Email marketing is about more than just promotion. It helps you nurture relationships with your clients, which is so important for business growth! Let’s break common myths about email marketing with Lyndsay and Aaron, two professionals in the field of business growth. In this episode, they share amazing insights on lead generation, segmenting your emails, and maintaining the right frequency of email campaigns, while also showing us what we should NOT do if we want to convert our email leads into profit.
Get to Know Your Email List
The first thing you should think about is your audience. Who are these people, and what do they need? Not everyone is opening their emails, especially sellers. That’s why we don’t advise you to tailor your email marketing to sellers because they most likely won’t open your emails. Note that the average open rates are around 20 – 25%, so you want those opening your emails to be engaged and converted, too.
Do you know who is opening their emails? That’s right: buyers. Basically, you should aim for your emails to reach real estate buyers looking for opportunities. When you narrow down your reach like this, you’ll increase your chance of converting email subscribers into clients. You can tailor the content to their specific needs and solve their unique frustrations.
Knowing your audience is essential to get started in generating leads. Learn their likes and interests so you can share relevant content. If your target audience isn’t interested in a particular topic (and you can check that with analytic data), then bring in different types of topics.
Leveraging Email Marketing To Nurture Your Leads
Aaron and Lyndsay are amplifying that fostering relationships will help you get email leads. To nurture your leads, it’s a good idea to segment your email list. This means you want to create a different type of content for specific audiences. Don’t put your entire subscriber list in one big pot. Segment them so that you can speak their language. In the real estate industry, you should have a different email marketing strategy for each group: buyers, tenants, team members, etc. All these people have different motivations, so if you segment them, you can interest them more easily.
You can also segment people based on their demographics. Target marketing can be so powerful. Alter your email campaigns to answer people’s specific needs, and they’ll respond more often. Your message also needs to be personalized. Email marketing software can help you with this by providing you with the data necessary to create unique messages for your email subscribers.
To nurture your relationships with your subscribers, you also need to show empathy. Try to understand their problems and struggles so you can offer the best solution (which ultimately involves your services). Each email subject line and its first paragraphs are especially important for this. If your email title shows people that you care, they’re more likely to open your emails.
Diversify Your Email Content
As Aaron and Lyndsay said, email campaigns are more than just promotions. Of course, you should send emails with offers, but you also need to send emails with different topics, as well as ones to increase engagement. You want to get people on your website’s landing page or lead them to check out your blog content, too.
Topical email marketing serves to inform your clients on various topics, establish yourself as an authority, and overall position yourself in the eyes of your clients. You don’t need a strong call-to-action in these. It’s better to use a transitional call-to-action and encourage people to get your ebook, sign up for a webinar, etc.
On the other hand, emails with offers should invite people to make a purchase. They should spark a sense of urgency (only X time left, only Y spots left, etc.) to encourage subscribers who are already leaning toward making a purchase to do it.
Use engagement emails to start conversations with your subscribers. If people reply back and offer feedback, you can create your future email campaigns better. You want to serve and help people, not just sell. To help them, you should know what they want. Social media networks are one way to find out, and emails are another.
How Can You Get More Email Addresses?
Email marketing can’t be that effective if your email list is small. A good lead generation strategy will help you get more subscribers. Fortunately, there are lots of easy ways you can collect email addresses for your email marketing campaigns. Start with:
- Nurturing existing relationships
- Making interesting lead magnets
- Optimizing your website and landing page
- Increasing your activity on social media, maybe running a contest or a giveaway
- Tailoring your digital marketing to a specific audience
- Using a few creative paid ads
- Writing a guest post that can lead people to your content
- Making videos or podcasts
- Including a brief call-to-action in your (and your team’s) email signatures
- Adding a call-to-action after people purchase your product
These are the best practices for getting people on your email list so you can work on improving your email marketing efforts, too. Once you get new leads, make sure to have a clear email campaign in mind. When you’re sending an email newsletter, promotional emails, and other content, you want to keep those new leads interested, not lose them. That’s why email marketing is a constant effort to get new subscribers with a lead magnet or a clever post, then nurture those leads with quality email content. This creates a cycle of lead generation and constant contact with your clients to ensure major business growth over time.
How Many Emails Should You Send?
This is the question that’s troubling many business owners. The answer is quite simple, actually. It depends on the situation, the analytic data, the relationship you have with your subscribers, etc. For example, too many promotional emails can make you seem pushy, so you should combine them with topical emails. On the contrary, too few emails will make you forgotten. That’s why you need to find the perfect amount of emails that suits your particular audience.
Some people send an email once a day, some even twice a day, and others are happier with three times a week. Whatever you decide, make sure to check the analytics to see what approach works the best. If people are unsubscribing, you might want to tone it down. And if people are opening more emails and engaging, you’re on the right track. Once you decide on frequency, make sure you’re consistent with it.
Be Authentic
You should be the most interesting thing in a person’s inbox. Authenticity can help you stand out. From your subject lines to your lead magnet and overall content, try to add a personal touch, a part of your personality. It’s not enough just to get people’s email addresses and form an email list. You have to engage them with regular and authentic content, too.
The best way to keep your emails interesting is to position yourself as the receiver. Put yourself in your subscribers’ shoes. What would you like to get in your inbox? What subject lines would you click on, and which emails would you delete without opening? Answering these questions will immensely improve your email marketing campaign.
What Should You NOT Do?
If you want to improve your email marketing and use it for more lead generation, there are some things you should definitely avoid doing.
- Don’t buy subscribers. Sure, it’s harder to gradually construct your email marketing campaign, but it’s much more rewarding than having a low-quality list with people that aren’t even interested in working with you.
- Don’t come across as a spammer. Nobody likes having a full inbox with uninteresting content. It’s better to send a few really good emails than a ton of weak ones. Trust us: Emails with unappealing subject lines end up in the trash bin.
- Don’t forget to check the data to see the response to your emails and newsletters. If your target market isn’t engaging with you, change your strategy. You need to deliver relevant content, and checking analytics is a great way to see if your content resonated with subscribers.
- Don’t use the same email template for every email. Remember what’s said on segmenting your list; this applies to each particular email. You want to create unique emails or series of emails that resonate with your subscribers, so make sure you (or your writers) use the latest marketing tools and change email templates often.
Final Thoughts
This is just advice on email marketing to get you started. Collecting email addresses and writing every email with care is just the beginning. To grow your email list and get more out of your email marketing efforts, you need to invest a bit more time and resources.
Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone! Smooth Sailing Business Growth is the agency that can help you scale up your email marketing game! Together, we’ll build your email list and increase your conversion rate. Just schedule a free consultation with us so we can start talking about growing your business.
