Businesses have always been using email to communicate with their buyers, vendors or service providers. Similarly, to communicate with the prospective buyers during their buyer’s journey in inbound marketing funnel, Email marketing is the safe, quick and most personalized way. Email marketing allows to send many details, ideas, offers, after sales communication, etc. directly in the inbox of your prospects. Email marketing is a tool which is utilized throughout the inbound marketing funnel in all three stages; Awareness, Consideration, Decision.
Today we shall see how email marketing can be utilized at every stage of the inbound marketing funnel. But before that, we shall discuss either email marketing in an inbound way.
Email marketing in an inbound way
There are marketers who like to buy email addresses from some agencies. They buy email addresses in bulk and then start shooting emails to them. The first thing about such emails is they are sent to those who are never intended to buy your product. The last thing about such emails is if they are not interested then why they are going to buy your product. This is an outbound way of email marketing.
In inbound marketing, at every stage of the buyer’s journey, every email is sent to the buyer only and only with the permission of the person. Further, all the next emails are sent to further enhance the knowledge and information about the same product or service which s/he showed her/his interest in the company. The beauty of email marketing inbound way, it never irritates the receiver and the chances of getting un-subscribed from the email list are very few.
Top of the funnel and role of email marketing
Every person starts a buyer’s journey from searching answers to many questions to some of their need or want. At this stage, businesses focus to answer all the “many” questions of the prospective buyers. For the purpose, they have many types of content which can help the prospective buyers to answer their queries. There are eBooks, Cheat Sheets, Brochure, statistics, comparisons, etc. These content types are to give answers to the questions of prospective buyers with proofs. These type of content is available at the cost of an email address and some other information which can help companies further detail the information in the later stage of buyer’s journey. All the information is sent directly to the prospective buyer through email.
If the prospective buyer has further queries s/he can further communicate with the person who is authorized by the company to communicate at the awareness stage.
Middle of the funnel and role of email marketing
At the “evaluation” stage the prospective buyer is doing an immense research on if the product or service you are offering is a good fit or not. For the middle of the funnel, most of the marketers have designated many types of content which they keep sending to the prospective buyers during the course.
For an example, yesterday was my birthday and I got an email from Adidas.com wishing me a birthday loudly by offering me 15% off on the same day purchase. And I loved to avail the offer to buy a product of my choice.
There are many other things which can be done at regular basis especially in the middle of the funnel. Things like new offers, discounts, News, interviews, new product inductions and everything that can help increase the probability of considering your product or service.
Bottom of the funnel and email marketing
This is also known as the “purchase” stage. At this stage, people want to figure out exactly what they have to pay to become a customer of your product or service.
At this stage, most of the prospects know whom they have to talk about a particular problem. This is the beauty of inbound marketing and power of email marketing that people who are going to be your buyers know your company and the relevant personals.
For this stage, all type of content is specific to the particular product(s) to educate and build confidence in your buyers. The information contained is about specs, technical details, after sales benefits, etc. Most of the companies like vehicle manufacturers keep this detail open for every visitor of the product but some companies like a SaaS development company try to share the information only with qualified buyers. This information is always sent to the buyers using email marketing.
Email Automation | A necessity
At this stage, it is very important to have automated email system incorporated into your website. Email automation is such necessary thing these days that a website without an automated email system is considered as incomplete.
You can hire a freelancer to do the job for you. The other option is to sign-up with Aweber or MailChimp to do the whole job for you. For a small and medium company, it is recommended to connect with one of the company to achieve the milestone of email automation for their website.
You can avail the email service at free of cost up till 2000 users. This is an ideal solution for the small and medium-sized businesses to make yourself reachable to the prospective buyers at all the stages of buyer’s journey.
Email templates | A necessary
It is very important to note that a personalized email is always expected to get more click through rate in comparison. An email is also the reflection of your company’s culture. Always select an email template very carefully.
To do so always segment your emails with respect to the level of the funnel. Once decided on the type and number of the email then go and find top email templates to get an idea what is liked by the customer.
On the other hand, you can find many templates from the free email providers like Aweber and MailChimp.
Email marketing is such a fun in all the stages of inbound marketing funnels. If you reached the reality of true email marketing you can enhance the customer experience. Do your website has an automated email system? How have you been utilizing email marketing in your inbound marketing?
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