Email Marketing Powers Your Inbound Strategy (Part 7)

This is the seventh blog in a series of articles highlighting inbound marketing and its advantages.

Catch the series here:

Inbound Marketing Strategies Score Outrageous Success (Part 1)

Inbound Marketing Services That Drive Revenue (Part 2)

Inbound Marketing Strategies: The Buyer Persona (Part 3)

How To Start A Blog: Amplify Your Inbound Marketing (Part 4)

SEO Marketing: A Crucial Component Of Your Inbound Strategy (Part 5)

How Social Media Marketing And Inbound Go Hand-In-Hand (Part 6)

Email Marketing Powers Your Inbound Strategy (Part 7)

How to Solve Your Biggest Sales Problems and Revenue Shortages (Finale)

Email marketing fits perfectly within your inbound marketing strategy.

While blogs, social media and your website attract people to your brand, without emails, you won’t have a way to speak to each buyer personally.

You can build your email list with these tools, but once you get their attention  –  eyeballs on your email messages  –  you need to use a targeted message that’s unique to each potential customer.

And you can’t do that with blogs, social media posts or your website.

Benefits Of Email Marketing

With emails, you will be able to dissect your contact list into segments, and then talk to them at the right moment in time. For example:

• For contacts who are just learning about your brand, you’ll want to build trust and authority with emails.
• For contacts who are further down your pipeline, you can talk about specific products or services and highlight how they solve buyer problems.

Targeted Messaging

The unique ability email marketing provides to talk to prospects at the right time with the right message is unparalleled.

Without this tool in your marketing arsenal, your inbound marketing efforts will fall flat  –  I can guarantee it!

With the right software (i.e., Hubspot or Infusionsoft), you can segment your email workflows to different categories within your email list, creating targeted messages for:

• Subscribers (send them a welcome email).
• Customers (people who’ve already purchased from you).
• Hot marketing leads (offer a discount for purchasing).
• People who’ve dropped off at the time of purchase, but are ready to buy now.
• New customers (offer them a coupon for making a purchase in the next 24 hours).
• Location (for businesses that are geographically based).
• Prospects who filled the shopping cart, but didn’t buy (send them a message saying their product is “waiting” in their shopping cart  –  just like Amazon does if you don't checkout within 6 minutes).

The options for sending personalized messages are endless – and will help you boost your ROI from inbound marketing.

Start With Your List

To begin, you’ll need to take your email list and segment it. (For a list of ways to build your email list, click here for an excellent read by Social Triggers List Building 101)

Consider the best categories for breaking down the list.

At Flight Media, we segment into four  categories:

1. Subscribers (only want content)
2. Marketing Qualified Leads (want free consultation)
3. Opportunities (are in the pipeline with one of our sales people)
4. Customers (completed the pipeline and are working with us)

That's what works for us, but yours might look a bit different.

For example, if you are an ecommerce-based business and don't have a sales team, then you probably wouldn't need “Marketing Qualified Leads” or “Opportunities.”

Emails You Should Send

It's absolutely vital that every marketing email you send is customized for each of your selected segments.

Here are some types of content you can customize:

• Educational emails. Send a short email that briefly talks about a topic that educates prospects and then directs them to get more information from a blog or your website.
• Newsletters. Compile several blogs together in an email to highlight popular topics, showcase solutions to problems, or to encourage people to subscribe to your blog.
• Lead-nurturing emails. These emails should be triggered by actions. For example, if a prospect downloads your ebook, you can send them a thank you message, followed up by several educational emails that introduce readers to educational content and possibly try to get a free consultation scheduled or low-end product sold.
• Customer-nurturing emails. Send surveys to better understand your customers or even try to get referrals.

Email Marketing Examples

Want to see a few email examples in action?

Here are a few emails we’ve sent to our list.

We ensure that each email is hyperlinked to additional content, personalized, focused on one message or action, and oriented to solve a problem.

Email 1

https://app.hubspot.com/email/1428728/details/4232293802/performance

Why It's Good:

• It tells a story.
• It's personalized.
• It's funny and timely (at that time this joke was HUGE).

Email 2

https://app.hubspot.com/email/1428728/details/4413495585/performance

Why It's Good:

• It speaks directly to our buyer persona.
• It solves their problems.
• It’s short, focused, and easy to understand.

Email 3

https://app.hubspot.com/email/1428728/details/3824140456/performance

Why It's Good:

• It uses a great email banner to tell readers what it's all about.
• It has an edgy approach, which got tons of responses.
• It solves a problem for the reader.
• It offers help and a solution.

Final Thoughts

One of the primary benefits of using email messaging is that you can quantify results.

You know who is opening emails, clicking through to your website and opting out of messages.

With this information, you can tweak messages to get even better results. And that's not all. It gives you the ability to segment even further  –  into people who clicked on the link, people who opened email, people who didn't open any email in last month, and so on.

With every email sent, you learn more about your prospects and are able to be even more specific and targeted the next time you decide to hit send button.

Are you struggling with how to fit email marketing into your inbound strategy?

Creating segmented lists and targeted emails will turn traffic into a rapt audience, eager to hear what you have to say and then buy.

Are you currently using email marketing as part of your inbound campaigns? How do you effectively target messages?