We probably all deeply understand that targeting your prospects and customers with relevant and specific offers / information is key to successful email campaigning, exclusively of your market or industry.

However, your strategy will vary depending on your proposition and where your customer is in terms of loyalty and maturity - we have more information about this (called our RACE model), which you can read about on our Consultancy page.

We provide a few suggestions here for improving your email conversions, engagement and loyalty of prospects and customers below and we hope you find this helpful:

1. Be welcoming (REACH)

Often overlooked, when you sign-up a new customer (in almost in any sense), you should welcome them with an appropriate automation campaign.

It’s your chance to set a good first impression, by expressing your brand, ethos and key propositions. If you can engage with your services at an early stage you will be building a stronger relationship from the start.

Welcome emails normally have a higher open rate demonstrating the fact that welcome campaigns are worthwhile. 

2. Be Persuading (ACTIVATE)

Once you’ve engaged your new prospects with your welcome series, the natural next step is your activation series. This helps new customers learn about your products or services while allowing you to get to know them. 

You should use your activation series as a way to get to know new leads. As well as introducing your brand offering, you should use this series to learn about their interests and needs. Gathering preferences is essential. 

Marketing preferences will be critical to creating stronger leads. Collecting them will enable you to send personalised marketing. The more you’re able to deliver targeted and relevant content related to the prospect’s journey, the more they’ll view your brand as one that will consistently meet their needs.

3. Be nurturing (ACTIVATE-CONVERT)

On average, nurtured B2B leads create 20% more sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads. But nurturing leads is often complex, you need to paint a clear and accurate picture of each person and move them along a suitable journey.

Doing so is not derived from their purchases alone but should be based on all relevant demographics in addition to their behaviours and preferences.

You can also use lead scoring to understand when a person is potentially ready to buy because they are undertaking research.

The persona group they fit will respond more positively to certain types of nurturing, i.e. slow decision makers Vs impulsive buyers, senior individuals Vs assistants, high-value subscribed customers Vs ad-hoc small purchasers - the list is endless of course but working with, say, five main persona groups and doing your best to identify which group each person belongs to will generate improved results.

Use identified behavioural triggers (clicking on a price list for instance or completing an online enquiry) or use the person's lead-score / time ratio to trigger a sales call to the prospect/customer or trigger a personalised email, SMS or other forms of communication to close your sale; often this is also referred to as account based marketing (one to one).

4. Be in love - build a relationship with loyalty (ENGAGE)

Use email campaigns, offers, promotions, personalise your home and other web pages (AI can do this but few other MA platforms can!!) to nurture your customers.

Consider how renewals can be sold or ensure the user remains subscribed to your service, offer them your care and attention and they will continue to understand the benefits of being your customer! Again, this should all be automated as it's too onerous to achieve manually, even with a sizeable team.

Consider the other key triggers too that should generate immediate and correct responses, such as referring someone to your brand, feeling the need to return an item, making a complaint or rating your product five stars (or only average or less).

In other words give and take some love!