Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your prospects and kick up your company’s sales. Everyone is focused on social media, PPC ads, and any other method that will get sales right now. The problem is that your customers will buy when they’re ready to buy, not when you’re ready to sell. Often, there’s a time duration mismatch between when you want to sell something and when your prospects are ready to buy.
To overcome that, you have to get intimate with your prospects. You have to stay in touch without looking desperate. Guess what? Email provides that intimacy without any of the drawbacks of other advertising methods.
Sending out an email isn’t enough. You have to have a reason to contact your prospects. Think about reasons why you contact your friends and family. Don’t you often tell them about your life? Usually, there’s some kind of story going on you want to share with them. Maybe you’re forwarding funny jokes, emails that will enrich their lives, or something really helpful. Maybe you’re even helping them out of a jam.
This is what you want to weave into your emails to prospects. Tell a rich story. Tell a story about your product. Don’t mention why it’s great. Mention what problems it helps to solve. Talk about how it solved a problem you were having. Talk about the prospect’s needs. His desires. Tell him you know what he’s going through because you’ve been there. You’ve discovered what really works.
Reach out to him like you would a friend. Use autoresponders to space out your message and automate your marketing campaign. Some of the best marketers in the world do this. It works.
There certainly is an art to drafting effective emails. Most amateur marketers give away the fact that they don’t know what they’re doing by hyping up their products and services. In a normal conversation with someone you trust, you do not constantly flail your arms in the air, shout, browbeat the other person into submission with your ideas, or otherwise excite the other person for the entire duration the conversation.
Look at the tempo of your emails. Are they a never-ending string of one-liners? Are your messages overflowing with adjectives? If a rational, sane, person would run away in the other direction after reading your email, you’re taking things too far.
You definitely don’t want to bore your audience, but you don’t want it to sound “over-caffeinated” either. The tone should ebb and flow. Some parts should move more quickly than others. That’s how real conversations (and real emails) work. It’s perfectly natural – and that’s how you want to come across to your prospects: natural.
Finally, people these days have short attention spans. Keep that in mind when crafting your emails. You might only be able to hold their attention for 300-500 words. That’s OK. You can always follow up with them in a few days. Multi-part emails also give you the opportunity to structure your emails like a soap-opera. In other words, make the end of each email a cliffhanger so that they can’t wait to receive the next installment.
Author Bio
Jack Harding is a website marketing consultant with a penchant for email marketing. He loves sharing his insights through blogging. Visit Wish.co.uk to see the methods they use to reach out to their customers.