Email Prospecting For Leads & Ecommerce Marketing Gold
Written by Rob Lane.
1. Overivew
Email is once again a leading digital marketing channel not only for reducing customer churn, but also for allowing your brand to gain the attention of new prospects. For this to happen, the front end of the digital sales funnel must be fed with a constant crop of new email subscribers, who are at least somewhat qualified to be prospective leads. This list must then be tended, as a marketing channel, to entice prospects to become highly qualified leads or customers… it is a pretty good list to make use of.
2. Grow Your Email Subscriber List
There are many ways to grow your email subscriber list; it’s a bit like the process of mining for gold with nuggets, or dust, or veins of the precious metal revealed throughout excavation process. There are also many opportunities along the online engagement process to ad subscribers to your email list. The most clear cut is a sale, and this list is quite valuable for your future marketing and customer relationships; however, non-sales email addresses can be quite valuable as well, for example abandoned sales cart email addresses have high conversion rates.
Many consumers vet their online purchase choices by reviewing your competitors’ online offerings and messaging. Email outreach to prospects who may be considering your product, before they’ve made a purchase decision, can be the deciding factor as to where they go – with you or your competition.
3. First Impressions Matter
When a prospect first hears about your online store, they should be offered a warm invitation to enter, and find a place where they are specially treated compared to anyone outside the inner circle.
Upon entering your site, the offer to subscribe or sign-up for a special offer should be immediately obvious and attractive:
“Don’t make site visitors work to make a connection. Put your signup form at the top of your homepage and alongside some other engaging content. You’ll get the most eyeballs possible on your form without requiring visitors to scroll all the way down to the bottom.”
Brands are once again having success with pop-ups that are more tastefully created and designed than only a few years ago, when pop-up blockers were on everyone’s wish list; in fact, many marketing insiders view this as one of the top ways of growing your email list:
“Add a lightbox form to your site: one company experienced a 99% increase in subscriber growth after adding a pop-over opt-in form.”
3. Sign-up Prospects On And Off Site
There are going to be many other areas on your site where you can interact with a prospect and ask for their email address, such as offering a free download, an exclusive coupon, newsletter sign-up, contest, or anything else of value to your audience… creative possibilities abound.
This also holds true for any offsite interaction with prospects, such as at trade shows where email address can be exchanged via business cards, or through popular social media sites:
“Social Media offers a powerful platform to build an audience for your business. But it’s also important to move relationships off social media and encourage fans and followers to join your mailing list. This will give you a better way to reach your audience without having to worry about network charges or declines in reach.”
4. Market To Your Subscribers
Since we’re talking about prospects, who’ve never bought from your store, you will probably know less about them than your would if they were a previous customer. It might be enough just to creatively invite them to your site, where they can explore and see what you’ve got for sale.
A good example (see below) of this comes from online movie ticked retailer, Fandango, which recently ran an email marketing campaign timed just after this year’s Oscar nominees were announced, creating a sense of urgency to click on the email below to read up on the nominees before the big show, but not selling anything.
Marketing to your list of email subscribers opens the door for a host of creative ideas and strategies. Do we offer a small gift to our prospects, or a bigger discount on a promotional product? These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked in the strategic stages of your email marketing campaigns.
The best ideas, however, must be tested by the market place where you can measure click-through-rates, conversions and sales from your efforts. Oftentimes, small changes to how sign people up to your subscriber list and how you market to that list can make a huge difference over the long run to your bottom line. Ecommerce shops, large and small, now have the ability to split test the entire email marketing process:
“You can split test your landing pages, your opt-in forms, your mail outs, etc. And see which Versions work best. It’s easy to do nbowadays so there really isn’t an excuse not to. Just make sure you’re testing things that matter and giving them enough time to show meaningful results.”
Converting prospects into paying customers through email marketing is exhilarating, but doesn’t have to be an occasional experience. It can be considered a continuous process that involves growing your subscriber list, marketing to it creatively and effectively and then building lasting relationships with customers to foster their lifetime value with your online store.
If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.
Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.
And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.
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