Email marketing is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing options available. According to a recent study, the average ROI from email marketing is $42 per dollar invested, which explains why most businesses are adopting this approach.
In this blog, we’ll cover the different ways you can close more sales through email marketing efforts.
Select the Best Email Marketing Approach for Your Business
You could be looking to re-engage previous clients, expand your social media presence, or improve your customer experience. Email marketing can be crucial to achieving each of these. Not only does it take less time and fewer resources than other digital marketing models, but there are multiple types of emails you can choose from. You need to learn which ones best fulfill your marketing objectives and go with them. That said, consider these examples of emails that can drive more sales for your business.
Inviting or Welcome Emails
When a prospective customer visits your website and signs up for your products or services, you need to send them the first email in their buying journey. In this case, a welcome or inviting email is the most appropriate to send to welcome the customer into your brand community. In this email, tell them a little about your brand, your offerings, what they should look out for, and details like password resets and purchase receipts.
Nurturing Emails
Also known as lead nurturing, these emails are usually sent at the end of the buyer’s journey after repeat purchases or successful engagements with your business. Nurturing or dedicated emails re-engage customers on a deeper level to build a lasting relationship. The goal is to keep reminding them why you’re the seller they should buy from. You should also notify them of new offers, discounts, and coupons.
Newsletters
This type of email is best to send when the prospect has reached the middle of their buying journey or sales funnel. It focuses more on the customer’s purchase history and engagement level. If the customer’s previous experiences were good, this email helps re-engage them and encourage them to make more frequent purchases.
Transactional Emails
Send this type of email toward the end of the customer’s journey, like when you reach the product shipment phase. Use this email to update the client about the status of their purchased products and how far you are with the shipment process. Note that you can only send this email if the customer signs up to receive such updates.
Brand Story Emails
As the name implies, these emails tell your brand story and help cement your relationship with your customers. Customers will read these emails to learn more about your company, products, services, and other relevant information to help them make better purchasing decisions.
This type of email should be sent at the beginning of the customer’s buying journey, usually after sending the welcome email. The email should be laced with interesting elements like catchy videos to entice customers to learn more about your brand.
Brand story emails demonstrate your company’s uniqueness, explain why you’re the right choice for customers, and introduce your offerings, most of which customers may not know about.
Review Emails
These emails should be sent after the customer has interacted with your business for some time. For example, after successfully building a solid relationship with a client for six months or more (during which the client has made some repeat purchases), you can send them an email asking them to leave an honest review about your brand and their overall experience. This helps you collect useful customer feedback to improve your brand reputation.
Now that you know why you need to send regular emails to your clients and the types of emails you should use based on where the customer is in their buying journey, how should you go about sending those emails? The next section shows you how to draft compelling emails that drive sales and ROI.
How To Write Winning Emails That Drive Sales
Know Your Buyers
Before launching a successful email marketing campaign, you need to do your homework. Be sure to research your prospect, their business, and which problems they need to solve.
Understanding your target customers and what they do helps you determine the right angle to approach them. This strategy also leaves a positive first impression on the prospect, because they’ll be able to tell you did your homework right and didn’t assume they’d automatically be interested in working with you.
With the research done and prospects already at the top of the sales funnel, consider tweaking your content to encourage the prospects to respond to your newsletters or email sequences. This way, you get to learn more about the prospect’s needs and expectations. From there, you can tailor your offerings to meet their specific expectations.
From those responses, you’ll also learn more about the client’s intention. Are they looking to purchase anything, or do they want to be informed first before deciding? You can use tools like Lead Forensics, Bombora, and ZoomInfo to separate prospects into various segments based on their intent. For example, if a prospect is only looking to be educated, you can adjust your emails to avoid appearing too sales-y.
Once the prospect has learned everything they wanted to know, it becomes easier to encourage them to the next step, because those informative emails demonstrate to the prospect that you’re a trustworthy expert in your specific industry they would want to work with. And when they’re ready to take the next step, which means buying a specific product or service, you’ll be their first option.
Not sure where to start with properly identifying your target audience? Read our blog here for more insight.
Learn First, Convert Later
It’s easy to get impatient and ask the client to make their orders. However, emails that outright suggest you’re ready to schedule an appointment have high rejection rates. Instead, entice your prospects by explaining how your offerings can solve their business problems or even help them achieve their revenue goals.
When you take a learn-first approach, you ask the right questions, which further shapes your prospect’s decision to work with you. Once you’ve generated considerable curiosity from your prospective client, the chances of them asking you to schedule a meeting to discuss your offerings are much higher. They’ll be the ones reaching out to you, not the other way around.
Advertise New Offerings
When you launch new products or unveil new services, you have a valid opportunity to reach out to prospects. Once customers are notified of new arrivals, they’ll troop to your website to check them out, and of course, they might have a friend or two tag along.
This strategy works best for increasing your web traffic. Consider sending weekly or biweekly emails depending on how frequently you ship new arrivals. Doing so gives your email subscribers something to look forward to every week or month, and ultimately, you’ll be scaling up your sales revenues simply from selling via email.
Use catchy themes in your emails with equally interesting photos to keep clients glued to your offerings. Mention no more than seven products in each email, no matter how many different products you offer. You don’t want to overwhelm your prospects with too much at once. Additionally, remember to include product links that are easy to find and load to improve user experience.
Share New Tips With Clients
Remember when we talked about establishing yourself as an expert in your industry? You need to demonstrate to your clients that you’re adept at what you do. And what better way to do that than sharing tips and tricks in your emails?
Include a section in your email specifically for sharing the benefits of your product or new ways the client can use it to build trust between you and the client, ultimately driving more sales.
For example, if your business sells veterinary products, you can share tips with pet owners on how to help their pet relax in a distressing situation. If you’re a gardening or plant service, you could share tips on safer, less tedious ways to keep gardens weed-free. There are many options. And no, sharing information about your job or brand doesn’t lower your value. Instead, it makes you an even more valuable resource for your customers.
Encourage Readers To Take Action
When you include clear calls to action in your marketing emails, you encourage the prospect to take the action you want them to without feeling like they’re being pushed to do so. Always make the process more straightforward for your prospects and make the calls to action specific to steer them in the right direction.
The ideal CTA should let the prospect know exactly what you want them to do. For example, you could include a button or link with a Learn More, Download Your eBook, Subscribe Now, or Book Your Appointment Today tag.
Finally, include links to specific pages on your website, especially those from where you want the prospect to take action. This could be a processing page or a product page containing the eBook, blog post, or other resources you want the prospect to check out. Make sure those pages hold the solution to the customer’s problem, and you’ll see how much traffic an email can generate for your website.
Follow Up
Maybe your prospecting campaigns only focus on cold calling. If that’s the case, you’ll still need a carefully crafted sales email to follow up with clients. A follow-up email gives you the chance to recap your phone conversation or provide useful links to multiple resources that address the client’s problems. Then you can thank them for their time on the phone.
This process may seem unnecessary, but it’s an essential step to increase sales through email marketing. Consider this: several sources indicate that prospects appreciate it when you follow up with them via email. Follow-up emails account for 2% of all sales made throughout a customer’s buying journey, so not sending even a brief follow-up email can potentially cost you 98% of your sales. This last email is the best way to continue nurturing your leads through the sales funnel and keep the relationship going.
Emails have become such a normal part of our personal and professional lives, that it’s easy to overlook the impact they can have on your sales and revenue growth. Your emails should strike a perfect balance between lead nurturing and closing more sales.
When you take the time to craft different sales emails, you give your customers something to look forward to each day, week, or month. Over time, your business will become an important part of their businesses and even their lives.
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is a gold mine. Most major brands employ several marketing techniques, including selling via email. And it pays in many big ways. For every dollar you spend on connecting with your prospective clients, you get between $36 and $50 in returns. Emails with valuable and interesting content keep your subscribers hooked and wanting more.
While your primary goal for any marketing campaign (email included) is to make sales, you should prioritize building a good relationship with your clients before anything else. Each type of email you send should be geared towards building trust, and then closing sales. If you’re looking to improve your sales success with cold email marketing, reach out to the sales experts at Abstrakt to learn how we can be your leading partner in business growth!
