Although social media has changed the way brands communicate with their audiences, email still remains one of the most effective tactics to reach and build relationships with prospects and customers to this day. Customers love connecting with their favorite brands via email, and because it’s an affordable marketing option, it can yield positive ROI when facilitated correctly. In fact, for every dollar you spend on your email marketing campaigns, you could see an average return of $42 for your efforts according to HubSpot State of Marketing 2020.
The trick is, people are bombarded by emails every day, so you have to stand out from the crowd and make people actually want to open the content you deliver to their inboxes. Remember, email marketing is part of your overall inbound marketing strategy, and your goal is to meet your customers at whatever stage they’re in within their own buying journeys. Not everyone will be willing to buy from you right now, but the right email campaigns can keep you top-of-mind so you’re the first brand they think of when they actually are ready to make a purchase.
7 Effective Email Campaigns to Use for Both Lead Generation and Customer Retention
Okay, so you understand that there’s a lot that goes into a great email marketing campaign, but what exactly does that mean? Here, we’ll look at seven elements you can include in your future email campaigns to grab the most attention from existing and potential customers.
1. Create an Educational Newsletter
A lot of people are turned off by hard-sell approaches, which is why informational newsletters often work really well. With this approach, you can talk about your products and services without sounding like the only thing you want to do is make money from the reader. Sure, that might be mostly true, but the key is to make your educational newsletter sound like it’s advice that’s coming from a helpful friend rather than a pushy salesperson.
Newsletters open the door to increase a better understanding of what you do and why you’re a great fit for your readers’ needs. Unlike advertisements, which only give you a small window of opportunity to sell yourself, email newsletters allow you to expand on the ideas that make your business work and detail why your products and services can solve people’s pain points.
2. Share Special Offers and Promotions
Promotional emails are simple, yet powerful tools that can help you spread the word about the best parts of your business. The objective of these types of emails is to increase awareness, generate revenue, and improve customer retention and brand loyalty. Decide what you’re promoting, and get to work, touting the benefits and value those products or services can provide to your audience. Make sure you understand why you’re promoting it so you can highlight that fact within your email content. Maybe you’re offering a special discount code to new customers or you’re having a sale for a certain holiday—in any case, knowing why you’ve chosen to promote certain products and services will help you speak to your audience more clearly.
3. Set Up Lead Nurture Campaigns
Prospects won’t initially convert for any number of reasons, but that doesn’t mean you should just let them sail off into the wind. Lead nurture campaigns (also known as drip campaigns) can help you move people into your sales funnel through a series of emails that deliver value, address their problems, and solve their objections.
Your first email should be sent immediately after a trigger event. If the person just signed up for your email list, send them a welcome email. The second email should address the problem you’re trying to fix. This set of emails helps potential customers see how you can soften their pain points. It’s important to have your email lists segmented so you know where people are in their buyers’ journeys to ensure you send out relevant email content at the right times. Your third email can be a little more confident and more brand-focused. Talk about how you’ve solved these same problems for real customers in real life. Use social media, Google, or other review platforms to garner true statements that you can include in your email copy. The last email should specify exactly where your readers need to go to get the solutions you’re offering.
4. Set Up Customer Retention Communications
Again, this is where segmenting your email lists is important. When you’re able to address existing customers, you can create content that will help you retain their business, which ultimately will boost your ROI. You’re also more likely to see more referrals and gain better insights into your growing customer base as your campaign takes off. Plus, when you’re able to retain existing clients, you’ll open yourself up to being able to find creative ways to attract new customers.
5. Review Acquisition
When you ask someone for a review, it’s important to think about the process from their perspective. Remember, they’ve already gotten from you what they wanted, so they might need a little encouragement to come through with feedback. Think like a customer yourself and consider what would make you inclined to leave a review. Be sure to:
- Keep it brief
- Be polite
- Reinforce your brand
You don’t want to wait too long to send these emails out because you’re trying to grab their attention shortly after they’ve purchased your products or services. If you wait too long, your brand will likely be long out of their minds. Of course, the idea would be to garner the attention of happy customers because those will be the best ambassadors for your brand. Bad reviews, on the other hand, can tarnish your reputation. Should you receive those online, it’s important to address them politely and professionally; ignoring them can be just as bad as saying something negative to the reviewer.
6. Inspire Customer Referral
One of the simplest ways to bolster referrals is through optimized email sequences that are fine-tuned to capture the attention of existing customers and simplify the referral process. Email gives you the ability to foster referrals by giving your customers the right tools and reminders when you’re most likely to reap the rewards of your efforts.
7. Build Brand Awareness
Use your email campaigns to talk about your new website, spotlight awesome employees, showcase your new office, or promote a new partnership. People want to know how you’re doing and who you are; email is a great channel through which to make connections and foster deeper relationships.
Rules of Thumb and Best Practices for Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Whether you want people to read your blog, buy your products, or collect sales leads, email is an incredibly powerful method of building relationships with existing and future customers. You don’t just want to send any old email willy nilly, though. Like most things in business (and especially marketing), there are some best practices that you should adhere to as you create your email content.
- Brevity: Keep your message and content short, simple, and personalized.
- Tone-of-voice: Write conversationally. Speak with your customers and prospects, not at them.
- Engagement: Encourage conversation. Link to blog posts, social media posts, or reply to their emails and ask your audience to share their thoughts and opinions.
- Test: Always test your subject lines and look for ways to improve them ongoing so you can get the most opens.
- Invite: Focus on a single call-to-action (CTA) per email to increase clicks.
Again, as you’re writing your emails, be sure you put yourself in the shoes of the people you’re trying to talk to. What would you want to read and hear about if you were the one receiving these email messages? Think about how they subscribed in the first place, what really matters to them, and how your campaign can provide value to solve their pain points and needs.
Manage Your Email Marketing with an All-in-One Solution
Surefire Local gives you the power to write, schedule, and send emails in the very same place where you check on your website traffic, paid ads’ ROI, leads, reviews, and more. You can easily manage your audience lists and pick which audience you want to email inside the Surefire Local platform. With our tool, you’ll get insights and performance reports so you can continually look for ways to improve. Request a demo of the Surefire Local marketing platform today!