Nurture Leads With Email Marketing
According to MarketingSherpa, 70% of your leads will end up buying something from
you or one of your competitors, but they wont do it right away! Companies that build relationships with their leads over time have the greatest success in turning leads into customers by staying top-of-mind until the lead is ready to buy. One of the best practices of lead nurturing is
email marketing.Lead nurturing is the process of developing that relationship with your potential customer by sending targeted, relevant, and valuable messages to them in a timely manner. Nurturing leads is a step taken following lead generation. The end goal is to get your leads to raise their hand and self-select into further engaging with your business. Forrester Research found that companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead.
Email Marketing Best Practices:
List-Building
Create opt-in opportunities. Make sure your lead forms allow your website visitors to enter their email address and opt-in to receive your messages.
Give people a reason to opt-in. Whether its a landing page for an eBook or an email newsletter subscription form, make sure you give people a compelling reason to opt-in. Whats so valuable about your eBook? What interesting and unique information will they receive in your email newsletter? Be explicit and phrase the benefit(s) in terms of your recipient.
Would I be upset if I didnt receive your message? Only send messages to people who have explicitly opted in. You can follow the extreme principle of
Seth Godins Permission Marketing: Would your recipient be upset if they didnt receive your message? If yes, you should send your email.
Sending
Stay relevant. What was your lead interested in? Did they download your 5 Tips for Using QuickBooks to Manage Your Business eBook? Or did they read your blog article on How to Get Your Business Listed in Google Places? Send them an email with more resources targeted to their interests.
Get personal. Use a name and email address in the from line of your email that your recipients will recognize. Personalize the message so the recipient remembers how and why they came to your website. For example, start with You recently checked out our eBook or Thanks for subscribing to our blog!
WIIFM? At the end of the day, make sure that your message adds value.
Get into the mind of your recipient and ask, Whats In It For Me? (WIIFM) Are you emailing them just to tell them how great your product is? Or are you offering to help solve a problem theyre facing? Make the value clear in both the email body and the subject line.
Dont rely on images. Many email clients dont load images automatically, so if your email is one large image, your recipient wont have any idea what its about! Use images as supplementary (clickable) content in your email, and make sure you have enough text to communicate value.
Be consistent. You want your recipients to expect and look forward to your messages. Whether you send your messages daily, weekly, or monthly, pick a schedule and stick to it.
Dont let the law get you down. Brush up on CAN-SPAM regulations to make sure your email practices comply.
Converting
What do I do here? When someone opens your email, make it clear what theyre supposed to do. Is it to click to read a blog article? Download a new, free eBook? Include a call-to-action that links to a landing page where the recipient can convert again and self-select to further engage with you.
The landing page is part of your email campaign. Email marketing doesnt stop with a click. Your landing page is an extension of your email, and it is where your conversion takes place. Make sure your email offer and landing page flow.
Measuring
Click-Through Rate (CTR) measures response. Of the people you emailed, how many of them clicked through to your landing page? The CTR can give you a sense of how compelling your offer and email messages are. Experiment with different subject lines, calls-to-action, and timing to improve the CTR of your emails.
What about open rate? Open rate is an increasingly unreliable metric, as more email clients do not load the images necessary for tracking who opened an email. Focus instead on how many clicks your email received.
Unsubscribe rate measures annoyance and spam. There will always be some people who do not want to receive your emails anymore, but you want to make sure your unsubscribe rate does not exceed 5%. If your unsubscribe rate gets this high, check on your opt-in policies and procedures to make sure youre only emailing subscribers who want to receive your messages.
Conversion rate measures actions. The final step is conversion, so measure how many of those clicks turned into reconversions on your landing page. Test different landing pages to improve the conversion on your website.
Lead nurturing is all about developing relationships with your leads, so keep in mind that this does not have to be limited to email communication. Think about how you can communicate with your leads via social media or another platform they use.
by: Ribi Khaimov
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