Email marketing is a very popular and powerful tool for lead generation. This form of database marketing allows businesses to reach markets and customers in the global village quickly, efficiently, and cheaply.
Database marketing has the ability to generate a wealth of information about your customer. However, properly harnessing this information and using to increase revenue can be tricky.
The most common barriers for email marketing are 1) time and 2) ensuring that your message is not immediately buried in a recipient’s trash folder.
Building lists for email campaigns can be very time consuming: building a list with thousands of contacts is not easy. Constructing the body of the email requires a significant amount of time as well. The email needs to be short enough so readers are not bored, but still long enough that you are able to properly convey your message.
The first step to avoid having your message deleted is to personalize the email. Use the recipient’s name, company, and industry in the email. Moreover, make sure that the subject matter of the email is relevant to the recipient: sending information about animal care to a beverage company is unlikely to have the desired results.
The second step is to ensure the content of the email has value to the reader and can trigger an appropriate action. The subject of the email is the first line of content the viewer reads. This line is the difference between the reader opening the email or deleting it. It must be relevant to the reader, create a desire for more information, and encourage the recipient to read the body.
The body of the email builds a relationship with the reader by providing information about how your products and services will benefit them. Successful communication in the email body is crucial for conversions. Encouraging readers to visit your website or reply to your email is how you measure the effectiveness of an email campaign. Thus, the content in the body of your email must provide information valuable to the reader and generate an action such as calling your sales team.
The most important stage of any marketing campaign is learning from the results. Without properly tracking who opened which email or who clicked what, email marketing is as effective as leaving a voicemail and hoping the message got through. Tools such as Vertical Response can track which recipients opened your email and which of those recipients went further and clicked on conversion links in the body of the email. This information is critical to understand what sort of message your audience is looking for and what types of offers encourage them to engage with your business.
Tracking recipients after their initial conversion is just as important. Most tracking tools only indicate that a reader has clicked on a link inside the email body. Learning details about a prospect’s visit to your website is important in driving the sales cycle. Tracking tools, such as ActiveConversion, can identify which pages visitors viewed and how they were originally directed to your website. Combined with the information from the initial email campaign, you are better able to identify which leads are the most interested in your products and services. Your sales team can then focus on these highly qualified leads saving them from chasing down every recipient that opened the email and generating more revenue for you.
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