How Email Marketing And Inbound Sales Can Increase Conversions

What is one of the biggest problems start-up company’s face today? That is acquiring new leads and being able to retain customers. So if you think that email marketing will not help to attain new leads, then think again and check out these 18 stats you should know as an email marketer. As it turns out, 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message. Here are another 15 statistics to prove how effective email marketing is. Bet you didn’t know that for every $1 dollar spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25? Or that consumers who are marketed through email spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers? It is crazy to see all the statistics showing the efficiency of email and how well it actually works. Now that we know email marketing is not dead, we can talk about how it is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to market in today’s world.

Here’s my agenda for today’s blog:

1. Important concepts to remember when starting your email marketing campaign
2. 10 keys to email marketing success
3. 3 steps to connect with email-fatigued prospects who are already subscribed
4. Companies with successful email marketing campaigns
5. How your email marketing campaign can fail
6. Intro to inbound sales and how effective it can be

1. Let’s start with this checklist of important concepts in starting your email marketing campaign:

• The most important is knowing your target audience. The quickest way to ruin your chance of a sale is choosing the wrong prospect. So, by making sure you do your homework and spending the time to create customer personas can help your chances of conversion with prospective customers.
• The subject line is also very important when starting your campaign. You need to make sure that it is specific and to the point in about 6 or 8 words. A false or misleading subject line message can be a detriment in trying to reach higher conversion ratings.
• There has also been studies done that providing localization, such as a city name, improves open rates for your email. So, taking the time to personalize each message and even adding a recipients name will help in getting more people to pass the first step, which is to just open the email you sent.
• It is also very important to follow up about 3-4 days after. With any sales tactics, persistence is key and so when someone doesn’t respond, it is important not to take it personally and keep moving on.

2. Now that we know some of the most important concepts, lets look at 10 keys to email marketing that can lead to success:

1. Only send email to people you know – People generally only open emails from people they know and may delete emails from people they don’t recognize.
2. Making sure to treat your contacts like people and not just a name on a list.
3. Sending only relevant content that has value to your recipient – It is important to listen to your audience to find out what they are interested in and filtering the content of what you send to them to their liking.
4. Engage your audience with the content you write.
5. Maximize your delivery rate – Making sure to keep an eye on your bounce report is important and will help you to remove any addresses with ongoing issues and help maintain high deliverability rates.
6. Never share your email list – As a business, you need to respect the trust and privacy of your customers so you should never share your email list which could hurt your reputation as a company.
7. Set expectations – By setting the expectations in the email sign-up page to make sure your audience understands the value of signing up is important in keeping customers fully engaged in your emails.
8.  Look professional whenever you communicate – Having a professional-looking template and email will help with the credibility of your brand.
9. Regularly review your results – As always, paying attention to your results and being able to improve by this is always extremely vital.
10. Go beyond the inbox – Email marketing will always work best when it is integrated with other communication channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

For more information on each step, take a look at the link above of the 10 keys to success.

3. We all know everyone complains of getting too many emails, so here are three steps to connect with these prospects who are already subscribers but may be tired of receiving so many emails:

1.  Showing subscribers you have more to offer than deals and discounts – Sharing relevant content without offering “big” deals can help build continued trust in your relationship and will help toward long time retention.
2. Offer a steady stream of customized content through an automated series – Creating meaningful and sending periodic touch points over a few weeks to your subscribers can show that you are valuable all year around and not just during the times when they need you most.
3. Give customers the option to connect a little less frequently – Going back to the last point, people don’y want to receive emails ALL the time, so having the option for just the occasional one can help keep customers around without being over-bearing.

For more information on these three steps, you can once again check out the article in the link above.

4. Now, lets take a look of some companies where email marketing has been very successful in helping them grow. Here are 12 email marketing examples from our friends at HubSpot that have been very effective. One company that stuck out to me was the fourth one, Canva, and their simplicity yet efficient emails to their subscribers. What they do is every time they have a new design concept, they let their subscribers know through an email that is very simple buy gives a brief description, shows a preview, and the encourages the reader to try it themselves. For subscribed customers, this is very compelling because Canva is not being over the top with sending too many emails or trying to sell too many products, they are simply informing the customer of new designs to keep them interested.

Here are another 5 email marketing success stories. In a few of these examples, Evans Cycles and Links London, they sent an email to subscribers right before the biggest events in those industries, Tour de France and the Wimbledon tournament, respectively.  These were both successful because they were able to hype their product using the big sporting event as a background to get people more interested in their products.

5. There are also many practices to be aware of when starting your email marketing campaign. Many reasons can lead to less customer satisfaction and a negative word of mouth. Here is a blog on 16 things people hate about email marketing. Although they are all important points to remember when starting your emails, numbers 1 and 3 really stuck out to me cause they are problems that have happened that I find extremely annoying. Number 1 is emailing people that who didn’t even opt in. How much do you like getting random emails you don’t care about? Exactly, you don’t so you should never randomly email anyone who didn’t opt in. The other one I find annoying is not honoring unsubscribes. Nobody wants to keep receiving emails they don’t care about after they have already said they don’t want anymore. So, it is always important to make sure you take all the people who unsubscribe off the list.

6. The last topic I wanted to talk about today is inbound sales. Over the years, the sales process has changed. It is no longer about closing, it is not about helping. Inbound sales are not about being an overbearing salesmen, they are taking a consultative point of view. This article here gives a good insight on the definition inbound sales and how it can help your business. Instead of the old sales tactics like trade shows, cold calling, elevator pitches, etc, inbound sales are focused on new ways of selling with online methods such as blogging, landing pages, SEO, content offers, social selling, and having a sales-ready website. Here is another article with 5 good practices for your inbound sales team. Inbound sales can be a lot more effective than traditional sales techniques because of the reach you are able to get. Instead of cold calling and eventually finding new prospects, being on the internet and having a presence on various social media websites can turn into some warm leads and more prospects to contact.