It’s time to start using email marketing automation tactics if you want to grow your sales pipeline and increase both email subscribers and average order value. Here we will look at four tactics businesses can use in emails that will help grow a sales pipeline and improve overall customer engagement.
1. Establish a Clear Goal
Let’s start with a radical premise: you should know exactly why you’re doing something before you start doing it.
This might seem obvious, but it’s not. Think about how often you’ve been asked to do something without understanding why or how it will help your business. It happens all the time! This is especially true for email automation, where we’re often given vague, overly ambitious goals and, therefore, likely unattainable in practice. The solution? Be honest with yourself about what outcomes are realistic given your resources (time and money), then set goals accordingly. Better yet, make them SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
For example, say your goal is “increase sales pipeline by 20 per cent.” That’s great. It has specific metrics attached and reflects an actual business problem that needs solving, but let’s break this down further by asking ourselves:
- Where did these numbers come from?
- What metrics will be used to measure success?
- What’s the timeframe we’re considering here?
- What do we want to achieve with this data?
By answering these questions now, you’ll better understand whether the plan will work when it’s executed.
2. Optimise Emails for Mobile
To build a strong sales pipeline for your business or startup, you need a reliable way of getting people onto your mailing lists. That’s where Zoho Campaigns comes in, offering features like email templates, A/B testing, and mobile optimisation to make attracting and engaging potential customers easier. With more people subscribed to your mailing list, you can turn them into actual paying customers when they’re ready. However, getting people to sign up in the first place can be challenging. That’s why optimising your emails for mobile devices is important, ensuring they are easy to read and the links are accessible. A mobile-optimised email campaign can reduce friction for your customers and increase your chances of success.
Make sure your emails are optimised for mobile devices. If someone opens your email on their phone while they’re walking down the street or sitting at lunch with friends while eating avocado on toast (or something else equally delicious), do they find it easy to read? Are there any parts that don’t load properly? Can they easily find any links inside? When someone visits an online store from their phone and sees, for instance, only small images of shoes instead of full product descriptions and prices that would normally be shown on laptops or desktops, this creates friction. A frustrated shopper may end up not making the purchase because the information they needed was not at their fingertips. You can read more about the mobile optimisations of Zoho Campaigns here.
3. Personalise Your Emails
- Personalised subject lines
We all know the personal touch goes a long way, and your email subject line is no exception. Ming your subject lines as personal as possible; using their name or a detail from their account, like their last purchase, can make a real impact. When you’re writing an email, you need to be as specific as possible in your subject line so it doesn’t look like spam and end up in the junk box. In this way, recipients can identify the sender without even having to open the email, making them more likely to open it.
- Personalised signatures and email addresses
Use a signature that includes your name and contact details at the bottom of every message you send out into the world. Your name should also appear in the form field on any email notification so prospects can see who sent it before opening your message.
To ensure personalised experiences for your clients, it’s important that everyone who works with clients have their own dedicated address. This way, no one uses a generic group email or emails from someone else’s account.
With Zoho CRM, you can easily capture and store customer data, including their name, purchase history, and other important details. You can create personalised emails, ensuring your subject lines and content speak directly to your customers. Additionally, Zoho CRM allows you to assign specific team members to individual customer accounts so that each customer receives communication from a dedicated email address. By using these features, you can create a more personalised and effective email strategy to engage with your customers.
4. Turn Awareness into Loyalty
A/B testing your emails can help you discover what resonates with your audience. Once you know this, use it to ensure that every part of your email marketing automation strategy is customer-centric.
Customer loyalty and customer experience are among the most important factors in growing any business and something every business should strive to achieve. When people are loyal to you, they’re more likely to buy from you and refer others. But how do you build loyalty? It all starts with what we call “customer love at first glance” – when customers quickly understand why they love working with you and treat them like gold or VIPs. We can do this in two ways:
- Brand Voice and Values: Make sure that everything aligns with your business’s brand voice and values to ensure that each interaction feels authentic and builds trust over time.
- Gather Feedback: Listen carefully for feedback from customers so we know how well a product or service meets their needs and how we can improve it. Using data from your customer relationship (CRM) solution to support this.
A final piece of advice is to remember that there’s no right or wrong way to get your emails ready. You can still use email marketing and automation as a way to be more efficient, but it doesn’t have to be the only tool you use. If you would like any more information on how email marketing automation can support your business, we would love a discovery call with you. Let’s start a conversation here.
