If we think about a marketing channel that facilitates everything in between ice breaking to conversion and even retargeting, email marketing surely tops the list. Even the pandemic wasn’t able to dent its effectiveness. The recent ROI figures for email marketing sit at 4200% as compared to 4400% in 2016.
No doubt, emails continue to claim the highest ratings from marketers:
If you’re planning to make client acquisition efforts, email marketing can be your lucky charm. It’s just not about these promising figures. There’s a lot of things that work in their favor when it comes to generating and closing leads.
Let us have a look at how you can use email marketing to acquire new customers and a few insider tips on the same:
Never Miss A Chance To Fetch Email Addresses
A leading email marketing company says that one of the untold rules for acquiring the maximum possible customers through email marketing is never missing an opportunity to collect email addresses. Here’s why:
49% of the individuals surveyed would be happy to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands. That being said, email is the only platform that is 100% consent-based with a privacy-first approach. Sending unsolicited messages can land marketers in trouble due to various legislations like CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL.
Both of these factors work strongly in favor of brands that follow list-building best practices and maintain a high mailing list hygiene. In fact, the better your list hygiene, the higher conversion rates you will get.
Once you onboard your prospects, you can engage with them on a one-on-one basis. Here, you won’t need to compete with any other entity for your recipient’s attention once they open your mail as opposed to all other platforms.
Use your website, social media, and even SEO campaigns to acquire email addresses. Make sure to keep emails in the loop regardless of the marketing platforms you are using because it’s the only avenue that allows you to connect with your prospects in a virtually free manner once they were opt-in.
Engage Consistently And Constructively
The next step is to communicate with your prospects regularly through different types of emails. These types include informative, promotional, engagement, testimonials, newsletters, surveys, referrals, and many more.
Before you begin with your conversion efforts, you need to understand where your prospects stand in their buyer journey. If unsure, ask upfront, as it will help keep your email marketing efforts relevant and well-targeted.
A great way to win customers over emails is leveraging drip campaigns as they provide the needed information for each phase of purchase. It would be best if you use beautiful email templates that are mobile responsive, or else you might lose out on many promising leads:
Using mobile-responsive html email templates also has a positive impact on your email metrics:
Ask For Referrals And Reviews
Did I just mention that emails are a one-on-one communication channel? It effectively translates to the fact that you shouldn’t treat it as a ‘blast-and-forget’ platform. Seeking replies in the form of reviews and asking your subscribers to forward your message can be game-changers for customer acquisitions.
Here’s why I am emphasizing harnessing them: Finding relevant leads is a long and exhaustive process. Once you land such people, you shouldn’t shy off from asking for referrals because they might know other people who consume similar products/services. Word of mouth makes marketing next to effortless, and though referrals are rare for email marketing,
Seeking reviews for the purchased items/services is a great way to gather user-generated content (UGC), and you can distribute it at multiple avenues, including emails, of course. You can display them as social proof, and it is by far one of the most influential tactics for both client acquisition and conversions.
Check out the below example of asking for feedback through email:
However, it is easier said than done as people turn hesitant to share your emails or provide referral leads even if you offer a financial incentive. In my opinion, the best way to fight back their hesitancy is offering benefits for both the recipient and sender of the referral offer. This is the quickest and easiest way to sort things out. Here’s a quick example of doing so:
The reason behind the high conversion rates of leads acquired through such campaigns is that all of us are friends with like-minded people. We are more likely to have friends and acquaintances in the same field as well as share similar interests and hobbies in life. Thus, there’s no way you would want to miss out on such opportunities, especially when email marketing is concerned.
As far as forwarding your regular emails is concerned, it would take you to be the bluest boy in terms of content quality and overall value offered. While you can always work in this direction, don’t forget to utilize personalization and segmentation, the top two of the best performing strategies for email marketers.
Be Generous With Email Automation
Lastly, I would like to stress the fact that email marketing is primarily an automation-first avenue. If you want to keep its full benefits, including client acquisition, you should be focused on improving your automation workflows regularly and keeping a tab on your progress.
Email automation paves the way for unmatched flexibility and scalability as you can create different sets of campaigns to target your subscribers for entirely different parameters and yet be relevant. Also, you can automatically send emails that respond to your recipients’ actions, generally known as transactional messages.
What more could you ask for in a world full of marketing platforms that require entire stacks of tools and sizable headcounts? Automation is surely the most underrated aspect of email marketing, and you should work on leveraging it if you were to acquire more customers.
Wrap Up
Toward the end, I would like to share a tip that would help you tremendously not only in acquiring new customers but also in retaining them through email marketing: You need to think differently when reaching out to your prospects over emails.
You’re not disturbing your potential clients while they swipe up and down through their feed. You’re not trying to slip into their DMs to offer unsolicited offers. They connected with you over emails. They subscribed to receive your messages.
The shift in mentality is very important as people consider their email addresses more intimate than their social media handles. It’s also considered an “official” correspondence channel which reinforces the level of credibility it boasts. Treat it that way, play the consultant, and talk like a thought leader. Making relationships should be the focus, and as they say, getting customers will become a natural byproduct.
That’s all for using email marketing to acquire new customers, and I hope it will help you in your 2021 outreach endeavors.
Author Bio
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest-growing PSD to Email coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, custom Mailchimp email templates design and coding in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
