The most powerful and far-reaching marketing technique in your toolkit is the one thing 97.4% of marketers do wrong.
Email.
YES! Good, old boring email which has long been one of the easiest ways to share a message with your audience has been bastardized, wasted and abused by marketers for far too long. That’s why we’re excited to tell you how to join the 2.6% of people doing it right.
Spamming Versus Nurturing
We all know and have experienced the nasty taste of email spam. Email spam is when the email recipient actually clicks the SPAM complaint button and reports the sender as sending the email without permission. Commercial emailers are unsurprisingly the source of 70% of spam complaints according to email intelligence company Return Path’s quarterly report.
Are you one of the spammers?
If you are like 97.4% of marketers, you send an email blast when you have something important to say and share. This ad hoc approach fails to attract your readers’ attention, evidenced by the fact that only 25.6% of emails sent are ever opened according to Return Path. As you can see, the open rate dips even lower for marketing and customer acquisition emails according to Epsilon’s Q2 2012 Email Trends and Benchmarks.
Lead Nurturing Emails
What the small but brilliant 2.6% of marketers is doing is sending emails based on their recipient’s behavior.
Instead of blasting recipients when it suits the sender, they send what are known as lead nurturing emails. Lead nurturing emails are triggered emails that provide value to a recipient based on their interest or actions online. For example, when someone downloads one of our resources, like our Essential Guide to Internet Marketing, they receive a triggered email with a link to the free guide and a call-to-action inviting them to subscribe to our blog to receive future resources.
Nurturing Emails are Opened at Twice the Rate of Email Blasts
Not surprisingly nurturing emails are more effective than blast emails because you are delivering useful information (hopefully) to people who are most interested in receiving it. In fact the open rate for triggered email is nearly 50% with a click rate hovering around 10%.
Goal of Nurturing Emails
The goal of these nurturing emails should be to gently encourage readers to move from one action to another.
For example, a visitor to 9 Clouds might start by downloading our Essential Guide to Internet Marketing. Then we would use a series of four emails over a three week period to encourage them to request a free competitive analysis. After their competitive analysis, they then begin a new nurturing campaign which gently encourages them to request a free demo of our services. At this point, the reader already knows what we do, they’ve received valuable information from us and will be much more likely to hire 9 Clouds based on this trust.
Get Started with Lead Nurturing
To begin using lead nurturing, you’ll need to choose an email marketing tool and create effective and compelling content.
Our new handbook, Effective Email Marketing From Soup to Nuts will give you everything you need to market like a pro with email. Specifically, we’ll walk you through:
- How to create memorable content
- Secrets for growing your email list (and keeping your subscribers)
- How to create lists for your lead nurturing efforts
- Pro tips on segmenting your lists and optimizing your emails
- How to integrate email marketing with social media and other marketing efforts.
With effective email marketing you can reach your audience consistently throughout the year, filling the flow of leads for your business. Get started with our handbook:
Compare your Email Efforts
As a little PS, take a look at how you compare to your industry. The data from Epsilon shows how emails from different industries and specific industry categories perform. How do you stack up to your competition?
