After all these years, email marketing remains one of the best ways to communicate with customers, clients, and leads.
The most common type of email marketing runs on a marketing calendar based on what's happening inside the business. Emails are scheduled on specific dates and sent out to segments of an email list to whom the message is relevant. This type of email marketing is effective, but also very labor intensive.
There's another type of email marketing available to you: automated or trigger-based email. This type of email marketing is driven by the way a client, customer, or lead interacts with your business. For example, you may send someone an automated email series when they fill out an email subscription form on their site.
If your business hasn't yet taken advantage of automated email, I'd like to share 5 reasons why you should get started right now.
1) Communicate With Prospects In A Relevant Way
A lot of the time we communicate with clients, customers, and leads based on what is important to our business. Automated email forces us to approach communication differently. This type of email is usually triggered by something someone does on your website. Because you're emailing someone as a result of them doing something, you'll know exactly the type of content you need to send them to make sure every email you send is relevant.
2) Free Your Team Up For High Value Tasks
You only have to create a triggered email series one time. After that, you can use a system like Hubspot or MailChimp to send those emails automatically whenever someone takes a specific action on your site (filling out a form, requesting more info, buying a product, etc.). This means that your marketing team will immediately get time back in their day while the emails keep sending in the background. Brilliant.
3) Build Trust Before Asking Prospects To Get On The Phone
Not all prospects are ready to talk to you the first time they land on your site. They may however be willing to ask for more information via email, or give you their email address in exchange for a valuable resource like an eBook. With an automated email program this is no problem. As soon as someone fills out the form you can send them an series of emails that slowly builds trust with them before they need to talk to sales or make a purchase decision.
4) Pre-Qualify Leads Before They Require Hands-On Care
A well-planned email series will do the hard work of qualifying leads before your sales team even has to talk to them. When we plan an email series with this goal, we'll carefully construct the content to do two things:
- Clearly demonstrate what type of person or company will benefit from the product or service we're selling.
- Gather additional information about the lead so that we can better understand if they fit the profile of our ideal customer.
By doing these two things, we can lighten the load of a hard-worked sales team by feeding them quality leads they know are worth pursuing.
5) Create A System You Can Optimize Over Time
Perhaps the greatest benefit of automatically triggered email is the ability to optimize it. Because you're sending the same emails to hundreds or even thousands of people over time, you'll be able to use real data to see what parts of your email program aren't performing. Then, using the built in testing features of a tool like Hubspot you can slot in a new or revised email to see if it performs better. No need to wait until you send out an email for your next campaign, the optimization process will start the next time someone enters the automated series. That's powerful.
So, if you haven't started yet, we recommend getting rolling with an automated email program. It will pay all kinds of dividends for your business.
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