Getting prospects to respond to your emails and express interest in your service has become a daunting task. As the volumes of unsolicited messages flooding their inboxes increases, so does your recipients’ resistance. If they perceive your email as spammy or irrelevant, they’re just going to hit “delete.”
Audience attention is valuable currency. You have to provide something of value in order to earn it and hold it. Tricking people into responding with gimmicks is only going to annoy them and diminish your brand.
Email Marketing Explained
Email marketing is the most cost effective tool in the marketer’s toolkit. It consistently tops the list of marketing tactics that yield high ROI. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI.
If you do it right, you can build an audience eager to hear from you. You can guide them through their buying process with helpful information and resources. If you’re feeding them what they need, they’re going to want more.
Email marketing can help customers negotiate the buying process. Through a consistent program of educating buyers with relevant content, you can build credibility and become their trusted advisor. It’s also a good way to nurture prospects who are not yet ready to buy. But in order to make it work, you need a sound strategy.
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Your goal is to get meetings with a qualified prospect. Your recipient’s goal is to protect their time while solving pressing business problems. In order to gain their attention, you have to meet them where they are and provide something relevant to their situation.
As long as it’s customer-centric, email enables you to:
- Develop a relationship with your audience
- Answer questions, nurture, and move buyers to the next stage of their buying process
- Identify and convert qualified leads
- Keep non-sales-ready leads from falling through the cracks
- Build trust and increase audience engagement
- Improve perception of your brand
- Gain competitive advantage by setting vision
- Create demand for your company’s offering
The goal should be to differentiate your brand and hold the audience’s attention — all while complying with global regulations. The goal is NOT inundating their inbox with irrelevant, spammy messaging.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
If you’re just getting started with email marketing, and already have a list that hasn’t been emailed recently, you’ll need to warm up the list with compelling offers.
Some companies are tempted to buy a list of cold leads. But that is rarely successful. Focus on creating content that will attract subscribers. Create an email newsletter and encourage subscriptions on your website. Encourage visitors to subscribe to email versions of your blog.
Put up premium content like e-books or white papers, and when they register, send them a series of emails related to that topic. When producing a live or online event, you can add those leads to a nurture track designed to generate interest in your service.
Optimizing your Email Marketing Strategy
If you already have an email marketing program established, then you should be carefully monitoring engagement — opens, clicked links and downloads as indicators of what content is working (and what is not).
You can optimize and improve your customer-centricity by creating more trigger-based campaigns. For example, you can trigger targeted messaging based on:
- Links clicked (or not clicked)
- Demographic or business role
- Website page visits
- Downloaded content assets
Responding to subscriber actions with strategic, personalized emails is a great way to naturally get a conversation started. When an individual is ready to engage with your company, they will emerge as a warm lead. You’ll have the benefit of having created context for a fruitful conversation with Sales.
We Can Help
PropelGrowth can help you optimize your email marketing by tightly aligning it with an overall marketing strategy and your customer’s buying process. We firmly believe in collaborating closely with our clients to understand the needs of customers, develop an email marketing program as part of your integrated marketing strategy. To learn more about how PropelGrowth can help you attract an audience and grow your business with email marketing, contact us by clicking here.
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