Email Marketing Is Still the Best Online Marketing Tactic You Can Use!
Surprised to hear that?
Yes, with SPAM being so prevalent, you’d think that email’s effectiveness would be minimal these days.
But the fact is…
A good, permission-based, and segmented, email system is the most effective way to communicate with both your prospects and existing customers.
But like most things, it’s not what you do it’s how you do it!
If you think of your email list as just a bunch of people who gave you their email than you are missing out on what’s really happening.
When someone gives you their email address they are raising their hands and saying…
- I like what I see and want more
- I’ve reached the Involvement stage of the Sales Cycle
- I give you permission to market to me
- I want to build a relationship
And that last bullet is very important.
If you think of your email list as part of your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM), you can go beyond just sending monthly “newsletters” and email “blasts” and begin to use your email marketing to build and nurture that relationship.
You can…
- You can get to know your prospects more personally
- You can learn more about their wants, needs, and likes
- You can learn more about their problems and which of your solutions they are drawn to
- You can mazimize your Customer Lifetime Value
- You can move them into your Sales Funnel
- and because of the above… you can sell them more stuff
So how do you do all of these things with your email marketing?
Think about what happens when you send an email to someone.
- They either open it or don’t open it
- They read all the content or they don’t
- They click on links or they don’t
Each one of those actions helps you learn something about them.
Qualifying
In sales, one of the first things they teach you is to “qualify your prospect.”
That means you should ask them questions to determine if they really have the problem you can solve, and that they are truly ready to buy.
Why waste time on someone who isn’t qualified to buy?
One thing your email signup form is doing is qualifying your site visitors into real prospects that want to keep in touch. They have moved from being suspects into being prospects.
But what happens next is just as important!
That moment when someone gives you their email is important. They are warmed up and ready for more.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t give out my email lightly. I must see something I like, or that made me want to start that relationship.
You don’t want to waste that critical opportunity!
Too many times companies don’t respond to this critical moment. They let that warmed up prospect cool off and die on the vine. They miss out on a great opportunity.
This is the time to have your automated, auto-response system kick in!
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They should immediately be sent to a thank you page where you thank them for their interest and let them know they will be contacted soon
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They should immediately be sent an email that thanks them again and offers ways they can begin to grow your relationship.
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They should be segmented into a category of prospects/customers that are appropriate to their interests.
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They should be asked to give more information so that you can learn as much about them while they are leaning your way.
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Based on the information they give you, they should be further segmented into appropriate groups based on interests and where they are in the Sales Cycle.
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Based on their interests they should be moved into other automated response sequences on these new interests.
And if this contact is not your first “touch” with this customer you should be monitoring open rates and clicks on EVERY email you send them.
For example, if you send a promotional email, you want to know what links they click on… that way you can qualify and segment them into “leads” that you can follow up with.
Responsive Emails
With most people reading their emails on their phones, and more doing so all the time. it’s important to have emails that “fit the screen.” This is called responsive design.
Responsive design means the email layout will change based on the size of the screen it is viewed on. If the email is viewed on a desktop computer it l will show full size. But if it is viewed on a small phone screen, the layout will change to a smaller, more narrow/vertical layout. If the you force viewers to scroll or resize the screen by pinching, they may not stick around to read everything because.It will be too hard to see everything clearly.
Keeping people’s attention is hard these day, and it’s easy to lose that attention if they are not comfortable. That’s why you want an email design system that creates “responsive” emails. If your email system isn’t doing this, then you are probably not getting the response you want. See Most Wanted Responses for more about this.
Marketing Automation
High level email marketing is really marketing automation. That’s when you setup automatic processes that move people through the buying cycle. They move from suspect to prospect and prospect to lead and lead to customer, without any human intervention.
More and more, good email systems are adding features that automate the steps above. In fact, a good email system is becoming a Marketing Automation System. These types of systems automate marketing actions throughout the Sales Cycle or Customer Journey.
Things like segmentation, lead scoring, lead followup, qualifying and customer metrics, are all typical parts of a good marketing automation system. Thankfully, in the last 5 years, email marketing systems have become more sophisticated. Today, there are many systems can handle these basic tactics.
The Email System that does all this and that I use every day is Get Response.
