If Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Includes Sales Emails, You Need to Read This ...

Email drip campaigns have long been considered an essential part of the lead nurturing process. While email is fairly low-tech by today's standards, it remains a valuable component of your inbound marketing strategy.

Effective email marketing is a vital piece of your overall inbound marketing strategy.

The Benefits of Sales Emails

According to Inc.com's "Top 5 Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Works", sending emails to potential and existing clients offers the following benefits as part of your inbound marketing strategy:

• Email gives you an easy way to connect with mobile users.
• Email allows you to have continuing contact with your customer base.
• Email coupons drive online and in-store sales.
• Email allows for a high level of customization and integration with other marketing strategies.
• Email marketing is cost effective.

Getting the Most from Email Marketing

While there are a variety of reasons to use email marketing, it is important to remember that your emails compete in a vast sea of emails that clients receive every day. According to research from the Radicati Group, a technology market research firm in California, in 2015, the number of business emails sent and received per day totaled over 112.5 billion. Per user, that equates to 122 emails sent and received per day. The average number of received emails was 88, of which 76 were classified as legitimate email communication and 12 were classified as spam.

The question is, if your leads are receiving 76 legitimate emails each day including yours, what can you do to make your emails stand out from the crowd? Here are some tips for more effective email marketing campaigns:

1) Write a great subject line.

Since the subject line is the first thing your leads see when your email appears in their inbox, it makes sense that your subject line can be the make or break item that determines whether your email is opened, discarded, or marked as spam.

Hubspot's "The 7 Deadly Sins of Sales Email Subject Lines" list several areas of concern for subject line content, including:

• subject lines that are too long
• subject lines that are misleading or that do not match the content provided in the email
• subject lines that are too generic
• subject lines that are not personalized

Just like a headline in a newspaper article, subject lines must convey the central theme of your email and do so in a way designed to attract the true attention of your audience. Thus, it is essential to craft subject lines carefully, putting real thought into how to attract your audience with a few simple, impactful words.

2) Provide high quality content.

The rules that apply to your other marketing content like your blog and social media marketing efforts apply also to email content. The standard to which all your email content should adhere is that of relevance and usefulness to the consumer.

Your emails should tell a story. Specifically, they should tell your story. After all, it is your story that makes you stand out from your competitors. Therefore, it stands to reason that it is your story which will make your emails stand out among a sea of other emails as well.

3) Include multimedia content.

In a river of text-only emails, you can make your emails stand out by employing a multimedia approach. Visual content like high quality photos and videos engage your audience more fully than do text-only emails. Consider incorporating multimedia content to tell your story more effectively.

Concerning this form of storytelling in your content, Hubspot notes: "This means including eye-grabbing components in your messages (visual content does a better job at capturing attention than text-only) and creating a narrative that ties together facts instead of just listing them."

Emails that include multimedia content attract leads and delight customers.

4) Use emails to drive your SEO strategies.

While it is true that emails have no direct bearing on your SEO results, you can still use email content to achieve positive SEO outcomes. SearchEngineLand's "3 Simple Ways Email Can Drive SEO Results" observes: "Email is a useful tool for keeping an audience engaged and "wielding" traffic in a way that no other marketing channel allows for. Using email as a tool to help or enhance a search engine optimization initiative can be extremely effective if done well."

The article makes the following suggestions:

• Include a strong call to action in emails to engage readers and drive traffic to your website.
• Use emails to encourage readers to follow you on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• Re-purpose high quality email content into blog posts.

The Bottom Line

Email marketing is a cost-effective way to build relationships with your customers. Done well, email content can encourage engagement and drive conversions. Thus, your email strategy should be a significant part of your overall inbound marketing strategy.

Are your emails full of high quality content that engages your customers? To find out, request an assessment today, and let us partner with you to improve your email strategy and integrate it more fully into an overall inbound strategy optimized for results.

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