Selling via email is an excellent way to boost your conversion rates. Emails might have been around for a longer time than many other forms of digital marketing. But once you dig more into it, you will understand the importance of selling through email. It will not come as a surprise that many internet marketing experts say: “The money is in the list”.
Selling your products or services through emails are techniques that can definitely improve your conversion as well as retention rates. According to email marketing experts, you should choose the right time to sell through emails. You should choose the best time of the week for promotion along with the frequency of emails to enhance the open rate. Increase opportunities for customers to send a response. Also, you need to note the time invested in the total sale process, that is, from opening the email to taking action and making the purchase. You also need to craft a successful promotion copy so that your subscribers can interact easily.
The copy should be made in such a manner that it instructs customers to take action easily. Also, you need to decide what strategy you are using to send an email. The best way is to use a service that helps utilize the most out of emails.
Which tools can help me?
Tips on how to sell over email
There are many service providers in the market that help marketers utilize most of the emails. They help their clients focus on emails that really matter. These service providers help businesses connect with their ideal customers. Some of the leading services are Boomerang, Woodpecker, If No Reply, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, and ActiveCampaign. For a top 10 list, check our earlier post.
Email marketing is widely considered a universal standard in inbound marketing practice. It provides a good base for up-selling as well as cross-selling. If you have already earned the trust of customers who previously selected to buy from you, the method of email marketing will prove beneficial for you. You can use emails to stay in touch with the existing customers and circulate more about your new products and services. You can use this tool to update them about your offers, new products, and services and staying in touch with them.
Listed below are the tips you can use to maximize your efforts with email.
Above all, be human, and talk to humans
First and foremost, when sending any type of email, be human! Even more importantly, write like you are writing for other humans! Yes, people will scan your email, spend 3 seconds on it, and so on, but you have to be able to provide a genuine connection. Show you care! Read your email aloud, and listen to how it sounds. At first, it may be weird, and you won’t know the difference, but keep doing it!
Offer discounts on up-sell purchases
This technique works well for service providers. When the customers are already happy with the services, they will not take much time to get convinced to take an interest in your other services. You should take advantage of holidays and events to offer discounts to your existing and preferred customers. This will build more interest in them.
Be proactive in promoting your product and services in the form of engaging content
Engaging and informative content in the form of blogs, white papers, and case studies will help you bring your current customers back on the website. This is an ideal opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell your existing customers. In other words, just bring value for free. Send an email as an honest attempt to solve someone’s problem.
Leverage customer trustworthiness with attractive offers over email
Turning your existing customers into brand ambassadors can be achieved in many ways. You can make your esteemed and reliable customers feel special by offering them exclusive offers such as early-bird discounts, family shopping events, and other tactics. All these things will prove fruitful. Also, a good way to show your gesture is by offering referral discounts to customers who send new business your way. Think of it as sending an email such as, “Pssst, we have this one-time offer for our email channel. Thanks for staying in touch with me like this”.
Creating robust social communities and groups on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook is a good move. The main attraction of these communities and groups is they help members to share their experiences with each other and also ask for recommendations. The conversations through these groups play a good role in convincing the customers to make a purchase. There you can use similar tactics to emailing someone (instant message) or ask someone for their email to continue the discussion via email. The same principles apply.
Differentiate one-on-one and one-on-many
There are two different selling strategies over email. One-on-many is your basic newsletter, autoresponder, and mail marketing automation with tagging and other features. As I’ve already written about this in the past, a great tool for that is GetResponse. This is more of a shotgun approach where you try to address many by using a developed persona or, depending on the topic, someone has subscribed to.
The one-on-one approach is more used during cold-emailing and when you are trying to reach out to someone specific regarding something specific. Like a guest post request, or follow-up after meeting someone for an interview request, or just a straight-up sales pitch.
Automatically rate the emails you are working with
When you are selling over email, you are bound to encounter a lot of them. Perhaps thousands. Whatever process you can automate will go a long way. That’s why we created an API that automatically rates the domain name, and email address. That way, when someone signs up with a temporary email address, your CRM, or you personally, know immediately. Our Email Score API will also tell you when someone important signs up. That way, you can better prepare your sales pitch.
A great domain name will go a long way.
It is very important to have a professional email address. I’ve created a very in-depth presentation on how to pick the best email address for your business, so I definitely recommend you check that out. For this article, suffice it to say that a great domain name will go a long way. If someone emails you from john.doe@go.com or john.doe@gmail.com which one would get more of your attention? I rest my case.
Automate your email marketing activities
How to sell over email – best practices
With so many options available in the market for up-selling and cross-selling in the inbound environment, it is quite easy to track down leads and follow the trail left by your current customers to offer personalized communications. The automated tools are designed to streamline the market process and make your marketing efforts much more effective.
Tools like Boomerang and IfNoReply are the ones I’ve tried myself. IfNoReply allows you to follow up with your email correspondent automatically and allows you to set up different reactions. For example, you can write in advance 3 (or how many you choose) emails, and these emails will be sent every 3 days (or how many you choose) until you get a response, then, you can stop the sequence. That’s why the owners named it “If No Reply” because it can keep sending emails until you get a reply.
A nice feature of Boomerang, on the other hand, is that it can “boomerang” an email back to your inbox in a certain number of days in case you haven’t received a response from the recipient. It is a very effective feature if you need to follow up with someone on that important thing.
Boomerang feature example
There are many advanced marketing tools and analytics that assist businesses. With them, they are able to drive revenue through a massive range of stages that exist at the later stages of the buying cycle. It is no longer the time to send thousands of emails with a particular offer. Therefore you need to ensure you are collecting and using smart data. Automating your marketing campaigns and using perfect marketing content relevant to your industry.
I hope this helps with your efforts to learn how to sell over email.
