Email as a tool for acquisition

There seems to be a common perception that email marketing is generally just used for communicating with your current customers. For some reason, it’s not often seen as a method for acquiring customers as well.

The rise of marketing automation has meant that email can be used as an effective tool for lead generation (and maintenance). By segmenting your data into hot, cold, engaged etc. leads, you should have no problem using your email marketing to bring new customers to you as well as to keep current customers coming back for more.

Email marketing for Lead Generation

Utilise your website’s form fills to get prospects’ email addresses in exchange for content such as whitepapers, guides or maybe even videos. Once your contact has signed up, you should send over an automated welcome email – a thank you message possibly with other suggested content is a good way to go.

This message can be automated with marketing automation software, so that you don’t need to worry about timing or forgetting to sort it out. Something important to remember is that all your data cannot be treated the same way, which is why segmenting is such a big deal. If you’ve bought data, for example, a welcome email from a website your contact has never heard of will most likely result in an instant unsubscribe.

Tailor your approach with dynamic content and strategies based around lead scores, where leads have come from, and any other data you’ve got, to make each buyer journey a separate, individualised experience.

Email marketing for Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of maintaining a customer to company relationship, as well as the communication between the two, via a gentle form of marketing. Oftentimes, this is used with cold leads to help warm them up to a sales-ready position, but it can also be used to re-engage your current contacts.

Whichever you’re nurturing, it’s all about keeping your company’s name in the forefront of leads’ minds whilst also finding any information that can help you personalise their experience. With pre-existing customers, it might be a good idea to ask for any changes in content or email preference, as this might have changed since they first signed up.

With newer leads, however, you can either continue to email content relevant to interests they’ve shown, or you can send a mini feedback form to try and collect more reliable, direct information.

What can I do will the data I’ve collected?

As we’ve said already, your data is useful for personalising your email campaigns and therefore raising engagement. But you can also use this data to improve your conversion rates.

By addressing the pain points that your prospects are facing – sending these emails at the right time, with the right content included – you’ll be showing your customer that you have the right knowledge to help them overcome any problems they are facing. Once you show them that you actually have a solution to these problems right there on your website, all at a value-for-money price, they will then be more likely to want to use your product over someone else’s.

With this kind of strategy, you can also upsell your products to existing customers, for example pointing out that if they buy a different tier of your product or even an additional product itself, you can help to improve their business’ income. You could even, if you wanted to, offer a discount for existing customers, which may help sweeten the deal.