Inbound marketing is a novel strategy to draw people’s interest, in recent years. It is closely linked to content marketing, crafting unique and targeted content to attract an audience by the quality and applicability of the material, and encourages engagement with your brand. To retain a particular lead with inbound marketing, you will have to increase its life time value (LTV), i.e., the time period in which it relates and does business with your company.
As inbound marketing intends to attract audiences with appropriate content, it’s best to form a reciprocity between inbound marketing and email marketing, so that together they can keep your prospects well-informed and in close contact with your brand.
Alignment of Strategies is the Key to Success
The basic rule of how to use e-mail marketing to lead nutrition is the e-mail focused on lead conversion, based on your conversations. Developing appropriate personas, increasing visits, content planning, , and generating leads are the first few steps in the inbound marketing strategy. It’s most advanced stages are targeting nutrition through email marketing and aligning both commercial marketing teams.
Actual results, with excellent opportunities for the sales team and new inbound customers, will start appearing when all these strategies are properly aligned and well-functioning. This is the primary step, but many brands and educational institutions fail to get great results by expecting instant results and give up on the strategy.
Fundamental Aspects of an Inbound Email Marketing Campaign
- Having a well-defined email sending frequency and strategy with primary as well as secondary objectives;
- Using a credible email-sending platform with high deliverability rate;
- The HTML must be in balance with the images, text and codes;
- The opt-out option on all your campaigns must always be available;
- Periodically update your contacts list, leaving it increasingly organic;
- In the “Subject” field, choose the terms carefully to avoid your e-mail being termed as a spam, and ensure that the message is very concise and objective;
- If possible, fill the the”Subject” field with some benefit shown to whoever opens it.
The Highlights of Lead Nurturing
Being a very powerful lead nutrition tool, a communication vehicle that keeps your leads informed about your brand, when e-mail marketing ally itself to the Inbound marketing strategy, it takes more and more relevant content to your prospects, evoking their curiosity on how to solve a common problem.
In order to understand more about the problem and the solution, the lead concludes: they should solve it themself or look for someone for help. And in this scenario, no one’s better informed than you to do this! Your company has demonstrated, time and again, that is an expert on this subject: choosing your business will be therefore something natural and obvious enough for the prospect.
For being extremely flexible, e-mail marketing is used to send various types of content:
- promotions, newsletters, and discount coupons;
- Blog content from your company’s website;
- links to other related platforms on the Internet;
- messages for various commemorative dates;
- Birthday messages, to show that your brand is attentive to the clients.
Nurturing and Segmentation – the ideal combination!
Remember that every nurturing action begins with getting key-information from your base of leads. You must get this information when the visitor converts into a prospect, by using specific fields on sign up forms to segment and qualify your base. These fields must take into consideration what are the necessary information you need to qualify, customize, and target your subscribers with nutrition actions through e-mail marketing.
Inbound Marketing Techniques for Different types of Email Marketing
Leads nurturing e-mails – These are personal emails that come from your company representative and look more like personal emails than the pre-designed template emails. They are set up in advance to go out at regular intervals and are triggered by key events. For instance, to download rich content like an ebook or an infographic.
In order to achieve success with lead nurturing, emails must be strategically thought to conduct the prospect through all the buyer’s journey. These emails cannot be very long and must be relevant to the reader’s interest. One hot tip to check if the email’s size is fine is to calculate the read time, which must not be longer than 30 seconds. Any content longer than that runs the risk of being ignored. Another crucial point to achieve greater success with lead nurturing is to keep the messages consistant – they must tell a proper story with a beginning, middle, and end.
Newsletters – are short snippets of information, with three or four items, typically derived from a company website’s blog. You can also publish rich content such as infographics, ebooks, and webinars. The main objective is to generate traffic to your blog and, educate your audience about themes relating your products to re-heat your contact base.
It is vital to remember that at the end of the journey of the nurturing flows and on the reheating of your contact base, the lead has to identify that your company can help him to solve a problem and supply his needs. In other words, the final objective is to convert him into a customer!