Email marketing strategy to retain your leads.

Defining your email marketing strategy? Don’t you know how to build your leads and convert them into customers through email marketing? In this article you will see the best techniques to attract these potential customers.

The process that goes between that anonymous visitors land on our site that we manage to turn them into customers and even beyond, making them become ambassadors of the brand, is one of the challenges of any marketing professional, so it is especially interesting to review the process and see how we can improve it, especially based on email marketing.

The reason is very simple, email marketing is the most powerful and effective way to sell directly to our contacts without having to invest in advertising continuously, being the channel most used daily by many large companies and the one that offers a greater return on investment .

What is a lead?

A fundamental aspect in marketing is lead. This concept refers to those people who have shown interest in a product or service of our company.

This interest can be demonstrated in many ways, for example:

• A very direct one is because they have called us, contacted on social networks or sent an email
• But you can also demonstrate it by downloading content from the site, the well-known lead magnet: an ebook or a case study in PDF, just to name a couple of possibilities

From the point of view of the inbound marketing methodology to these potential clients we are interested in offering them options to convert them into potential buyers.

Why are leads so important?

The leads have shown an interest that indicates that they are willing to receive communications from our company.

It is, then, a good time to be able to send materials that can be useful for you to make a decision, whether they are offers of our products or services, if we believe that we can convert them directly, or news from the sector, case studies, etc. to demonstrate our deep knowledge and interest in him, in getting him to know us better and have greater security in the purchase he will make.

How to attract these potential customers?

Getting leads usually has the same route, from the moment that anonymous visitors access our website or blog and are interested in the content we offer, we must direct them to any of the calls to action we have raised to land on a landing page where we will have a form, chat, telephone, etc. so that they can leave us that information that will allow us to contact them later.

Let’s break down these concepts a bit.

Value content

That an anonymous visitor wants to leave us their data is not an easy task, so the downloadable offer must represent an effective incentive to do so. If we do not offer something useful, they will hardly click on the call to action and we will not get their contact details. The choice of the offer must be related to the stage of the buyer journey in which the potential buyer is located.

Calls to action

Calls take the form of a banner, button, link, etc. and are inserted in the pages of our website to redirect users to obtain a content or offer in exchange for leaving their contact information. For this reason, we are interested in being clear, very visible and attractive to click.

Landing pages

After clicking on the call to action, you will arrive at a landing page. It contains texts and images that clearly expose the benefits of downloading content that will leave our contact information. The user experience on this occasion is important so that that user is not distracted and leaves the page.

Contact Form

The form on a landing page is the tool that allows you to collect visitor data and start its transformation into a lead, although there may be other forms, such as a phone number, a chat, etc. The minimum data we need to collect is the email and a name if we want to address it in a more personalized way.

We must ask for the fair fields, the requirement of a large amount of information, or data considered too personal, can lead the visitor not to fill out the form, which will result in the loss of a new potential customer.

In general, the rule is that the duration of the form and the value of the offer must be similar: for an ebook it is only necessary to provide the essential information, to request a consultation about our free services we can demand more data.

Starting our email marketing strategy

Once we have their data is when we can apply our email marketing strategy to lead nurturing, which is to establish a relationship and help them understand that we have the right product or service.

For them we must be able to offer content that has value for the reader, such as informative articles, video tutorials, personalized offers, etc.

Working our leads involves studying a strategy based on the potential client, to surprise them by offering exactly what they need. The use of marketing automation is essential as it will help us to have more information and act accordingly.

Marketing automation is based on software with which it is possible to add and automate different marketing activities that would otherwise be managed separately and manually.

The advantages are clear because we can centralize the information in a single tool for all communication and promotion actions and, on the other hand, the optimization of workflows, thanks to the configuration of pre-established automatisms that save us great work.

They usually allow us to work in various areas such as:

• Email marketing
• Social networks
• Integration with CRM to have a large database that feeds the rest
• Lead score, that is, measure the level of interest of the person towards us

It would also be interesting to carry out a strategy to increase the list of subscribers.

Examples of campaigns that we can automate in email marketing

Once we have a contact email, and perhaps much more information, we can establish a series of communications with subscribers to help them become customers, if they are not already, or to become ambassadors if they already are.

The goal is always to send the right messages to the right people at the right time. Otherwise, we will lose time and money, as well as the interest and trust of the public. Some types of email marketing campaigns that we can configure are:

• Welcome email: We can configure the sending of a welcome message for users who subscribe to our services, a product test, website, blog.
• With content: Create periodic communications with content. The ideal is to know what kind of pages they visit to offer them the ones that are more similar.
• Lead nurturing: If we know that a lead has visited certain pages that may indicate an interest very close to the conversion, we can take advantage of this moment and try to convince him by sending him an email with a free trial or demo offer.
• Reminder Emails: In the case of subscribers of products that have a periodicity, emails can be developed to remind them to buy again.
• Reactivate users: We can automate messages with exclusive discounts after a certain period of time since the last interaction.
• Shopping cart abandonment: E-commerce sites often detect how many users have access to one step of making the purchase. To convince them to finish it, once again, using email marketing we can send an email that remembers the pending purchase, even with a promotion code to favor the interest.
• Make our events known: A perfect option for both online and physical events. From the moment that users register, we can easily communicate this type of activities with them through email marketing providing value and connection with the brand.
• Cross sales: You can automate emails that offer complementary products or services to the one they have purchased.

Why and how to segment the database of our leads

It is true that to send our email marketing campaigns we only need to have a database with email addresses, but the solution is not to send emails without further ado.

We must be able to customize content to create a real interest in our subscribers. Therefore, it is essential to segment the database based on the interests of the different buyers. After all, the opening rate depends especially on the interest of those who receive it.

Sending the same content to all our contacts is still like any outbound technique that sends advertising to many people hoping that a small percentage may be interested.

The disadvantage that we find when using email is that the subscriber is more likely to avoid it because they can unsubscribe from the list, send emails to secondary folders such as promotions in Gmail or, in the worst case, mark us as spam.

Segmenting the database according to interests allows us to reach a specific audience and reach the goal of a 1 to 1 communication, without disturbing everyone with issues that do not interest them, and generating many benefits:

• Promote the loyalty of followers to the brand. Upon receiving messages and content for them they become more faithful to the brand. Feeling more heard will produce more conversions.
• More conversions. If we create specific messages thinking about customers, we generate a greater impact. Generic messages are impersonal.
• More experience with the brand, offering content aligning the interests of the subscribers with those of the company.

The recurring problem is that resources are needed to develop these strategies and maintain them over time. A clear strategy must be established with long-term thinking.

If we are able to keep our database updated and clean, our results will be more positive: we will be able to achieve better opening rates and obtain higher conversions.

What criteria can we follow when segmenting?

These are some of the best ways we can choose to segment correctly.

Segmentation by age, sex, job

This is a simple way to segment if we have this data. Surely there are issues that, if they are of interest to the youngest, are likely to lack interest for the elders, to give a basic example.

Geographical segmentation

Whether we have products or services of a local nature, or if we are a retail company with countless points of sale, it is important to customize the emails by referring to the proximity point to increase your interest.

Segmentation by your browsing history

Being able to know interesting data such as the type of pages they browse makes it easy for us to know what their current interests are and to adapt our communications accordingly.

We can also rely on how they respond to the emails we send, how it acts according to the opening rate or the content on which they show the most interest.

In this sense, it is important to work the quantity and, above all, the quality of the available information. The more data we have available to customers, the easier it will be to send personalized information to improve our results. That is why many large companies use marketing automation tools, such as Salesforce or Selligent, to dispose of this data.

Customer type

Knowing if customers are potential or have already bought allows us to communicate differently. When it comes to personalizing communication, we can place greater emphasis on knowing us and seeing why we can interest them and with those who have already been buyers, we can be more direct when it comes to selling.

One of the most common mistakes that companies make when they start to develop their business is only to think marketing actions to gain notoriety and make noise but without having a clear strategy or defining their objective.

Finally, we must not forget that this work gives very good results but being constant.

Generating a lead acquisition strategy that ends up nourishing our list, which we are going to segment and update, requires long-term work. What is unquestionable is that it is a strategy that is very worth developing.

What do you think? 😉

Alex Romero – Digital Marketing Expert
Marketing Digital Malaga