The first rule of a great full-circle marketing campaign is that you must have a lot of compelling content. However, all this content serves no purpose if you don’t also have a strategy for increasing your business’ visibility and generating leads. You must be asking yourself, what’s the most effective way to do this?…
…Effective email marketing strategies, of course! A recent ExactTarget study found the following to be true:
75% of consumers would prefer to receive permissions-based promotions through email, and 93% of online consumers have provided companies with permission to send them information through email.
I’ve categorized effective email marketing strategies into five general types of emails. When it comes to email marketing, your goal is always to develop specific campaigns around product/service areas that your business offers. The next important step is to develop segmented lists so you can separate relevant content and information for particular groups of people. Remember, effective emails should accomplish two things: 1) direct recipients to your website 2) drive them to take some type of action.
1. Educational Emails:
This is my personal favorite type of email because these are the emails that help answer a question or solve a problem for your potential customers. You are providing a service by providing information. You should send educational emails whenever you have a new, compelling piece of content or a new bit of research to promote. These type of emails can often be developed by repurposing a popular blog article or even combining a series of recent blog articles from any education-based content that would fit together into a particular campaign.
2. Informational Emails:
Informational emails are short and don’t usually ask the recipient to take alot of action. In fact, sometimes the email’s subject line alone might communicate everything that is needed. Examples of information emails are meeting reminders, webinar invites or an offer to check out a particular post on one of your social media platforms.
3. Promotional Emails:
While some people avoid this type of email, it is still very important to implement. Just make sure that you do your promoting in a professional, tactful manner. Promotional emails have a main goal of moving the recipient to take some action- usually around a new product, service, event, or special deal. As effective email marketing strategies go, these emails usually don’t have a lot of content associated with them. They focus on selling points and persuasion verbiage.
4. Newsletter Emails:
Generally, these are sent out by companies once per month and often include several pieces of content that you have already published over the course of the past month. Content for newsletters can include blog articles, videos, or many other types of pieces of content. We’ve outlined a few of these in our free e-book, A Comprehensive Guide to Internet Marketing.
5. Lead Nurturing Emails:
Every marketer knows that it can take a lot of time and effort to move a lead through your sales cycle. Lead nurturing emails are part of the cycle and a key to help you expedite the process. Once you have a workflow set up, sending out these types of emails will not take much of your time. In fact, the entire process should be automated. These should be short emails that are content rich. Their goal is to get leads to take some type of action on your website. Ask Farotech how we can help you can set up lead nurturing emails for each of your campaigns and schedule them out for an organized workflow through your sales cycle.
As mentioned above, the real key to effective email marketing strategies is know your audience. This will certainly help you determine what type of email you want to send and strategize for a better ROI. We recommend sending out permission-based emails to your recipients.
