How to Nurture Leads with Email Marketing

How to Nurture Leads with Email Marketing

Author: Johanna Rivard / Source: Marketing Insider Group The Internet of Things (IoT) is radically changing the way people search and rec

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How to Nurture Leads with Email Marketing

The Internet of Things (IoT) is radically changing the way people search and receive information. Luckily for businesses, this interconnectedness allows them to deliver content in different ways: social media, blogging, video, audio, and a host of other interactive platforms. Plus, let’s not forget email.

Email marketing is very much alive. It has withstood the test of time and remains a strong force to contend with in lead generation and management, as well as customer engagement. In fact, based on statistics from Campaign Monitor:

  • More than 80% of B2B and B2C companies are still using email marketing technologies as part of their marketing strategies
  • Email opens on mobile devices are hitting almost the 55% mark
  • Marketers have experienced an astounding rate of 760% added revenue from segmented email marketing campaigns
  • Email content is six times more likely to be clicked than tweeted content
  • Facebook and Twitter are trailing email when it comes to acquiring new customers
  • The ROI for email is approximately 30% compared with direct mail’s 7%
  • In the United States, 6 out of 10 employees using the internet acknowledge the importance of email at work

The numbers, compiled by experts and practitioners in the field of marketing, are compelling indeed. Whether it’s about automation, mobile, personalization, engagement, or ROI, they are echoing the same point—email is still highly relevant in the modern age.

Personalized Emails

No one appreciates generic or template-style emails, that’s for sure. People want to feel like more than just another sale to your company. To stand out from all the inbox clutter from other brands, you need to get personal to attract and retain your customers.

If you want your prospects to take notice of your message, you need to do so much more than just push your content. Personalizing your emails means you know your subscribers well enough to know what they’re looking for. Be ready to give it to them at the right time and via the right channel.

Here are some ways to maximize your personalized email strategies:

  1. Practice Segmentation in Your Email Marketing

This means grouping your leads by their browsing activity, demographic information, and purchase history. This data can then be used to customize your email, making them more relevant to any particular group of contacts.

Putting segmentation into action enables you to track your leads’ activity according to what category they belong to. With this information in hand, you can come up with different customer personas such as those interested in demand generation, data management, or sales leadership, to name a few. Your next move should then be to provide relevant content that’s valuable to each persona group.

Another useful idea to help tailor your emails is to use your customers’ time and location information. Have you ever noticed how emails arrive into your inbox usually at 9 or 10ish in the morning? Businesses have identified it as the best time to send out marketing emails.

However, a more reliable time marker that you could use is your customers’ email open histories. With that information, you can personalize email deliveries to match the ideal time of your subscribers. It goes without saying that the content should cater to what those prospects are looking for right then and there, which brings us to the next element in email marketing personalization.

  1. Offer Well-Tailored Content

You might be wondering how individually targeted your email content should be. First of all, you should know that marketers identified “creating relevant and compelling content” as both the most effective and the most challenging email marketing tactic. So, how do you work around this sticky situation?

First, you must gain mastery in the art of questioning. Asking the right questions can give you good insights as to what your customers’ priorities are.

For example, one of the most important questions you need to find an answer to is why a particular customer is visiting your website. If you’re an event organizer, and a lead checks out your “Party” page, they’re probably interested in getting you to organize their party for them. But there are a number of other questions you should be asking to get a more holistic understanding of their needs.

If it’s an anniversary party, for instance, you might want to know if it’s anything near the most cherished milestones like a silver or golden anniversary. You could use the answer to send out a targeted email with details about suggested themes or motifs that are most appropriate for the occasion.

Second, you can use personalized emails to direct your customers to a landing page on your website, which should have the same look and copy as your email, including CTAs. The idea is to identify your customer segments, write custom emails for each segment, and develop several landing pages for that particular segment. With this strategy, your leads will be able to recognize that you are giving them an integrated, personalized email experience and may feel more encouraged to convert as customers.

  1. Automate Your Email Marketing

Marketers are under great pressure to generate, nurture, and manage leads, and you’ll be needing tools to automate the majority of the tasks involved in email marketing. Such tools are not only meant…

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