The process of lead nurturing or taking your leads to customers is to develop relationships with your potential customers. This is best achieved by sending them targeted, relevant, and valuable messages.

Always place yourself in your customer’s shoes in order to best provide this information. It should be about them and what they want, not only what you want to send. The goal is to encourage your leads to further engage with your business.

Unfortunately, time constraints can necessitate making this an automated process especially through the early stages. The system or software you choose allows you to send an automated series of email messages to your leads to provide more information to them and pass them through your sales funnel to the point where they make contact with you or you with them personally.

Email Marketing and Best Practices

In this post I take you through several tips to Get Your eNewsletter Opened And Read

What to send?

• Emails that are relevant to the interests of your contacts  – Why did they initially engage with you? Follow up with information that will further engage them.
• Personal communication –  See above and craft your email as though you were speaking to one person – not a group. In an initial email remind them how they came to be on your list – “you recently read our blog!” or “you downloaded our resource <>”
• A message that adds value – put yourself in your customers place and ask what’s in it for them. Offer to solve a problem.
• A clear headline that doesn’t mislead
• Text – not just images – these may not load or may be confusing. Images should be complimentary to the information.
• Consistency – choose a regular interval to send your emails and stick to it

Other proven techniques include

• Email personalisation –
  • For example in a MailChimp study mail subject lines with the first and last names had the highest open rates.
  • Subscribers can see who sent the mail, and that influences them in a huge way. Emails sent from a real person with a company name following have higher open rates.
• Targeting by segmentation of your email list
  • Purchases – Send emails to customers based on their past purchase items
  • Content topic – Offer different free products to see what makes your customers tick
  • Usage – Which emails were opened by which customers, which ones received higher click through rates, etc. Keep on testing!

In addition to these emails ensure that you continue to grow your database and monitor your KPI (key performance indicator) metrics for your website and Social Media (more on that next time).

Building a List

A continuing challenge is creating opt-in opportunities. Ensure that your lead forms allow visitors to add their email address so you can send them information. When they sign up be explicit about what information they will receive and talk about the benefits for them to do so.

Remember you are only allowed to send messages to people who have opted in to your list.

Converting and Reconverting

Each one of your marketing messages including your emails and eNewsletters should have a goal. Whatever this goal is – eg. buy a new product, share with friends, download a resource or ebook – make it clear to your reader.
When this goal is lead generation – ensure that your call-to-action links to your landing page allowing your reader to convert or reconvert and take further action in your sales funnel. This will keep you top of mind with them and allow you to introduce new services and products which may interest them.

Keep your emails and landing pages aligned – use the same language and images in both to reduce confusion when a reader moves from one to the other.

Measuring Email Performance

• Click-through rate (CTR) – measures response: how many of the people you emailed clicked on your link(s)? It can give you a sense of how compelling your offer and email messages are. Experiment with different offers, subject lines, calls-to-action, and timing to improve your email CTR.
• Open rate is an unreliable metric – focus on the number of clicks your emails receive
• Unsubscribe Rate – measures the percentage of recipients who opt out of your email communications. This isn’t a reliable picture of your email list’s health. Many subscribers won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process but may just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your messages.

What to Measure

Measure how many of those clicks turned into reconversions on your landing page. The higher your conversion rate, the more relevant and compelling the offer was for your audience. Remember that conversion rates are dependent on factors beyond the original email message, including the quality of your landing page. You can test different landing pages aiming to improve the conversion on your website.

Beyond Email

Remember that you can communicate with your leads via social media platforms they use.

More next time! Topic will be Analyse and Improve.

Sources
Hubspot
High Email Open Rates 
Subject Line Data, Choose your Words Wisely 
AB Testing in Action