29 Mar Building relationships through email sequences
While other elements such as your landing page bring in new prospects, it’s your email sequence where the relationship between your brand and your customer really begins.
If your prospects have trusted you with their email address, which is not a decision that today’s savvy audience takes lightly, you must ensure you provide value for them from the start. People want to feel like you understand their pain points, see where they may be struggling, and are passionate about creating a solution that uniquely helps them.
Whatever your product or service, this next stage of your prospect’s buying journey begins with raising awareness of your offerings, building interest, helping them decide if they need or want what you’re selling, to finally taking action and making a sale.
Reaching the ultimate goal of the sales journey – making a purchase – requires a relationship built on trust, and this relationship begins with your email sequence.
Here are five tips for creating an email sequence that builds that relationship.
1. Have a clear aim.
This may seem obvious, but you need to know the focused goal of your emails before you start to write them. Unfortunately, it is easy to neglect this focus when constructing pithy subject lines or perfecting your brand voice, and audiences will lose interest if your purpose is vague or focused on you and your business.
You need to understand the ‘what’ to make your copy convert. What are you motivating your readers to do? What is the desired next step you want them to take? Whatever the action, make sure your copy – right from the subject line – guides them in that direction.
2. Know your audience.
Email sequences will differ according to your audience and their stage in your sales funnel. Whether the function of your sequence is to welcome, launch or re-engage, you need to consider your audience in depth.
You need to find out the pain points and particular challenges they experience within their role. This understanding will encourage engagement from your audience as they recognise your efforts to create a solution to their unique problems.
This will build a positive brand association that allows your audience to feel confident to engage further with your offerings.
3. Humanise your copy.
You want your audience to feel at home with your brand and recognise its value. Keeping copy simple, conversational, and jargon-free will make it feel like the communication comes from a human being, not an automated system.
Ensure you have good personalisation, so they feel valued as individuals with unique needs, further strengthening their trust in your brand. An immediate turn off is when you see an email that starts with Hi [Firstname]!
4. Include a clear call to action.
If your copy is doing its job, then your audience should see the value in your offerings and have enough trust in your brand to feel compelled to take the next step.
Your call-to-action (CTA) needs to be front and centre, easy to spot, and easy to use. Leave no room for confusion about where your prospect should click next and use active language to lead the reader to the next step.
Finally, a compelling CTA creates a sense of urgency, emphasising the value of acting and the consequences of not.
5. Listen and learn.
Access and act upon all your available data, such as open and click-through rates. Build on what works and what doesn’t to improve your lead scoring.
Be willing to find out why some prospects have unsubscribed. Take it as a challenge to re-engage inactive subscribers and customers who haven’t opened your emails in a while and spend time learning what type of content they’d like to receive.
Create effective tests to understand what’s working and pinpoint the methods and messages that could use improvement. This will help you scale your efforts and increase success over time.
Whatever your product or service, Incognate’s Reach model can help you to build your brand and demand to win more customers through an effective, data-driven marketing strategy that supports your business growth.
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