In the last decade, the marketing environment has shifted considerably. What used to be done over the phone or in person is now primarily done online. Clients who previously found your business through referrals are increasingly looking for creative solutions on the internet.
Email is your hidden weapon in today’s evolving marketing scene. A well-thought-out email marketing strategy may assist you in capturing, qualifying, and closing leads at a large scale. Email marketing isn’t just crucial, it’s required for an agency to succeed in 2018 and beyond.
In this comprehensive tutorial, I’ll show you how to develop an effective email marketing plan for your business. I’ll teach you how to get email addresses and how to qualify leads. I’ll also cover how to maximize the effect of your email marketing by optimizing and scaling it.
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Why Email Marketing?
These sources, while effective, are neither scalable nor predictable. You can get ten referrals one month and none the next. Unpredictability is not conducive to the growth of a firm.
Another issue with traditional marketing is that it is intrusive and impersonal.
Traditional push marketing seems intrusive at a time when clients are increasingly taking charge of the buyer’s journey (57 percent of the buyer’s journey is completed before they ever speak with sales). Your customers want to absorb your marketing messages on their own time, not on yours.
A normal sales process for an agency is likewise extensive and centered on customer education. Traditional marketing falls short of this goal, leaving your sales team to handle the hard lifting of customer education.
Last but not least, traditional marketing is difficult to measure. It’s difficult to estimate the return on investment of a trade show booth or word of mouth.
Email marketing is a solution to all of these issues.
A well-thought-out email marketing funnel may help you generate leads in a consistent and scalable manner. To produce quality leads, all you have to do now is bring targeted visitors to the funnel.
What’s more, our email marketing funnel is non-intrusive. Clients have the option of reading (or ignoring) your communications at their leisure. You may also heavily tailor each email to boost conversion rates (and keep clients happy).
Email marketing is content-driven as well. That is, it is intended to assist clients rather than simply sell to them. Traditional marketing, which is centered on sales and interruptive, is diametrically opposed to this.
The Email Marketing Funnel for Agencies
If you’re going to utilize email to attract new clients, you need to go beyond it as a lead source. You must see it as a whole system for capturing, qualifying, and nurturing leads.
A marketing funnel is divided into three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. These stages correspond to the three stages of the buyer’s journey in terms of content consumption.
This funnel begins with prospects learning about your company or their personal requirements in the Awareness stage. A prospect becomes a lead and enters the funnel once they provide their contact information (typically in return for some content).
As the lead moves down the funnel, it has a better understanding of your company (and vice-versa). The major purpose of the Consideration stage is to collect additional data. This is done by delivering the lead personalized content offerings in exchange for further information.
You may score, qualify, and segment leads using this information. A lead can be pushed to sales if they consume a lot of Decision-stage information (refer to the buyer’s journey here). This Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a Conversion from a marketing standpoint.
If the data indicates that the lead isn’t yet sales-ready or hasn’t expressed a clear interest in your services, it can be moved to a nurturing funnel.
I’ll go through the two most critical aspects of email marketing in the following section: collecting emails and qualifying leads.
Capturing Emails
Every email marketing campaign begins with one thing: email addresses.
As a result, the initial step of the marketing funnel, dubbed “lead generation” or “awareness,” focuses only on email capture.
Of course, persuading untargeted traffic to give up their email addresses is never simple. You also don’t want just any emails; you want emails from people who make decisions in the markets you serve.
So, how do you get the correct leads and persuade them to reveal their email addresses?
I’ll provide some responses below.
Create a Highly Targeted Content Offer
The basis of email marketing is a basic dialogue. Your target market provides you with their email addresses. In exchange, you provide them with content, such as the lead magnet.
It will be simpler to persuade your audience to give up their email addresses if your material is more focused.
To make such personalized offers, you must first figure out what your target audience is interested in. What are the issues and worries that it has? What type of media does it prefer to consume? On the internet, where does this audience congregate?
There are various approaches to obtaining focused content ideas, as I’ll show you below.
Borrow Content Offer Ideas From Your Competitors
A powerful email marketing plan from a rival might be a blessing in disguise. You may make more attractive offerings by using concepts tried and proven by your rivals rather than learning about the audience from new.
Looking for any lead magnets made by your major rivals is an excellent place to start. Because most lead magnets are PDFs, use the following query to locate them:
Dig through the competitor’s resource archives to locate all of their material provides for additional in-depth study.
Make a spreadsheet now. Add the title of each lead magnet you locate to one column. Takedown the name of the rival, the sort of lead magnet (how-to, whitepaper, workbook, content upgrade, etc. ), the emphasis area, and the level of difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced).
Your aim is to uncover similar patterns in the lead magnets of your competition. Is there anything that comes up repeatedly among competitors? Is there a successful rival who is producing a significant number of lead magnets on a specific sophisticated topic? What are the main issues that these lead magnets are attempting to address?
Answering these questions can assist you in coming up with content and offer ideas of your own.
If your rivals are producing a lot of social media-focused material, for example, it’s likely that your target audience is interested in this subject.
This is a little-known yet effective method for coming up with intriguing lead magnet concepts.
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Use Client Surveys and Sales Data
Your sales personnel, more than anybody else, would have a thorough understanding of your target market’s worries, questions, and interests. Their suggestions can be a great way to come up with ideas for content offers.
You might also conduct a survey of your website visitors to learn about their issues. Create on-site surveys using platforms like Qualaroo and Typeform to question users about their content preferences, pain spots, and difficulties.
Your existing client base is another source of content ideas. Interview your clients to learn about the problems they were having when they first came to you. From the first contact to the last sale, map out their whole client journey. What were the origins of their issues? Did this change as the customer’s trip progress?
When brainstorming content ideas, use this information to augment your rival research.
