In the current digital age, speed of action is everything. So, it will come as no surprise that when someone ‘pays’ by leaving their data they expect instant access or an instant response.
Obviously, having an employee sitting and waiting for an offer or a landing page data capture form to be filled in so that they can respond instantly would be a waste of money and resources. That’s where technology and automation come in, especially in the form of automated emails.
Automated email responders act like a member of staff that never sleeps, never has a day off, never asks for a pay rise and deploys all of their work unmanaged.
You may be thinking, emails – really? They’re a thing of the past aren’t they? Aren’t people sick of getting spammed? Well, we can reassure you; not in this context. If your offer is good enough for visitors to leave their data, they will be eager to receive an automated response.
As various technologies rise to prominence and then fall from grace, the dominance of email remains unflinching. Not only do 72% of professionals prefer this means of communication today, but it also tops the list of best-converting marketing channels.
With automated emails, you’re able to build lasting, personalised relationships with your customers, convert leads into customers, enjoy a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and grow your business.
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Automated emails can turn out to be the ace up your sleeve with the correct strategy and practices. So in this blogpost we're diving deep into automated email success, with 11 top tips that will help you to create emails that generate leads.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
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Know your customers
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Determine your goal
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Write great subject lines
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Personalise your emails
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Humanise your message
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Keep it simple
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Make clear and compelling CTAs
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Send valuable content
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Align emails with landing pages
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Track your results
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CMS Hub
It's critical to understand the sales process from your customers' point of view, so we'll start here…
1. Know your customers
Segmenting subscribers into different groups depending upon the customer journey will give you a good idea of who your customers are and highlights the email content that will be valuable to them.
By sending the right messages to the right people, you can achieve 50% more click-through rates, and can help leads fly through the sales cycle.
2. Determine your goal
Your email marketing success relies on your strategy, so make sure you know the reason behind contacting each individual. Do you want them to purchase something? Learn something? Or do something?
Once you’ve thought about this, you can work out what's working to take them from where they’re at to where you need them to go.
When using HubSpot software you can unenroll any contacts who meet the goal defined. If your software doesn’t have sufficient features like this, you may need to consider this as you build your workflow’s logic.
3. Write great subject lines
To get your subscribers to open and read your email, the subject line must grab their attention. It only takes subscribers a few seconds to decide if your email is worth reading, so you must keep your subject line simple, sweet, and convincing.
Adding a sense of urgency can persuade subscribers to take advantage of your offers. Likewise, personalising the subject line also positively boosts open rates and engagements.
Click here to discover our beginners guide to lead generation
4. Personalise your emails
Personalising emails can positively impact email open rate and click-through rates. For example, emails with personalised subject lines have a 26% higher open rate than those without.
Luckily, automation makes it very easy to personalise emails, as you don’t have to address every single person that the email is sent to. With a CRM like HubSpot, you’ll be able to send automated emails to targeted segments of your database.
5. Humanise your message
Nobody wants to read an email that sounds like it’s been written by a robot. Throughout your email body, you should stick with a personal and conversational tone. Using conversational language and thinking about the customer as you write emails helps to create content that feels natural.
6. Keep it simple
The average time people allocate to an email after opening is just over 50 seconds, so it's critical to capture your audience’s attention in this short amount of time. To do this you must find the correct balance between written and visual content.
Very few people read every word on an email, incorporating the use of heading tags, bold words, lists and call-to-action (CTA) buttons can help to make it simple, scannable, and visually pleasing.
7. Make clear and compelling CTAs
When creating emails, you should include CTA buttons to increase the chances of people clicking through and taking your desired conversion action.
Creating CTAs that stand out, contrast with the colour theme of the email, and show above-the-fold in your email content, help to encourage the reader to make the action.
User experience is key to your digital growth.
Find out how to use buyer personas to supercharge your UX.
8. Send valuable content
Email marketing isn’t just about firing every email address a random email, in the hope that someone will click a link and purchase your product or service immediately. It’s about delivering value and helping people.
Emails sent should bring value to your audience's lives and focus on their needs and challenges. Whether this takes the form of a new blog post that addresses a common customer question or a story about someone using your product or service, this is the kind of valuable content that will make subscribers open your emails, click links and become loyal customers.
9. Align emails with landing page content
Strategically aligning your email content with content on your targeted landing page can increase sales conversions. Keeping a coherent look and feel in both your initial email and website landing page can nurture trust in your consumers. More consumer trust results in increased sales conversions.
Creating consistent content reassures the consumer as they’ll know right away that they’ve clicked on the right link and have arrived on the correct page. Any chance to make your sales funnel easier for prospects – take it.
10. Track your results
Your marketing is only as good as your data. Email analytics can highlight subscriber engagement and the kind of content they like the most. This can help you understand where you need to improve, deliver more value and increase the success of your emails.
You should check open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribes and any other key metrics that are relevant to your strategy.
11. CMS Hub
Instead of automating emails, you could respond manually but, take it from us, when the volume starts to increase, you’ll need all the automated tools set up and ready to react.
We use HubSpot’s CMS Hub, as we let the software do the heavy lifting so we can focus on dealing directly with the warm and hot leads rather than wasting time on writing and sending emails.
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