Running a small business is hard work, there’s no doubt about that. And among the many tasks you have to do, the most important one is getting and keeping customers. Without them, you simply don’t have a business.
To do this, you need to spend time nurturing your customer relationships, both for people who have already bought from you and for people who haven’t yet done so.
What you’re doing is keeping existing customers happy, and hopefully buying more from you, while also managing your leads and moving them through your sales funnel to try to convert them into paying customers.
One of the best ways to do that is still email marketing. Yes, there are countless other ways to market to your customers, but email is still right at the top of the list when it comes to managing and nurturing your leads.
But how do you do that? What do you say? And how do you improve your results again and again?
Read on for Surefire’s top email marketing strategies for lead management.
Why Email Still Matters
Email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers and help them move along your sales funnel.
While not everyone checks social media every day, most people check their emails at least once – according to OptinMonster, that figure is as high as 99%. In fact, it’s quite often the first thing people do when they get up. They reach for their phone and check their notifications. And with mobile phones, they can check their email when they’re on the go, at work, at lunch, or anywhere else they might want to do so.
That tells us two things; firstly that you need to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile, and secondly, that people are still paying attention to emails.
Another reason why email works is that you can continue to use your brand voice and give a general impression of what it would be like to buy from you, when you send out emails. The way you communicate with your customers sets the tone for their entire experience with your company and it starts with email.
Lastly, and definitely not least, your email list is your list. You own it. It doesn’t matter if Facebook goes out of business tomorrow or every other social media platform ceases to exist. You can still reach your customers and keep marketing to them. Use email marketing to build your business on your own platform, not on someone else’s.
Email Marketing Tips for Lead Management
So, now we’ve hopefully convinced you to keep going with email when managing and nurturing your leads, here are our top ten tips to get the most out of email marketing:
1) Tailor the email campaign’s theme to your customers’ interests
Get to know your customers and your general audience extremely well and give them what they want in your email campaigns just as much as you would on social media.
Make sure to tailor the email campaign’s theme to suit your customers. They might glance at your emails anyway, even if you don’t, but if you focus your emails on their particular interests, they will happily open up your emails and read them. If you’ve done things well, they may even click through and follow the next action that you want them to take.
What you can do is segment your list and create different email campaigns to suit different parts of your list. You’ll get far higher engagement and sales from this than sending generic emails to everyone.
2) Send a welcome email to every new customer
When someone signs up to your list, say “thank you”. Welcome them to your list and tell them what they can expect to hear from you if they stick around. Make them feel genuinely welcome and give them reason to want to stay on your list and they could be with you for years.
You’ll also want to use this email to provide links to more information and to tell them how to get their hands on the lead magnet you promised them when they signed up.
Don’t put too much in this email. You don’t want to overwhelm them, just make them feel good about being there and do what you said you would do. That’s a great way to start off on the right foot.
3) Keep your emails short and simple
Email length does vary depending on what your business does. You can probably get away with a more in-depth email if you’re selling B2B, for example. But in general, keep things simple and keep it short.
Make things easy to read, make it clear what you want your customers to do next, and stick to the same topic throughout. You can include more than one call to action per email, but try to keep it to just one ask rather than many.
The more you put in and the more you ask your customers to do, the more likely they are to do nothing.
4) Use automation to send targeted emails
With email automation, you can do so much more than just send individual emails to your list.
You can use automation to send emails to customers based on what they do. For example, if a customer adds an item to their basket and then closes your site, you can send them an individual cart abandonment email, perhaps with a time-limited discount.
You can use this same automation to send offers, ask for reviews, follow up on individual appointments, and more.
It’s highly effective and can help customers feel like you really do know them and what they want.
5) A/B test
A/B testing is one of the most effective ways to find out what is working and what’s not with your emails. You can set up two different emails and send both of them to part of your list and then compare your results.
You can test your subject lines, your email copy, your offer, colors, button design, your email design style, whether to use an HTML email or a full template, and far more.
Then you can see which headline is the winner, which button color makes more people click, etc, and start to refine your emails based on real results, not guess work.
The only thing to be aware of is that it’s best not to test more than one thing at once. If you try to test everything in one email, you won’t know which of all those things was the one that really moved the needle.
6) Send relevant content
We’re back to “know your audience” again. You have to know what people on your list want to see so that you can send them the right content to help them move along your sales funnel or even make a purchase.
However, it’s not just about relevant content. It’s about sending the right content at the right time. Automation can help you send the exact right offer just when a customer is thinking of leaving their purchase, or you can reach a customer with a timely discount and help them to make their minds up. You can send relevant sale offers to people when products they’ve looked at are on sale. The possibilities really are endless.
7) Use personalization
In addition to being able to personalize offers and send tailored emails to certain customers, you can also personalize your emails by including the first name field in your subject and in your email itself.
Instead of reading:
“Have you seen this offer?
Hi there”
You can instead send emails to your list using their own name, so what they get is a personalized email that reads:
“Amy, have you seen this offer?
Hi Amy”
That’s much more powerful and personal for customers. People do react and pay more attention when they see their own name.
8) Track your results
Naturally, you need to track your results from your email marketing campaigns. We’ve talked about A/B testing to improve click-through rates and results, but it’s also important to keep a general eye on your analytics.
Look at the results of each email campaign. Compare them against the last one and see what you can learn. What went well and what didn’t? What products or services are people most interested in?
Use your results to continue making improvements to your email marketing over time.
9) Use marketing software to simplify and automate
Use a marketing platform, such as Surefire Local’s business intelligence software, to automate your email marketing and take a lot of the work out of your hands.
You can set up welcome sequences for new subscribers, sequences to sell a particular product or service, and targeted emails or sequences to reach particular segments of your list with more tailored offers and information.
That leaves you with more free time to focus on the big picture of running your business.
10) Compliment your email efforts with text messaging
Text messaging in combination with email marketing can be highly effective. Yet again, you’re relying on the fact that the first thing people do when they get up is to look at their phone. People do pick up text messages and read them, and if they give you their phone number and give you permission to market to them via text, they really do want to hear from you. Getting a text is far more personal even than getting an email. People tend to only want texts from people and companies they don’t want to miss out on hearing from.
Get permission, but start building your text messaging list now, if you haven’t already. Like your email list, you own it and you can keep marketing to people on that list as long as you like.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
With Surefire’s all-in-one local marketing software, you can manage every aspect of your email marketing right from your dashboard. You can jot down ideas for emails to send, set up and send your emails, and even include automation to help you market with ease.
Not only that, but you can also manage every other aspect of your marketing from the same platform. No more logging into multiple platforms and trying to learn many different pieces of software.
Just log in once and you can take care of your social media marketing, content marketing, paid ads, reviews, directory listings, and far more.
And you can easily create reports and gain in-depth insights from your analytics.
It’s one platform that provides your team with a centralized inbox to manage customer communications via email and text, along with managing the rest of your marketing too. Book a demo with our team and see how we can help you grow your small business.