Building an engaging list of email subscribers is an extremely important part of any business that wants to be successful these days. When you can learn how to execute a well-planned email strategy, you can effectively create amazing returns in your marketing, including repeat sales, customer loyalty, and returning website visitors. This helps to improve your search engine ranking and positions you as a reliable source and expert in your industry.
When you hone your email marketing campaigns and focus your time and energy on building and fostering relationships with your subscribers, you can catapult your business success to the next level. The key to fostering and nurturing your new email subscribers is through cultivation. By sharing content with your subscribers that offers value, solves problems, and engages your readers, you can move them strategically closer to a buying decision.
The messages you send to your subscribers help keep them connected to your brand. The more value you offer them, the more likely they are to not only open your emails but engage with them as well. If you don’t have a strategy in place to convert your leads into customers, it is pointless to spend your time trying to grow your lead count.
With the proper nurturing technique, your subscribers will look forward to hearing from you. Here are five ways to nurture your email subscribers, increase engagement, and generate sales with your email marketing.
Create a Welcome Series
Having a welcome email series that greets your new subscribers will dramatically separate your business from your competitors and put your brand in a good light with your target audience. These emails should be friendly and inviting, giving your new subscribers a taste of your brand culture. These welcome emails will set the stage of excellence for your business.
This is the time to introduce yourself and explain how you can help your customers. Tell your story, with each email building on the last. You might want to provide a 5-part training series or advice regarding your related niche. Your welcome emails can be as unique and creative as you want. This will help you improve your open rates, and your email list will be more receptive to upcoming sales promotions and events in the future.
Evergreen Blog Articles and Posts
The content on your blog serves multiple purposes in marketing your business. First of all, it helps your business attract a steady stream of organic traffic from social media, search, and referrals. To achieve the best results, make sure that you are writing evergreen articles and posts. Evergreen articles provide value to readers all year and beyond. They aren’t based on trends or what’s “in,” but rather are articles that your reader will always find useful and reflective over time.
Each evergreen article should be insightful, educational, and highly relevant to your customers, without being news-oriented or date-specific. To nurture your new email subscribers, create this kind of content and distribute it over social media and other channels. People who find it useful will continue to share it with their networks.
Another reason to create shareable, evergreen content is that it can serve as free, valuable material that you can include in your email newsletter. This provides your subscribers with a great reason to check their inboxes without coming off as too salesy or pushy. Don’t just send out the articles the same day that you publish them on your blog. Instead, recycle your best-performing articles to use in your email campaigns so that your new subscribers always receive your best content. If you have long content, you can always break it into pieces and offer it up as a series.
Offer Content Upgrades
In exchange for a visitor’s email address, you can offer content upgrades, which are well-targeted pieces of bonus content downloadable with a specific blog article. For example, if a Human Resource Consultant writes a blog post on the best practices for high-performing team leaders, they can turn that post into a short eBook and make it available to download when people provide their email address.
The content upgrades you offer your new email subscribers should be useful, highly relevant to the topic, and actionable. Try to have a unique content upgrade for just about every post you publish on your blog. While this means a lot of extra work, it will be well worth it because you can capture more qualified leads.
If you don’t have the time to create unique content upgrades for each of your blog articles, keep an eye on those articles with a massive readership and create a unique content upgrade for those articles.
Publish Monthly Newsletters
There are tremendous benefits to sharing a monthly newsletter with your subscribers. Newsletters are an ideal platform for keeping your list informed and connected with what’s happening in your company, as well as what’s happening in your industry. You’ll bolster your thought-leadership by sharing articles, both yours and those of authoritative sites, to drive more traffic to your site and increase your sales.
Creating a newsletter email campaign is a winning strategy to boost engagement and growth for your business. It helps to build an expectation with your audience, and they’ll be excited to see your newsletter in their inbox every month.
Here are some essential items to remember when putting together your monthly email newsletter:
- Use a colorful and compelling design and template that captures attention and exudes your brand.
- Share company news, industry-related content, and customer testimonials.
- Curate content from other writers to highlight the best sources in your industry.
- Promote your most popular blog posts.
- Include large, distinct call-to-action buttons in your newsletter.
- Showcase team members and employees in your newsletter to further humanize your company.
Segment Your Email List
Email list segmentation is a growth hacking trick that can significantly improve the bottom line of your business. Many marketers have enjoyed a 760 percent increase in revenue after they started segmenting their email marketing campaigns. Segmented and targeted email campaigns generate 58 percent of all revenue for a business. Email segmentation allows you to create personalized emails that speak directly to the subscriber receiving the email.
The idea behind segmentation is that you use the demographic information you collect on your subscribers to custom tailor an email that speaks to their interests, likes, and wants. By doing this, your subscribers are more likely to open your emails, respond to the content, and take the desired action, compared to a generic email message created for your entire list.
Here are some categories to consider when creating a segmented email list:
- Gender
- Age
- Demographics – the city, region, state, or neighborhood where your subscribers live
- Career
- Preferred or loyal customers
- Past purchases for upselling opportunities
- Buyer Personas
- Subscriber content interest – pay attention to the kinds of content your subscribers are clicking on the most
Segmenting your email list and creating highly targeted emails will increase your open rates and help you nurture your new email subscribers.
Conclusion
Nurturing your newly built email list is just as important as growing the number of subscribers you have. When you regularly share useful content with your subscribers that informs them, helps them solve their problems, and inspires them, it helps keep your brand at the front of their minds. When they are ready to buy, they’ll turn to your business because you have been feeding them with continuous value, making them want to buy from you. With these tactics, you will soon build a loyal customer base who will refer you and your business to their family and friends.
Start with just one or two of the tactics mentioned above and test them with your list over a period to determine which tactics create the most engagement with your subscribers and the most sales. Keep strategies that work and refine those that don’t. With consistency, you will be able to create a winning formula that will transform your email list into a sales-generating machine.
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Roger