Sales funnels are a basic digital marketing setup every business needs to generate leads, and then convert those leads into sales.
If you don’t follow what really works and do things that you absolutely need to, then thinking of sales funnels is like thinking about having a dessert when you can barely get to have dinner.
Most businesses barely get to eat.
Funnels or no funnels, it’s really up to you (and we don’t see why you wouldn’t?) But if it ever came down to it, there are absolute basics that you must be doing with your email marketing:
Don’t forget to send emails
You wouldn’t believe it if we told you, but most businesses are too busy with everything else except “keeping in touch” with their subscribers.
Noah Kagan of AppSumo believes that most businesses barely send any emails, let alone making email marketing work for a positive ROI. Most businesses don’t even do email marketing. Among those that try to grow a list, there’s no communication with subscribers beyond the welcome message or a string of email autoresponders that’ll end abruptly leaving subscribers high and dry.
The absolute minimum you could do with your list of email subscribers (forget selling for now) is to keep them nurtured. Have your subscribers engage with you.
Determine a email sending frequency that works for your business and keep the engine on.
Talking about email sending frequency…
The “Write to a Friend” Strategy
It’s incredibly easy to write emails that just work if you were to stop thinking that you were writing to your email subscribers and think of it as a single email you are writing to a friend. How do you write to friends normally?
There’s personalization, there’s that addressing by first name, and then there’s that easy flowing language that doesn’t sound too corporate like, and you normally keep it short and sweet.
Plus, there’s that tone of “I mean well for you” thing embedded in the email.
What happens if you write emails to your subscribers that way? Think about it
Find Email Sending Frequency, Then Draw a Balance
Marketingsherpa conducted a survey asking email subscribers (industry wide) on how frequently they’d like to hear from brands and businesses they subscribe to.
Take a look at the results below:
Wondering about the 10% of subscribers who don’t want to receive any emails whatsoever, they are called “unsubscribers” and they’ll unsubscribe anyway.
Most subscribers expect businesses to send emails. It’s like, they are waiting to hear from you. Meanwhile, most businesses go incommunicado.
Choose an email frequency, and then get into the habit of communicating regularly. It does wonders for your business (not to mention the high engagement levels that come as a result of frequent communication).
Make it a Habit to Provide Value
You don’t have to do copywriting 101 or a course of consumer behavior. You don’t need high levels of expertise to actually do email marketing that just works. All you have to do is to give more than you ask for.
Strive to provide value within your emails.
While the value you provide in the form of content will be in small portions, and you could “drip” it all the way with well-designed and strategic email campaigns, asking for the big sale without giving anything away first is just not how the modern-day, Instagram-busy customer is conditioned for.
Find Automated (and Smart) Ways to Keep in Touch
With the level of automation that’s available with email marketing today, you don’t have to put in much effort to “keep in touch” with your subscribers.
RSS-to-email campaigns — emails that go out as digests of your previously published blog posts — are the simplest way to set up a “just read this, you can thank me later, and you don’t have to buy a thing” kind of an evergreen campaign for your business. Almost all email service providers you might be using have this feature enabled.
If you have an ecommerce store, then you could set up abandoned cart email campaigns to reach out to everyone who leaves items in their cart.
Feeling adventurous? Create loyalty campaigns and retargeting email campaigns using Adroll to send emails to visitors of a particular page or those who take some sort of action on your website.
What are you going to do with your email marketing? What issues do you normally face when it comes to being in touch with your customers? Tell us about it.
Want to get on a scheduled call to discuss funnels or digital marketing strategy?