Email marketing when automated, will help support your lead conversion and bring repeat business
Automated email marketing tools will allow you to do the work in advance, to nurture your client database with frequent touch points.
As mentioned in our post about Lead baits, you need to have a marketing list of customers who have opted in for your marketing content. Without a marketing list, you can’t send out your promotional content.
Maintaining a list of customers (opted in or not) is rather important when growing your business. This is where a CRM tool comes in.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management (tool)
There’s lots of tools out there, we’ll list a few below.
Once set up and connected to your website; when a customer interacts with your website via a webform – the details in those form fields will pass into your CRM. Thus, creating an ‘address book’ on steroids.
This pumped up address book will show you if this email address has been in touch multiple times or if they have downloaded more than one free guide. The more interaction on this user, the more of a lead they would be considered.
Most of these CRMs will provide free plans until you hit a certain amount of users in your contact list. So we would recommend starting with free levels, and upgrading as you hit each milestone (if you choose to not clear out the old, ‘dirty data’).
The upgraded plans come with better tools. For example with ActiveCampaign; you can categorise each contact card through a pipeline for your sales team, and move them along lanes that you can label up yourself, such as ‘Contacted’ or ‘Followed up with’. You can score these leads so you know that the cold ones don’t need as much attention compared to hot leads.
You must always consider GDPR
It’s important to start by keeping two lists of opted in, and opted out. The opted out customers you can still keep on hand should they reach out to you in future, perhaps that brochure they downloaded has finally sunk in and you’ve got some baseline data on them kept to one side, to get a conversation going.
With the opted in customers; these you can nurture and convert them from lead to sale, with a little extra encouragement – by using coupon codes or by perhaps by sharing links to your latest insightful article via your website.
Using gentle reminders here and there, with reasons to come back to your website and ideally part with their hard earned cash, they’re less likely to forget you. But again I must stress – this content has to be beneficial to the user.
If your CRM content is ‘selfish’ and just letting everyone know that Jimmy has joined the team – you’re in dangerous territory of users unsubscribing.
Since the GDPR act came in to place that we discussed in our Lead bait marketing post, businesses are coming up with all sorts of quirky methods to try and keep their customers opted into their marketing lists.
Asos for example, have a fantastic email marketing team that talk in the language of the reader. By titling their emails ‘Are u OK hun?’ and sending out promotional content around ‘Work from home loungewear’ during the pandemic (where lets admit, we all ditched the office wear in favour of joggers) – they have remained very relevant to their customer base.
Automated Email marketing tools we recommend
Many of these tools offer rather similar features and free starter plans. However their interfaces are all quite different and you may simply prefer the usability of one over the other.
It’s worth checking out their websites or review videos on YouTube to aid in your decision. However as nearly all have free plans, you can explore these tools yourself by signing up.
MailChimp
One of the cheaper of the CRM providers with very good backing and public usage.
SendGrid
Simple, yet effective. Check your email open rate and learn how effective your campaign has been to better yourself for the next one.
ActiveCampaign
Fantastic for beginners with the option to extend your plan for further features as mentioned above to support your sales team.
Infusionsoft (Now known as Keap)
Much like ActiveCampaign but with added power. This tool is slightly more complex and recommended more so for businesses that are very on top of their marketing.
Hubspot
Hubspot has grown well since it started in 2005, due to it’s varying range of simple features or complex bells and whistles. It even allows free live chat features, which integrate with your CRM database itself.
What we recommend with email marketing content
- Limit your use of emojis and imagery. Although they look quite modern and eye catching, a lot of email providers can see these as spam and filter them out of the users inbox.
- Make your headline catchy! What would make you do a double take at your inbox?
- Ensure your content is original and helpful to the reader. What’s on offer? What’s the seasonal trends? Any global news worth discussing in your industry?
If you’re just talking about the new team member who’s joined .. who cares? Unless this new employee is going to be the face of communication with your customers – your readers aren’t going to benefit and they’re more likely of unsubscribing. - Always give the user the option to opt out in the footer of your emails.
Get your email marketing automated
One of the easiest ways to keep in touch with your audience is to automate your emails. How many times have you had that extra reassurance that your contact form question went through and you didn’t mistype your email address, by receiving an automated email to say thanks, we’ll be right back with you?
You can set up different automated email responses per webform on your website. For example a contact form confirmation of receipt, to ask for a product purchase review or as a PDF downloaded of a free brochure.
With PDFs, the automated email should thank the user for the interest in the brochure – and include a linked up CTA button to download the PDF requested. This PDF link, will live on your WordPress media library and thus slightly helps you in bumping up traffic to your website, rather than attaching an enormous file to an email.
Don’t forget to follow up
Depending if the user has opted in or not, you would be allowed to send follow up email marketing content which again, would be automated. For example; 1 week later, your CRM would send the follow up email and ask the user how they found the brochure, was there any questions you can help with? Would they like to book in a call? Would they like to take advantage of this unique discount code?
Leave the reader with another action to take.
Turn your automated email marketing tools into a strategic sales funnel
If you’re really serious about your online marketing, we recommend dipping your toes into funnels.
With a growing, opted-in marketing list – you can start to work on funnel campaigns. Another marketing buzz word to learn but simply put, a user enters the top of the funnel and gets nurtured until they come out of the bottom of the funnel as a lead or paying customer.
If a user has been in touch with a specific webform, and opted in for further marketing purposes whilst requesting a call back or from downloading a guide – they fall into the top of your funnel.
You can set these funnels up to be as simple or as jazzy as possible with your CRM (however you’ll need to upgrade plans to set up these sorts of email campaigns.)
Click Funnels is a fantastic third party tool you can use if you’re looking to get strategic with your email campaigns and jazzy sales landing pages.
Here’s an example of a funnel flow:
You’re about to launch a new product and it’s going to be your biggest yet. You need to promote it’s launch on your website and get a return on your investment spent by getting the money flowing in quick. Though you know that potential customers will need a little nurturing and persuasion first.
To help sell it and to get people coming back to your website, you’re going to offer a limited time discount code to those who signed up to be the first to know of your product launch.
- Day 1 – User immediately receives a confirmation email, is told their discount code will arrive on launch day.
- Launch day – the customer gets the email about the exciting product with the goodies they signed up for.
- 1 week later – reflect on how great the product launch was and the first batch of reviews. Customer is told if they haven’t used their coupon yet, it’s only valid for another week.
- Second week post launch – The product launch is doing so well that you’ve decided to extend the coupon use for one more week so people don’t miss out. You’ve also given an additional referral coupon code in this email, that a friend or family member can take advantage of.
- Just before the end of the third week – Let the customer list know that time is running out to use the discount code and whilst you thank them for their interest, you can’t wait to get started on the next product.
You can see from this example that you’ve created a sense of urgency – and you’ve kindly extended the deadline for those left who hadn’t purchased your product yet.
Those who did purchase and came out the end of your funnel – you can automatically have it set to take them out of the list so they don’t get reminder emails and instead; move them into a different nurturing funnel.
As above, ask them if they enjoyed the product, could they review it on Trust Pilot? Would they be interested in another product or upgrading a package?
Continue to upsell.
The possibilities are honestly endless if you provide your customer base with reasons to keep coming back with engaging email content.
