Cooking up leads: How to boost sales with email marketing
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The age of the empowered customer has changed a lot for modern marketers and sales people: customers go through 60% of the buyer journey without any help from sales. This means that we need to remain in control about the way our brands and products are being perceived. In this presentation we'll show you how to use email marketing and marketing automation to influence the customer journey and boost sales. Because of these changing customers, marketing and sales need to learn to work together. The biggest challenge is SMarketing today, is the ability to engage with your prospects on a regular, next-steps cadence – keeping the information moving forward and keeping them engaged within the sales cycle, until the point where they become a paying customer. In this presentation I’m going to show you how marketing can use email marketing to generate highly valuable leads, and to convert those leads into prospects. And that will help sales to close more deals
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Editor's Notes
- Cooking up leads: how to boost sales with email marketing Ann Flipkens - Email Marketing Consultant Flexmail The age of the empowered customer has changed a lot for modern marketers and sales people: customers go through 60% of the buyer journey without any help from sales. This means that we need to remain in control about the way our brands and products are being perceived. In this presentation we'll show you how to use email marketing and marketing automation to influence the customer journey and boost sales.
- I’m in sales, and you’ll probably agree with me, our customers have changed a lot over the last years, both in B2C and B2B. A lot of our customers make their way through the majority of the sales cycle on their own, before ever speaking to an actual sales rep. Let’s be friends Because of these changing customers, marketing and sales need to learn to work together. The biggest challenge is SMarketing today, is the ability to engage with your prospects on a regular, next-steps cadence – keeping the information moving forward and keeping them engaged within the sales cycle, until the point where they become a paying customer. In this presentation I’m going to show you how marketing can use email marketing to generate highly valuable leads, and to convert those leads into prospects. And that will help sales to close more deals.
- Email marketing and content: a love story Because of that evolved customer, email marketing also had to go through some big changes: gone are the days of batch& blast campaigns and mass mailings. Automated and targeted emails can get up to 119% better click rates than broadcast emails. The ability to reach prospects with highly relevant and timely messages can make an enormous difference in conversion rates.
- Content & email marketing can be used as a preparation tool Just because someone filled out his email address on your websites, that doesn’t mean he is ready to be contacted by sales. Using email marketing you can set up a regular flow of relevant email messages to warm up your leads until they are ready to be contacted by sales. Content & email marketing can be used as a selling tool By targeting your leads with the right content at the right time, you can entice your contacts at crucial moments to make a purchase, without being contacted by sales. Content & email marketing can be used as an analytics tool If you track of the actions of your contact, and the content he interacts with, you can use that information to learn more about your contacts, and to target them even better.
- RACE model We often hear that email marketing should only be used as a retention tool, to keep existing customers engaged. But the truth is that email can be used in the various stages in the sales process. At Flexmail, we often use this model when helping clients with their email marketing strategy. It contains just 4 steps, which makes it easy to evaluate the different stages at a regular pace. If you’re losing a lot of contacts in a specific phase, your strategy needs some evaluation and optimization.
- Buyers are more hesitant to engage with a rep until they’ve educated themselves enough. So the first challenge is to educate them properly, and to be able to gather their contact data as soon as possible. This will allow you to control the information and perception they get from you in an early stage.
- That means that both marketing and sales have a clear strategy in place. So map out your sales process. Make sure you know who you’re talking to: what are the needs and questions of your audience? What problem does he need a solution for? Based on the information you have about your contacts, you can segment that audience into clearly defined target groups. What do those target groups need and when? When will you contact them with what?
- Content hub Sales leads and subscribers are not the same thing. People that sign up to receive your monthly newsletter should not automatically be incorporated into a lead nurturing program. Your time is better spent focusing on leads that come in through specific campaigns and lead capture forms.
- In your sales process you need to include an outreach plan: you need to contact your leads at the ideal time with the right content. So ask yourself: What makes a lead valuable? And how can we get the most leads there as fast as possible? Which tactics result in the best leads?
- Because people reading your content is wonderful – it creates a positive impression of your brand, positions you as an authority, and there are many other soft benefits. But what you really want, what really matters, are leads you can follow up with, nurture, qualify and move through your sales funnel. The content at the top of your funnel is both the bait that attracts visitors and the net that captures leads.
- Because people reading your content is wonderful – it creates a positive impression of your brand, positions you as an authority, and there are many other soft benefits. But what you really want, what really matters, are leads you can follow up with, nurture, qualify and move through your sales funnel. The content at the top of your funnel is both the bait that attracts visitors and the net that captures leads.
- Rather than letting a potential lead slip through your fingers, you need to give them a compelling reason to give you their contact information. Offering free reports and whitepapers is great, and has worked for a while now. But you can also use a new tactic that has been even more effective: content upgrades. Content upgrades are offers for additional content that align perfectly with the content the visitor is reading. It’s a way for a reader to instantly “upgrade” the content in exchange for their email address. E.g: in a post with a process, you could offer a printable worksheet with additional resources and commentary. For a video, you could offer a transcript with additional resources. To create content upgrades, consider “What can I offer that would make this content even more useful to a reader? Only do this for your best pieces of content, as it takes quite some time to work this out. Keep track of source and interest for every lead. You know what leads are struggling with, and it allows you to run reports on which topics are best for attracting leads. Voorbeeld links: regular whitepaper download Voorbeeld rechts: Content upgrade inside an article.
- Content should drive sales, not just brand awareness – The sales team should have a consulting function in this process. They are best positioned to identify opportunities and objections they hear from prospects. Also make sure both as marketing and sales that you know exactly how every piece of content is performing. Marketing can easily do that by applying interest groups or tags to various pieces of content and links. Those interest groups allow you at a very early stage to optimize your target groups: you know exactly what they’ve done.
- What can you do to get your leads ready and turn them into prospects? By sending the right content at the right time of course.
- Pay extra attention to your early interactions: get a higher-level understanding of the challenges their business is facing, and show them the big picture of what your business can do to help them – things they may have missed when looking on your website, by focusing on features and lacking a larger understanding of your overall products or services. The ACT phase can be a game changer.
- Make sure you control the customer journey, and what content they see and when. Once you have effective and targeted content and sales messages ready, use marketing automation and email marketing to help stay top-of-mind with prospects, and keep them engaged over the course of a long sales cycle.
- How you nurture your leads depends on your business. Most nurturing sequences however, will typically make use of a combination of articles, webinars, videos and other educational content formats to build trust and turn cold leads into warm ones.
- Voorbeeld tekstueel: Opvolging van sales, whitepaper gedownload en volgen op met extra content.
- Voorbeeld Hanapin: Opvolgingsmail na meevolgen van webinar. Voorbeeld Email Conversion Course to drive you in. Free 14 day course. Gives you plenty of opportunities to educate them and to get them to convert to paying customers. Voorbeeld Strava: test version signup confirmation. How to get started. Using dynamic content you could also sign the email with the sales rep responsible.
- And the only way to turn leads into prospects, is to know what drives them. Get to know your contacts even better by analyzing their clicking behavior in your emails. Or use a preference center to actually ask them about their interests. By also implementing web tracking, you can track which pages your contacts visit on your website, and use that information in your marketing automation. If you don’t have enough information about them to set up a custom lead nurturing strategy for each target group, get them to self-identify via a form or short survey or preference center. There is nothing wrong with asking questions at crucial phases in the sales cycle.
- Email templates The best lead nurturing campaigns combine both marketing messages, and emails that are triggered by sales. And this is even more true for B2B businesses. It makes your leads feel more appreciated, as they are being offered a personal approach. So enable your sales team to be “their own marketers” by providing marketing-approved email templates they can easily send to prospects. Templates for pre- and post-events and webinars are especially useful because your sales team will be able to personally invite and follow up with their contacts with very little work on their part. E.g: after an event: allows sales reps to follow up with a prospect, give them an event recap and provide them with a relevant resource (Thanks for attending our session!) You could also set up a ready-made marketing automation flow for this purpose. Sales can trigger it by adding specific leads to a new list, or by changing contact information or status.
- Invite them to an event : program, exclusive, new speaker, why you shouldn’t miss it. Starbucks: New features, can be sent to older prospects that maybe requested these kind of features. Spiceworks: lead comes to event, but they send him a recap of last year’s event to get him excited.
- Alert sales when a leads needs to be contacted By implementing marketing automation into your customer journey, you can score leads based on quality and relevance. That means leads only get to the sales team when they're qualified and ready to purchase. Being able to prioritize leads this way ensures your sales team spends time speaking with people who have already identified their problem and been educated on how you can help them solve it. This dramatically increases the likelihood that the sales person will win the prospect's business with far less time required to do so than with someone with a lower lead score.
- This is the phase of conversion to sale. It involves getting your audience to take that vital next step which turns them into paying customers, whether the payment is taken through online Ecommerce transactions, or offline channels. That means that you should have offered them enough contextual relevance to drive conversion. The big question is: as a sales person: have you made your contact ‘thirsty’ enough to be willing to make the investment, both for budget and time. This is where are great sales rep can distinguish him/herself from competitors. Of course there are some tricks to speed that process along:
- Add credibility to your copy--and enhance your visitors' trust in you. It's vital that your sales copy establishes your credibility: It's through this process that your visitors come to trust you and feel comfortable enough to buy from you. There are several ways you can do this effectively and I’ll talk about two of the quickest and easiest ones here. If you're not already using these techniques, revamp your copy and test it against what you're using now. You'll be surprised by the difference. One of the best ways to establish your credibility is to include customer testimonials in your sales letter. These should be excerpts from genuine e-mails or letters from customers expressing how your product or service helped solve the particular problem they faced. This last point is important: A customer testimonial that states how your product benefited them is much more effective than one that just says something like, "Your product is great!“ You can also enhance your credibility by adding a section to your copy that outlines your credentials, experience and any background information that makes you qualified to solve your target audience's problem. Your aim should be to effectively convince readers that you are the best person to offer them a solution to their problem. Both testimonials and convincing copy that you can use to close your prospects can be prepared by marketing.
- Instill urgency in your copy--and convince readers they need to buy now! It's very important that your sales copy instills a sense of urgency in your visitors, compelling them to buy now. The best place to do this is toward the end of your sales letter, near the call to action (when you ask for the sale). Here are a few of the most effective ways to create a sense of urgency. Try testing each one against your current copy: Offer a limited-time price discount where visitors must buy before a certain date in order to qualify for the discount. Offer additional bonuses for free if visitors buy within a certain time frame. Offer only a limited quantity of your products or services. Offer a limited quantity bonus.
- Follow-up after purchase Besides making sure you convert your prospects into paying customer, your marketing also needs to set up a scenario of transactional messages. Make sure your customer is properly informed after his purchase. Optimize order and shipping confirmation emails, and don’t forget to put a review email in place. It gives you a great opportunity to gather feedback that you can present to potential new customers (great social proof!). And it also allows you to pull back your customer to your website, where you can seduce him to make new purchases.
- Voorbeeld Recurly: ordered a subscription, gets a welcome message with information to get started Harry’s: Not just a boring transactional email. When they know your order has been delivered, they send you an email with a how-to guide to best use the products. Purina: On the website you can compose your own blend of dog or cat food. When they think your animal food is almost empty, they ask if you want to reorder a new bag.
- Besides making sure that you gather new leads and customers, you should also focus on long-term engagement with your existing customers, and developing a long-term relationship with first-time buyers to build customer loyalty as repeat purchases using communications on your site, social presence, email and direct interactions to boost customer lifetime value.
- Marketing and sales should set up a customer engagement plan for every new customer, and for every target group of existing customers. And you should do that with a combination of marketing messages like newsletters and via personal sales email just to check in with your customer. Thrilled customers are key. Engage them through social proof by asking for recommendations, try to get repeat sales or send referral campaigns. Try to improve customer satisfaction by offering the best service, and by sending surveys. We’re trying to generate happy customers in this phase, to find advocates for our brand.
- Incentivize customers to review the product they’ve bought via email or make repeat purchases Asking for reviews has two important benefits: you can collect valuable social proof and testimonials for new prospects, and you get the opportunity to lure your customer back to your website to present him with other relevant offers. Once someone has become a customer, you shouldn’t stop there. We are trying to make a customer as valuable as possible for our business, so it’s both marketing’s and sales’ responsibility to get them to make repeat purchases.
- Survey email Dollar Shave Club stands to learn a ton about their customers from this email. They’ll find out, for example, who’s really interested in their company based on who opened the email. As they gather more responses, they’ll learn more about product-market fit and get some insight on what products could be useful in the future. This data will also help them segment users into groups when it comes time to let people know about future products. If, for example, someone responds with “None of the above,” then they know not to dilute that person’s inbox with more information on the topic. Milestone email: Keep customers involved. Flexmail: you’ve sent your first campaign. Email 1 of 3, educational series. Referral email: Flexmail: We activate brand advocates for Flexmail by sending our tell a friend email now and then. Our clients can receive free credits if they can refer Flexmail to someone in their network.
- Build In A Lead Nurturing Process For Lost Leads Many marketers and sales people forget the power of continuing communication once the lead or sale falls through. If you lose a lead, the worst thing to do is to sulk and do nothing. The most proactive thing to do is to slowly rekindle their interest by placing them in a new lead nurturing cycle. For example, if someone enquires about your content marketing services, downloaded a number of guides, but still didn’t sign up when you reached out on a telephone call, you can place this customer into a nurturing cycle which educates them on the further benefits of content marketing, e.g. ways they can implement a content marketing strategy, perhaps sharing an content marketing success story, followed by an article on how to measure the effectiveness of content marketing. Similarly, for ecommerce, you might find that a customer objected to a purchase because the price was too high. You can then place this prospect into a lead nurturing cycle which targets them with special discount emails or even ads on social media which show similar products to the one they viewed. There are lots of great examples. Simply sending them a short email asking why they didn’t buy can give you valuable information as well. Maybe they didn’t have enough time to check it out, or there is an underlying question that you need to get to the bottom of. Just by reaching out in a sincere way, you could rekindle some of those lost leads.
- Feedback email to non-buyers: If you are selling a product, and one of your prospects doesn’t become a customer, always make sure you close the conversation by reaching out one last time and asking for feedback. Beegit asks you to fill out a couple of questions, Feedly pro asks you to answer just one quick question. It allows these companies to gather feedback why someone didn’t buy, and can help them to start a conversation to turn those readers into buyers after all. Maybe your contact didn’t have the time to check out your product, or has some question that you need to get to the bottom of.
- Sales enablement isn’t a task to check off your to-do list. It’s a continuous project that requires frequently communicating between the sales and marketing to see what marketing can do to better enable sales and adjusting the strategy accordingly, and for sales to give marketing valuable feedback about customer reactions, interesting content or approaches, and ideas for specific sales campaigns. Once sales and marketing define a follow-up process together, marketing automation allows you to implement it for all different segments of leads. This applies to leads that have already been worked, too, and have been put back into the lead nurturing queue. If a lead needs more nurturing, marketing automation ensures you stay on their radar, and when they make it back to the bottom of your funnel, they're even more prepared to purchase than during their first sales cycle. The power of marketing automation lies in its agility. Marketers can adjust campaigns in real time, learn from mistakes, capitalize on successes, and deliver content that helps prospects. All of these capabilities help transform a lead from a mere database entry to a prospect with very specific problems, behaviors, and interests, giving your sales team the information they need to personalize the sales process and ultimately accelerate it for more closes and more happy customers.