![](https://www.salesoutreachheroes.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/sales-outreach-email-marketing.jpg)
Email is a more direct and personal way to engage with prospects and customers. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones. Pretty much everyone has email in their pocket or within easy reach.Building a database of email subscribers plays a central role in your online marketing strategy.
A prominent part of your website should be an opt-in email form. This enables you to capture email addresses. It then gives us the ability to intelligently deal with interested prospects who may not yet be developed to the point of making a purchasing decision.
Generally, these kinds of prospects make up most of all opportunities and are crucial to filling your future sales pipeline. If you didn’t capture these interested non-buyers, you’d likely lose them forever. Your only hope would be that when they finally became ready to buy, they would remember your website – among hundreds they may have visited – and complete the buying process stages that they began days, weeks or months ago.
An email also enables you to maintain a close relationship with your customer base and makes it easy to test and launch new products and services. Over time, as you build a relationship with your email subscribers, your database becomes an increasingly valuable marketing asset.
Despite the growth and popularity of social media, a database of email subscribers remains one of the essential elements of your online marketing strategy. As discussed, social media reach has become problematic because only a tiny percentage of your followers will see your message.
Even if your posts were allowed to reach everyone, your message would probably get lost amongst the funny videos, jokes, and memes. It’s called social media for a reason.
Even more importantly, an email database is an asset that you own. It’s independent of whatever social media property may be the flavour of the month. Remember MySpace? Facebook is also having reputational issues, which has probably contributed to a change in their company name to META.
While no one predicts that Facebook and others are going away soon, it is a fast-moving space. If you build your business on someone else’s platform and it starts to decline in popularity, your key online marketing asset will be stranded.
While email is a powerful medium, it does have a few quirks that you must be aware of:
Six key do’s and don’ts when it comes to using email as a marketing channel.
- Don’t spam. There are rules about email marketing to contacts who are not a customer or did not explicitly sign up for your email. Most notably, even if you are emailing someone under the guise of “legitimate interest”, it’s considered bad taste and borderline spamming if you mass mail without any pre-qualification as to whether or not they would be an appropriate customer. Your outbound emails to these prospects need to be specific and should make them feel “considered”; otherwise, it’ll just be viewed as spam.
- Be human. Don’t write an email like a robot or like you’re writing a formal letter. Email is a very personal medium and even if you’re sending the same email to thousands of your subscribers, write as though you’re emailing a single person. Feel free to be a bit informal.
- Use an email marketing system. Don’t ever use Outlook, Gmail or any other standard email service for mass email marketing. These services are designed for one-to-one emails, not one-to-many. If you start mass emailing from these services, your account will either get shut down or blacklisted. There are commercial email marketing systems that are cheap and easy to use.
- Email regularly. If you rarely email your contact database, they’ll start to go cold. They may have opted into your email database, but if they haven’t heard from you for a long time, they may forget who you are and mark you as spam. Worse still, the value of your key online marketing asset starts to decay. To keep the relationship warm, stay in touch with your email subscribers at the very least monthly. The best practice is closer to weekly, but it also depends on the target market. There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to frequency. Just ensure when you email, it’s relevant and value-building.
- Give them value. If you emailed your subscriber database only when you wanted to sell them something, this will quickly get old, and they’ll either unsubscribe from your list, ignore your emails, or mark you as a spammer. All healthy relationships are based on an exchange of value. Ensure the majority of your emails are not sales pitches but rather something that creates value for your subscribers. A good ratio is three value-building emails for every offer email.
- Automate. Another great reason to use a commercial email marketing platform is automation. These platforms allow you to set up sequences that automatically get emailed to new subscribers. For example.
Step 1: you should have your email marketing platform automatically send them a welcome email when they subscribe.
Step 2: a day later, it should send them a value-packed email helping them to better understand your market.
Step 3: three days later it should send an email telling them more about you and your company.
Step 4: a week later it should invite them to book a call with you.
All this can be done on autopilot. An email marketing platform is your digital salesperson who works 24/7/365 and never needs to take a break. It can be one of the best salespeople in your company.
Comments are closed