When you’re looking for a cheap yet highly effective marketing tool to communicate with your prospective, existing and even dormant customers, look no further than email. Despite what you might have read or been told, email marketing is far from dead. In fact, it’s still regarded as one of the best ways to convert and retain customers. You can use email to:
- Respond immediately to prospective customers’ request for information
- To contact old customers
- Communicate with your existing customers
- Distribute press releases
- Invite prospective customers to visit your website
Tell your prospects and customers about sales, discounts, webinars, new products or services, or special events.
Create an email autoresponder series
Reminding prospective and existing customers about your business and how your product or service can solve their most pressing problems is critical to your success.
But if you’re like most business owners, you just don’t have the time and resources to contact each of your existing and prospective customers with a personal message.
So, use an email autoresponder series to do the work for you. It works like this: once a visitor to your website or landing page signs up to receive your emails (in return for something like a newsletter subscription or free report or free video), they are then automatically sent a series of emails over a scheduled period.
The purpose of the emails is to build a relationship between you and your prospective customers so that when they are ready to make a purchase, it’s your company that comes to mind.
Once you’ve created it, you can use it repeatedly to convert each new prospect. That leaves you free to work on other areas of your business.
The content of each email in the autoresponder series is critically important: one false note and your recipients will unsubscribe or block all future emails from you. Hard selling has no place in an autoresponder series: instead, each email needs to contain information that your prospective and existing customers consider to be useful, informative, and relevant.
Of course, you should include offers of discounts, great deals, and enticing benefits in your autoresponder series too but you need to do it in a way that doesn’t seem like an aggressive sales pitch.
Target your audience
When you know your prospects’ greatest fears or challenges, you can tell them how your product or service can resolve those fears or challenges. Make a list of the 10 biggest fears or challenges they have. Those 10 items will become the themes of your email series. Use one for each message. At least one or two will trigger a response from your prospects because they address a key challenge or fear.
Use provocative subject lines
Your prospects’ inbox will be crammed with emails, so you need to ensure your email stands out. You can do that by creating an intriguing or provocative subject line that is compelling they can’t help but click it to read more.
Make the content compelling
The first few sentences in your email should be so fascinating that prospects can’t help but continue reading.
One in three
Immediately after your prospect has opted into your email list, he or she should receive a welcome email from you. To encourage conversions, offer something enticing to encourage your recipient to take action and visit your website. Send your next message two or three days later, then every three days afterwards. A two or three-day gap means you’re still top of their minds but not annoyingly so.
Trigger action
Use a CTA in all your emails. What do you want your readers to do after reading your message? Do you want them to follow the link to your website or to call your office? Make it clear—tell your readers exactly what steps you want them to take. Let them know in a compelling, benefits-oriented way why it’s in their best interest to act immediately.
Test what works for your audience
What works for one company might not work for your company. What works today might not work as well next week. That’s why it’s best to test everything to see what does and does not work for your target audience.
Keep getting new email subscribers
Your email data ‘decays’ at a monthly rate of 2.1% or about 22.5% annually, according to Marketing Sherpa’s research. That’s because people change email addresses or because they opt-out of receiving your emails. That means you need to keep finding new subscribers. You also need to cleanse your list regularly.
My recommendations
Start FREE. There are some incredible systems out there that can manage your subscription lists, we highly recommend MailChimp and have successfully used the cloud-based solution for over 6 years.
More recently we have been trialling with a more automated solution called Get Response – they allow you to build marketing auto-funnels to really automate your marketing processes.
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