Email marketing as part of an inbound strategy (3 of 3)

E-mail marketing

Of all the marketing strategies presented in our series of articles, e-mail marketing is undoubtedly the tactic with the greatest potential for revenue and growth. E-mail marketing is the process of sending messages to people who have given you their e-mail address to entice them to return to your site. Once you have the information in hand, you can engage and motivate them to become paying customers. To do this, however, you'll need to think about a strategy for contacting them.

For example, let's say you're a B2B company selling 3D printers to small and medium-sized businesses. You have a wide choice of reliable and useful equipment, but it's a little more expensive than that of your competitors. Through your research, you've determined that your sales cycle is 3 months.

In this case, your best marketing strategy is to encourage visitors to your site to sign up for emails from you so they can learn more about your products and services. Once they've signed up, you'll add these new addresses to an email marketing campaign and send them occasional messages to bring them back to your site.

Follow the prospect every step of the way

That said, email marketing goes further than simply telling someone to "buy now". Instead, you could send a helpful guide that explains how your material helps businesses. The next message could feature customer testimonials or reviews about your products. You could even create an e-mail that shows a side-by-side comparison of your products.

Finally, you could send an e-mail to your customers encouraging them to contact you if they have any questions. After three months, you could finally send them a message encouraging them to buy.

Email marketing is a powerful tool when you have prospects moving through the sales funnel, especially for B2B companies. What's more, it's a great way for B2C companies to encourage repeat purchases. Since the buying process takes some time, you want to do everything you can to make sure potential customers remember you without being annoying or spamming their e-mail address.

E-mail marketing is incredibly effective. The proof is that companies that use it generate twice as many leads. That said, if you automate your e-mail marketing, your customer conversion rate could increase by as much as 53%!

Offer value through free content

One way to generate enormous value for your customers is to make free content available to them. In addition to creating lasting relationships with them, this will help build trust with your brand. Once again, the key is to show your customers that you're there to help them. This will set you apart from those who simply want to sell to them at any price.

Inbound marketing through free content is different from blogging. Content needs to be more in-depth, each focusing on a specific aspect of your industry. They are usually downloadable, rather than only available online.

E-books, white papers and checklists

An e-book is an excellent starting point for this type of inbound marketing. The general process is to identify a problem. It can also be a recurring question or issue within your industry. The next step is to address it ina comprehensive eBook. For example, an employee engagement software company might very well release an e-book titled "The Perfect Guide to Keeping Your Employees Engaged at Work."

That said, you don't need to go the e-book route if it doesn't apply to your reality. A dental practice, for example, might instead decide to compile an informative checklist oftooth-brushingbest practices, or a reference sheet explaining which types of food are particularly bad for teeth.

One of the greatest advantages of content such as e-books, PDF checklists and reference sheets is that, after the initial effort required to create them, they will continue to provide value and serve your customers without you having to do anything.

A win-win situation

Free content is great because it responds directly to requests for information. To return to our previous example, if a web surfer searches for "how to mobilize and engage employees", you'll know at least two things. A) they're looking for a solution to a problem you can solve. B) that they're not quite ready to buy your software yet, and probably don't even know it exists.

By offering this person "The perfect guide to keeping your employees engaged at ", they'll find a number of possible solutions to their problem, and keep your company's name in mind at the same time. So, when the time comes to buy, you'll have every chance of being considered, especially if you apply the nurturing steps discussed earlier. In other words, you have nothing to lose by implementing a free content strategy combined with nurturing emails as part of an email marketing strategy. On the contrary, once the initial time investment has been made, you'll have everything to gain!

Need help with your inbound marketing? Don't know where to start? There's no need to struggle to create aninbound marketing program. If you need advice or support from a digital marketing company, contact us today. We'll be happy to help.

To read the first two articles in this series, click here:
Leveraging your blog to generate leads
Generating leads using social media

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