Email Marketing: How to Nurture Leads

The internet is, as we all know, a highly interactive and creative space. Marketers have a double-edged sword when it comes to the internet.

This interconnectedness allows content to be delivered in many different ways, including social media, blogging and audio. Let's not forget about email.

It also allows your competitors to do the same. You need to ensure that your emails and content rise above the noise.

Email marketing is still very relevant. Email marketing has stood the test of time, and is still a powerful force in lead generation and customer engagement. According to Oberlo statistics:

• There will be 4.6 billion users of email by 2025. This is more than half of the world's population.
• Every day, more than 330 million emails are sent.
• You can expect a $42 return on investment for every $1 you spend on email marketing.
• Email marketing is used by 90% of marketers as part of their marketing strategy.
• 81% of SMBs rely on email marketing to acquire customers.
• Emails with personal subject lines get 50% more open rates
• Video can help increase your open rates by 30%

This is your warning not to reduce your email marketing efforts. It is a crucial part of the online world. It's up to you to find ways to be more than others. It is not as difficult as it seems. Continue reading for useful tips and tricks that you can use to impress your boss and increase your CTR.

The key takeaways from

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  Personalize emails with segmentation and well-tailored content
  

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  Automation is key to optimizing time and effort when marketing
  

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  Create emails that are memorable for your customers by emphasizing content that educates and connects with them or improves their jobs
  

Email Marketing Personalized

Generic or generic-style emails are not appreciated by anyone, that's certain. Your company should be more than just another sales pitch. You must be personal in order to stand out amongst the clutter of other brands' email boxes and to retain customers.

You need to go beyond just pushing your content if you want prospects to pay attention to your message. Personalizing your emails will allow you to get to know your subscribers and what they are looking for. You should be ready to share it with them at the right moment and through the right channel.

These are some tips to help you maximize your personal email strategies

Segmentation is a good practice in email marketing

Email segmentation is the process of grouping leads based on their browsing history, demographic information, purchase history, and browsing behavior. These data can be used to personalize your emails, making them more relevant for a particular group of contacts.

You can draw different conclusions when you segment your email lists by watching leads activity in each category. This information can be used to influence the customer personas. The next step should be to create relevant content that is valuable to each individual group.

Image Source: GetResponse

There are several ways to segment your email. You can send content-specific emails by tracking which section your leads visit on your website. You might send them emails about the amazing cupcakes you offer if you sell baked goods. Let's say they watched a video about your baking class. Send them information about the class, and how to enroll.

You can also use the time and address information of your customers to tailor your emails. Did you know that emails arrive in your inbox at 9-10 in the morning? It is the ideal time for businesses to send marketing emails. (P.S. You can think outside the box by sending emails at other times than a rounded hour like 8:19 or 09:42.

It is obvious that content must be relevant to prospects' needs. This brings us to the next step in email marketing personalization.

Provide well-tailored content

Marketers face the greatest challenge of creating creative content that is both useful and effective. However, you can start to make progress once you have segmented your email list. It's now time to create content that is specific to each group.

Next, ask as many questions and as many people as possible. The right questions will give you valuable insight into your customers' priorities.

It is important to find out why a customer visited your site.

If you are an event organizer and someone checks out your Party page, it's likely they'd like to have you organize their party. To get a better understanding of your lead's needs, there are many other questions that you should ask.

For example, an anniversary party might be a good opportunity to find out if the milestones that are most important to you, such as a silver anniversary or a golden anniversary. This information can be used to send a targeted email with details on suggested themes and motifs that would be most appropriate for the occasion.

You can also use personal emails to direct customers to landing pages on your website. These landing pages should look the same as your emails, and include CTAs. It is important to identify customer segments and create custom emails for them. Then, you can develop landing pages for each segment. This strategy will help your leads recognize that you offer a personalized, integrated email experience, and encourage them to become customers.

Automate your email marketing

Marketers are expected to manage and nurture leads. Email marketing automation tools are a great tool to help you do this.

These tools aren't just meant to make your life easier, but they will also help you scale up your personalized email department. Many automation tools include segmentation to make optimization even easier.

Automating can allow you to take new steps that were not possible before. You've probably heard of abandoned cart messages if you are an online shop addict like me. Say you sell jewelry. Your customer adds some earring options to his cart, but then leaves the page. They forgot to make their purchase or they decided not to. Email automation allows you to remind the customer of their order and offer a discount code so they can get back on track.

Image Source: Oberlo

These emails can be used to greet subscribers, up-sell or cross-sell, and to provide updates on their accounts.

Use Marketing Automation

Marketers don’t have the luxury of a million hours to generate business. Marketing automation is both a challenge as well as an integral part of modern businesses. Marketing automation allows you to analyze a lot of data and get to know your customers to provide useful marketing content.

Image Source: Medium

Automation is marketing technology at work. It allows you to track your leads' digital footprints, make insights about customers' sales journeys, and create better content to help prospects make a decision.

Automated marketing is not without its difficulties. These are the main obstacles that marketers face and how they can help their brands overcome them.

• Marketing automation is not a panacea. It takes buy-in from all stakeholders, including sales and marketing. Marketers must understand their automation goals, the metrics they should track, and how to analyse data to gain valuable insights. Marketers also need to understand which data is most important, such as behavioral data used to identify influencers and buyers to personalize content and create personas.
• Marketing automation doesn't mean hands-off marketing. Based on the observations made above, you must constantly update and test automation tools. Your messages will quickly become stale if you allow automation to go.

• Marketers need to know where their ROI comes from. This is why it is important to have a CRM system or model that can help them identify which campaigns are successful and which ones are not. To help marketers predict the best leads, they should be able to understand how the CRM and marketing automation systems work.

• Companies may have to put automated marketing on the back burner due to budget constraints. It is important to remember that many marketing automation platforms can score leads and show which leads are the best. This saves marketers tons of effort and time. They also focus on prospects more likely to convert, thus making them more profitable in the long-term.

Marketing automation allows you to scale without losing the ability to segment or personalize. This video contains 10 examples of successful email marketing campaigns.

The Best Emails to Nurture Leads

Marketers need email to stay connected. Email marketing is generating a 3800% ROI for brands!

Marketing emails can be annoying for some people because of the amount of spam being sent and it can be difficult to sort through all of them to find relevant information.

Knowing which emails resonate with customers can help you improve your email campaigns. The best email types are those that:

Educate

What serves them most matters to people. Your email should be able to tell your prospects about their problems or explain how your products and services can help them. This is a powerful marketing tool.

You are demonstrating your expertise and value by creating educational content. This will help you establish yourself as a trusted brand people can trust. Although it may take time and effort to maintain this email distribution, it is the gradual, step-by-step process of educating customers and earning their trust that makes it special.

Establish Connections

Email marketing campaigns should aim to create meaningful conversations and open dialogue between brands and their audience. You can expect more engagement if you are able to get closer to your customer.

Your customers should have the opportunity to connect with you via other means. You can offer your customers the option to sign up for your newsletter, connect on social media or receive updates about product development. No matter what channel, let prospects choose the one that is most convenient for them.

Offer something relevant

Although it may sound great to send prospects product offers, you must make sure they are getting more than that. For example, if someone registers on your website, it is likely that they are interested in your content. You should therefore give them what they want.

Instead of offering them a free trial for your product, it might be a good idea to find out which pages and topics they are most interested in, then send them additional content that might be of value. You can use the trust you have built to send them more content-centric content and drive them towards purchasing.

Help someone improve

Keep in mind that nurturing leads is part of your goal to improve their lives. Your brand's theme should be the focus of your content. If you sell vitamins, and your target audience is mostly health-conscious, you might create content that explains how certain vitamins can reduce the risk of developing specific diseases.

Emails should be similar in tone and design.

Recreate Opportunities

Your email marketing efforts will not always go according to plan. You will encounter subscribers who aren't responsive to your emails or don't click through.

You could ask your subscribers for feedback on the frequency and content of your emails. You can still use the insights you get to address any issues, regardless of whether you get the feedback you hoped for.

A personal appeal is key

This is a common theme in email marketing, as it helps to build a personal connection between your brand's audience and your business. Personal touch is especially helpful if you are trying to overcome barriers during the sales process. Customers will appreciate your extra effort.

You can add a personal touch to your customer by checking in, thanking them, remembering special events and planning ahead. Birthdays are a great way to do this. Send a simple message to show your appreciation by finding out the birthday of a subscriber who signs up on your website.

Last Thoughts

All signs point to the fact that email will not be left out of the marketing mix. We continue to see email grow as a primary communication channel for people.

A less serious note: Here are some stats about how often people check their email (via Inc).

• 70% of people check email while watching TV.
• 60% of people check email at night while they are asleep
• Half of vacationers check their email when they are away
• 42% of people check email while they are on the toilet.
• 18% of people check email while driving (which is something we don't condone)

People check their emails everywhere. Don't be afraid of increasing your email marketing efforts for lead nurturing. You'll likely be very happy with the ROI if it's done right.

Are you struggling with content creation in email marketing? It might be time for you to increase your content marketing strategy if you have more material to send to your subscribers. We can help.

Take a look at our SEO blog services and schedule a consultation with us now!