referred to as an opt-in form, which is designed to collect information from subscribers. One of the most important components of any marketing strategy is an email form, which offers a safe and reliable method for gathering information from your potential clients and existing consumers.
You may use a variety of different forms as part of your email marketing plan; however, the simplest forms consist of only two fields: one for the person’s name, and another for their email address. You have the option of coming up with email sign-up forms that demand as much information about the subscriber as is humanly possible, depending on the approach you use.
When you include more fields on your email sign-up form, you will collect more information about each of your customers. This will enable you to promote your products or services to them in a more efficient manner. Take, for instance, the case where your class is geared toward assisting time-pressed professionals with their productivity. In such an instance, you might include form fields that ask questions about their ways of life, such as the number of people in their family and the business they are employed in. You will be able to personalize the content of your emails and promotions to the recipients by tailoring the content to themes that are relevant to them depending on the responses they provide to these fields.
Take care not to make your forms unnecessarily lengthy and specific. People are typically too busy to fill out long forms due to time constraints. It’s possible that some people are uneasy with the idea of revealing personal information. It is important to focus on a frictionless procedure while also giving consideration to the user experience if you want more individuals to enter your marketing funnel.
It is essential to the effectiveness of your marketing efforts that you consider how your audience reacts when they get your emails. Deliverability, click-through rates, and open rates are all affected by the appearance of your emails, as well as how easy they are to read and how they are structured.
The following are some of the best practices in email design that you should implement to guarantee that your marketing emails are engaging your audience and leading to conversions:
So, what do you write in your marketing emails to inform, inspire, and turn people into paying customers? The key is not to start writing right away. First, you need to know what your emails are all about and what your marketing goals are. Usually, there are two main goals of an email marketing plan:
In other words, your email marketing strategy will either keep in touch with people who have already signed up for your list or grab the attention of new people and turn them into warm leads or customers. How do you get people to open, read, and click on your emails? To nurture and convert your subscribers, you don’t need to be creative or a good writer to write great marketing emails. Email copywriting isn’t about being creative, and you don’t have to be a master of words to get good results.
Here are the three main things that make an email interesting:
Step 1: Figure out who your ideal customer is (ICP). Before you start writing anything for marketing, you need to know who you’re writing for.
Step 2: Write headlines and subject lines that make people want to read more.Writing headlines that get people’s attention isn’t as hard as it sounds. A hook-worthy headline is just one that stands out among all the other marketing emails the reader is getting. Here are some ways to make sure that the subject lines of your emails will get opened:
Step 3: Be aware of words that spam filters look for. Even though these words don’t necessarily mean that your email will end up in SPAM, you should be aware of them. In the future, when you’re trying to fix problems with click-through rates and deliverability, it’s helpful to know how these words could affect your results. ActiveCampaign says that SPAM filters tend to mark words that are linked to:
Examples of some SPAM words and phrases are:
Email can be your most profitable way to sell, so building your email list should be your top goal. Your email list will have the most interested and likely customers/students. Statista says that email marketing will bring in almost $11 billion by the end of 2023, so it’s important to be able to reach as many potential customers as possible through their inboxes.
So how do you get more people to sign up for your email list? The first step is to offer something of value to your audience in exchange for their email address. We’re getting more promotions, ads, and spam than ever, and people are paying more attention to ways to stop being so overwhelmed by digital stuff. So, people won’t just give us their email addresses—we have to make them want to. Lead magnets and gated assets come into the conversation at this point.
A lead magnet is a freebie or giveaway that your target audience wants because it has the information they want. eBooks, quizzes, guides, cheat sheets, checklists, templates, and swipe files are all common types of gated assets in B2B. To get people to sign up for your email list, you need to keep promoting your lead magnet. Keep it in the middle of your website’s home page and offer it on a separate landing page that you can send people to with LinkedIn posts or podcast interviews.
How will you know which lead magnet your business needs? Think about the problems your audience wants to solve and the type of content they are most likely to read.
For example, a busy salesperson who is having trouble setting up meetings doesn’t have time to read a 30-page ebook, so they are more likely to download scripts and templates for cold emailing. A chief marketing officer might usually read trade magazines, so it would be best to make something that fits the way they get their information.
Here are some examples of free gated assets that will get people to sign up:
Now that you’ve made a lead magnet that people will want to sign up for, you need to figure out how to get people to it. Here are some steps you can take to build a list of potential customers who will read your emails.
Show your opt-in form in several key places throughout your website
Lead social media traffic to your gated asset’s landing page
Advertise your gated asset in your audio and video content
Lead traffic to your gated assets via paid ads
The press and interviews
You or someone from your business should offer to be a guest on podcasts in your industry. Interviews put you in front of new people in your niche and help you establish thought leadership, which is important if you want to grow your list of subscribers. At the end of the interview, you’ll have a chance to promote your brand, which is a great time to talk about your free lead magnet.
Paid posts on blogs
If you work in finance, you could ask a personal finance blogger with a lot of readers to write a blog post about your business, product, or brand. Most of the time, this will mean paying a one-time fee. There will be links to your gated asset all over the post. Influencer marketing, sponsorships, and affiliates are all ways to promote your business.
Marketing with Influencers
Influencer marketing is popular with B2C and lifestyle brands, but B2B brands can also benefit from it. Influencer marketing is a way to get people to trust a product or service by having people with a lot of social connections recommend it.
Webinars, roundtables, and fireside chats can be done together
Co-host a webinar with other businesses and thought leaders in related fields that will reach a lot of people. These are best if they are not directly competing with you. All of the emails you get will be added to your list of people who want to hear from you.
There are rules about email marketing to stop spammers from getting people’s email addresses without their permission and sending them emails they didn’t ask for. Most likely, if you’re using a good email marketing automation platform, you’re already following these rules. However, you should still know about them so you don’t get fined. Here are some easy ways to stay on the right side of the law when you email your list:
Even if your marketing team is lean, you can use the following steps to create compelling emails that build a loyal subscriber base for your business.
Segmenting your emails means dividing your email subscribers into groups based on certain criteria. You could divide your emails into different groups based on things like who they are, what forms they filled out to join your email list, and what they do, like clicks and opens.
Segmenting is important for keeping your list of subscribers healthy and interested because it lets you personalize your emails based on what your audience wants to know instead of sending everyone the same message. Try out this plan. Now that we have more data than ever, marketing automation lets you send your subscribers emails that are timely and relevant to their interests. Use a questionnaire to let people self-segment.
For example, if your business or company offers online courses as a way to make money, you might not want to send “101” content to subscribers who want to learn more advanced techniques, depending on your industry and the subject of your courses. You could make one of your welcome emails a survey that asks the subscriber, based on their journey, what kind of information they’d like to read.
Every successful strategy for getting leads and turning them into paying customers depends on automated funnels and sequences that turn prospects into paying customers on their own. An automated funnel is the steps you guide your leads through to convert them into customers at the end. Your automated funnel will include email marketing, social media, and landing pages.
How to set up sequences that run themselves. Welcoming each person individually when they opt-in to your email list would be impossible, which is where your marketing automation platform’s ‘autoresponder’ feature comes in. When someone signs up for your email list, your marketing automation platform sends them a series of emails over a certain amount of time based on the rules you set. The best way to keep in touch with your audience on autopilot is through automated sequences.
See it in action: a picture of an eCommerce course funnel. Let’s say you’re a company that sells things online and you’re holding a webinar to promote your course on how to do well in eCommerce. To get people to sign up for your webinar, you could schedule some tweets or LinkedIn posts a few days before the webinar. People will see these social media posts and go to your registration page, where they will fill out their information to sign up for the free webinar.
Your marketing automation platform will mark them as “interested in eCommerce” and “registered for the webinar” after they sign up for the webinar. You don’t have to just wait for them to show up at the webinar; you can set up an autoresponder sequence that goes out to those leads who have been tagged. This sequence will include useful information about eCommerce. This will help them get to know you better and increase the number of people who sign up for your webinar.
Even if some leads don’t buy from your webinar, giving them good content will keep them on your email list, where you can keep nurturing them with other automated sequences. This keeps them interested and makes them ready to buy when you have your next promotion.
Triggers tell your marketing platform to send a certain message to a certain email list member. Your platform will work based on “if/then” rules like these: If a potential buyer downloads our how-to guide, they will automatically start getting our weekly educational emails on the same topic. Triggers make the customer journey more personalized, which is the opposite of those mass emails from your favorite clothing brand with a 50% discount. Smart Insights says that triggered emails have 71% more people open them and 102% more people click on them than regular email newsletters.
As we’ve already talked about, segmenting is the best way to send emails that are relevant and interesting and get opened and clicked on. Tags are one of the simplest ways to divide your list into groups. For example, you could divide your audience into groups based on the form they used to sign up for your email list. In other words, your tag will answer the question “How did they get on my email list?” and make the content fit. Marketing automation can help you divide your lists automatically based on which links your subscribers clicked on.
After all the work you put into building and keeping up your email list, the idea of removing people from it on purpose might seem like sacrilege. OptinMonster says that one-third of the people who sign up for your emails will never open them, let alone click through them. So, you need to “scrub” your email list every so often. Email scrubbing is the process of getting rid of people who aren’t interested in your emails so you can market to people who do want to get your emails. Make sure to clean your list a few times a year to keep your email reporting accurate and to keep your sender reputation score.
You don’t want to waste the time, effort, and money you put into email marketing on people who don’t want to hear from you. Also, most email marketing platforms charge you based on how many subscribers you have, so cleaning your email list makes sure you don’t pay for people who never open or click your emails. You can test your lead generation campaigns by using data and reports from email marketing. When it comes to marketing your business successfully, there are no “right answers.” Instead, there are only tried-and-true strategies that have been tested and improved. Tracking and reporting are important parts of any strategy for email marketing. By collecting data, you can make smart decisions about what to change, where to put more money, and what new strategies to try.
During your marketing activities, you should do the following tests. Email A/B testing also called “split testing” is when you compare two different versions of an email (version A and version B) to see which one works better. Two parts of your email list get Version A and Version B. Then, the “winning version,” which is the one with the most opens or clicks, is sent to the rest of your email subscribers.
Which parts of an email do you need to do A/B testing for?
You may be able to get a lot of marketing metrics from your email marketing platform. Focus on these important metrics to avoid being overwhelmed and make marketing decisions quickly:
Marketing campaigns don’t have to be hard or expensive to get people interested in the content you send them and ready to interact with it. In fact, if you make and promote a gated asset with a lot of value, like an online course, you can slowly build up a list of potential customers you can market to. The Hootsuite Academy taught students and customers how to use social media. This is how Hootsuite got more than 450,000 leads.
How to get the best from funnel marketing for your knowledge business
Read this article to learn all about funnels. After the reading you’ll be ready to get the best from funnel marketing for your knowledge business.
A complete guide on how to build your personal brand
Why should you build a personal brand? What are the advantages of personal branding? How to actually make it? Read this article to find out.
Effective Instagram Post Ideas for Engaging Content in 2023
Create engaging Instagram content to keep your following growing and your page well-seen. Read this article to get inspired for cool Instagram posts.
