If you want to generate higher-quality leads while dramatically improving the efficiency of your sales funnel, lead nurturing has to be part of your sales process – that’s a no-brainer.  Forrester Research reports that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

While lead nurturing makes complete sense for businesses that want to generate more revenue and decrease customer acquisition costs, it’s not always easy to put a process in place.

It takes more than investing in a lead nurturing tool to nurture cold leads into sales-ready prospects. You need a solid lead nurturing strategy to close the gap between failure and success.

Lead Nurturing Tactics vs. Lead Nurturing Strategy

With a small business CRM and marketing automation software, you can implement any of the lead nurturing tactics you need.  

For instance, you can send autoresponders to a lead that fill out a form on your website.  You can create a 5-step nurturing campaign.  You can automatically create follow-up tasks for your salespeople.

But, without a big picture strategy, these tactics won’t add up to success. Lead nurturing is key component of your overall inbound marketing strategy. If you aren’t adding new leads to your database every month, you don’t have a need for nurturing. (If this sounds like you, check out our lead generation course for helpful tips on capturing new leads every month.)

To really excel at lead nurturing, you have to understand how you can help move cold leads down the sales funnel into hot prospects.

Here are some overall lead nurturing strategies and the tactics you can use to drive them:

Strategy: Educate Cold Leads

When you’re selling a product like socks or clip-on ties, there’s little explanation needed. But when you’re a B2B business selling something more complex – like a new technology, a program or a service, you have to provide more context.  Your audience might not understand why they need you. They may not even know a solution like yours exists.

Lead nurturing is an excellent way to educate your leads over time, especially when they are not actively searching for a solution. Instead of confronting cold leads with a sales pitch that they aren’t interested in, you can uncover their pain points and introduce solutions over time.

Nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle (Market2Lead). So don’t wait for your leads to discover you’re the solution they’ve been looking for.  Be proactive with lead nurturing.

2 Tactics to Try:

• Send a drip email campaign to your new leads.  Include a link in each email to drive them back to a blog post on your website that addresses an issue they may be facing.
• Create an email course that leads can opt-in to. Provide a daily lesson on how to solve a pain-point your audience faces.

[Tweet “Tip #1: Create an email course leads can opt-in to that helps solve a relevant pain point.”]

Strategy: Send Targeted, Personalized Content

Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts (DemandGen Report). Unlike a general email newsletter, content in lead nurturing emails can be highly tailored to the recipient.

Understand what content your leads will be interested in at which stage in the sales funnel to deliver value and help them along the path to conversion.

For instance, say you are a manufacturing company. You sell a part that reduces friction and saves fuel costs for commuter trains. A new lead may not be looking for your specific solution, but they may be extremely interested in cutting fuel costs. You can send them a guide to cutting fuel costs, and use it to introduce them to your product.  A hot prospect, however, may know about your product and be very interested in your solution.  You can send them a link to your pricing calculator that calculates the cost to install your product and their fuel savings over time.

Curate content or develop your own content on your website so you can easily send highly-relevant content to your leads depending on what they’re interested in, and how close they are to making a buying decision.

3 Tactics to Try:

• With marketing automation software, tags can be used to label your contacts’ interests – by the pages they visit on your website, the links they click, and the forms they submit.
• Contact record details, like contact status and contact score can tell you how hot or cold a lead is in your database.
• Marketing automation can help you pull dynamic lists based on your contacts interests, or even start contacts on personalized campaigns.

[Tweet “Tip #2: #Marketing automation can help you pull dynamic lists to start personalized campaigns.”]

Strategy: Stay Top-of-Mind

Using lead nurturing has shown to convert 15-20% of the “not yet ready to purchase” opportunities into sales (Gleanster). Staying top of mind with your leads can help you squeeze revenue out of your sales pipeline that would otherwise be left on the table.

At the same time, following up too aggressively can lead to email fatigue, causing your leads to opt-out of communication from you.

Understanding how many days on average it takes a lead to convert to a customer can give you a good indication of how often to follow-up.  For instance, if your sales cycle is 12 months, you probably don’t want to follow-up every week.

Determine how many touch points you need to convert a cold lead into a customer, then plan on the best way to follow-up.  A mix of calls and emails can help lead prospects down the conversion path.

2 Tactics to Try:

• Use triggered emails to stay top of mind. For instance, send a birthday promotion or holiday greeting.
• Use automated tasks or notifications to help your sales team stay in touch with leads. Create an automated reminder to check in with warm prospects every 30 days.

[Tweet “Tip #3: Use triggered #emails to stay top of mind with your prospects.”]

Strategy:  Follow-Up with Sales-Ready Leads

Lead nurturing is effective because it puts your business on a buyer’s radar early in the buying process – sometimes, even before they realize they have a need. Instead of using pushy sales tactics that are easy to tune out, lead nurturing builds trust in your business over time, getting your relationship with leads off on the right foot.

6 out of 10 survey respondents who use marketing automation say it has increased the quantity and quality of the leads that get passed to sales (Lenskold Group & Pedowitz Group).

Eventually, you have to ask for the sale.  So how do you know when a nurtured lead is ready for your sales team?

In the realm of digital marketing, there are several indicators you can use to determine who on your list is ready to take the next steps. As you drive leads back to your website through lead nurturing emails, your sales team can be reaching out to these types of prospects:

Highly Engaged: A contact that has been very engaged with your content – opening emails, clicking links and visiting your website – is finding value from your marketing efforts.  They are probably a strong candidate to reach out to and will be receptive to learning more about your solution.

Performing Detailed Research: A lead that is browsing your blog articles is in a different research mode that someone who is checking out your pricing page or downloading product specs. Prospects that visit

Actively Reaching Out: Obviously, you should follow-up with anyone who requests more information from your website – like requesting product information or scheduling a consultation.  However, it’s important to have a good process in place to ensure that everyone is followed up with quickly and that no one slips through the cracks.

3 Tactics to Try:

• Use your marketing automation tool’s built-in lead scoring to hand-off high-scoring leads to your sales team.
• Automate a task or notifications to alert your sales team when a lead visits a specific sales-geared page on your website.
• Automate a follow-up task for your sales team any time a lead fills out an important form on your website.

[Tweet “Tip #4: Automate a follow-up task for your sales team when a lead completes a form on your site. “]

Lead nurturing wasn’t always in reach for small businesses – mainly because lead nurturing tools used to be super expensive and complicated to implement.  Now that there are a plethora of affordable, easy to use marketing tools available, the only thing standing between your business and lead nurturing excellence is a solid lead nurturing strategy.

Since you’re reading this, chances are you’re a small business owner or manager responsible for marketing your small business. You know that if you want to grow sales, you need to invest in the right marketing tactics. But which ones? With all the latest marketing options available to your business it can be confusing, overwhelming and become a major resource drain.

The truth is, we can’t keep up with it all — social media, email marketing, content, blogs, SEO, PPC, trade shows…..whew. But we try anyway. And in doing so, it’s easy to get distracted and lose focus on what truly matters and get enamored with marketing initiatives that in the end don’t drive sales or pay the bills.

Focus on what matters. Ignore, or at least minimize, what doesn’t.

So, what is it that we so often focus on that may either be meaningless or not all that important in the big picture of small business marketing success? One common area for most businesses is social media. In fact studies show that 43 percent of small businesses spend about six hours per week on social media — buying into the hype of likes, follows and shares.

Don’t get me wrong, social media can definitely be a valuable small business marketing tactic. It can help indicate the word is getting out about your business. Social may also solidify your brand and build trust as well as TOMA (or top of mind awareness) with your audience. The main benefit of TOMA is that when your prospects are ready to buy, they think about you first

On the other hand, you can get views, likes, shares and follows until the cows come home, and still not get the results you want, and still not sell anything!

Let’s face it: Buying requires a commitment on the part of the buyer. A like, follow or share doesn’t require much commitment at all. Just because someone likes your page on social media does NOT mean they are truly engaged and going to buy your product. There’s a very good chance they won’t even remember you.

Think about it.

Do you remember and mentally dwell on every single page you’ve ever liked on Facebook? Of course not. I know it can be self-gratifying to see your like totals go up each day but be careful not to let your time on social take away from working on marketing activities that move the needle the most.

Going Viral: Should You Care?

Very much related to this discussion is the notion of going viral. (Talk about a time suck!) It seems we are constantly hearing about the latest video to “go viral” such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. But the reality is for the one time that viral marketing works there are a million times that it doesn’t. Consider this: You don’t control whether your brand or product goes viral…your audience does. Trying to get your small business marketing campaign to go viral can drain your energy and valuable marketing dollars from your business.

And even if it does spread like wildfire, will it help you sell more? Maybe not. Evian water had perhaps the most successful viral ad campaign of all time. This video has been viewed over 130 million times! But did it, and the other viral videos in the series, boost sales of the product? Apparently not. According to this article, “…viral success is not the same as sales success. After Roller Babies was released in 2009, sales of the water brand actually declined…”

Let me ask you, do you really care about “going viral” if it doesn’t help you sell more of your products or services? Let’s focus on what matters.

So what does matter? Making sales. Making repeat sales to your current customers. Building long-term relationships with customers. Taking the necessary steps to make these vitally important things happen. What steps are these? They include:

Looking at marketing from a “big-picture” strategic perspective

In today’s crazy, constantly-changing marketing world, it’s easy to get caught up in “the latest trend.” It’s easy to do something just because it seems like everyone else does it.

My advice? Don’t. But do develop and follow a comprehensive marketing and sales strategy. Employ the tools and tactics that will help you succeed with that strategy. Ignore those that won’t. If that means you have to forego the latest digital breakthrough that everyone seems to be loving, so be it.

Identify and nurture your ideal buyer

It does no good to spend your marketing dollars on campaigns targeted at the wrong audience. You have to market the right product to the right audience, and you have to get their attention.

Do they want what you offer? Can they afford it? Are they ready to buy now? If so, are you ready to capitalize on this big opportunity? If they are interested and qualified, but not yet ready to buy, do you have systems in place to nurture the relationship and maintain TOMA until they are ready?

Provide excellent, proactive customer service

It is often said the best form of marketing is word of mouth. So train your staff and yourself to be genuinely, cheerfully helpful. And don’t wait until there’s a problem with a particular customer. Give great service from the beginning of the relationship, even before they have purchased your product or service. In addition providing standout service after the sale will help set the stage for future referrals and boost sales to your current customer base.

Small businesses often overlook the importance of customer service as a differentiating factor for prospects and customers.

Build a website that serves as your online marketing hub (and drive traffic to it)

It’s imperative that you drive traffic to your website. How? That can involve SEO, email marketing, PPC, and even offline marketing. You need ample traffic to your site. But that’s only a piece of the online marketing puzzle.

What do you do with these visitors when they land on your site? How do they respond? Are they immediately turned off and quickly leave, never to return? Do they spend time on your site? Does their interest and curiosity about about how you can help them deepen and intensify? Do they return to your site again and again?

The right copy and content, and the right conversion-oriented design all play a huge part in attracting and converting your website visitors into customers.

“Things that matter the most, must never be at the mercy of things which matter the least.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If a viral video, likes, follows, shares and so on help you grow your business and make more sales, great! But pursuing social stardom and virality instead of a smart, well-rounded marketing strategy can prevent you from getting the sales you need to thrive (or survive). When deciding what marketing initiatives to pursue in your small business take this advice from John Carmack to heart; “Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.”

A Guest Post by Katie Alteri, Content Marketing Manager at Fora Financial.

As a small business owner, you’re accustomed to balancing a variety of tasks. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough hours in the day to complete everything you’d like to do to – like growing your business’s marketing efforts.

Have your small business’s social media accounts been put on the back burner? If so, don’t get discouraged. It’s a common misconception that in order to be successful on social media, you have to devote a lot of time to it.

We have some simple hacks that will help you develop your business’s social media presence– without taking away too much time from your other responsibilities:

1.   Determine where your customers are posting – You might think that in order to become a social media guru, you’ll need to create an account for your business on every platform. This isn’t necessary, we promise! Don’t bother posting to a platform that your customer base isn’t interested in. Instead, see which platforms your customers are interacting with you on now, and focus your efforts there.

For instance, if you own a retail store, you might get great engagement on Facebook, while another industry does better on Google+ or Twitter. Not every industry or business will be the same, so concentrate on sites that your audience appreciates.

2.   Think about what content will resonate with your customers – With limited time, you’ll need to be strategic about what you share on social media.  

Think about your customers – what’s important to them? What will keep them coming back to your page, or even better, entice them to hit the ‘follow’ button? It might be exclusive offers, educational content related to your industry or daily inspiration. Whatever it is, remember that your business is aiming to solve the consumer’s problem, or supply them with something they need. By keeping that in mind, every post will serve a purpose!

3.   Keep a social media list – Whenever you get an idea, write it down. Keep a calendar of upcoming holidays and ‘national days’ that relate to your brand. This way, you’ll always have content ready to go. When you’d like to post, you can review this list, and choose relevant content to share.

Hootsuite has some super helpful social media templates – including a social media content calendar to help you plan ahead.

4.   Ask customers to help out – Another way to distribute content that you know your customers will enjoy is to ask them to send it to you! For instance, if you own a restaurant, ask patrons to take delectable food pictures, and have them ‘tag’ your page. Then, share the posts that you think will look best on your profile. Reward customers with a gift certificate or another prize. This is a great way to bond with customers, and receive excellent content!

5.   Make it a team effort – If you’re lacking in time or creativity, get your employees involved! Hold a quick brainstorming session, where you all share ideas that will reflect your brand and help generate business. Then, take action! Delegate jobs to a few members on your team. Have someone write content, take pictures, and oversee the accounts. By designating these roles, you’ll all be contributing to your business’s social media pages, and no one will get overwhelmed.

6.   Add some hashtags – You may not be able to focus on social media outreach, but that’s where hashtags come in! On Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Facebook, to name a few, hashtags help connect you with other users discussing the same topics as you.

If you’re not sure which hashtags to use, sites like Hashtagify.me can help you figure out which hashtags are trending so you can give your social media posts added exposure.

By adding relevant hashtags, you’ll be able to reach users who may not be following you, but are interested in the information that you’re sharing. More than likely, you’ll be able to gain new followers (that could convert into leads) with help from hashtags!

7.   Make images a priority – Not all industries have services or products that are easy to photograph, but having images to share on social media is important. If you don’t have time to take pictures, or your industry isn’t highly photographable, then you can consider utilizing a stock image service. There are some free options, but you may be better off paying for a higher quality site, like iStock. That way, you’ll be able to search for keywords that relate to your social posts, and have an image ready to post with it.

You can also use free photo editing tools to create your own images, or to make stock images look more tailored to your brand.

8.   Use a post scheduling service – If you know that you can’t post to social media on a regular basis, using a scheduling service will make your life much easier! We suggest using Buffer, a free social media scheduling site that lets you write and schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. When you have a moment, write all of your social posts for each platform, and schedule them via Buffer. It’s that simple!

It doesn’t take hours and hours to produce content that resonates with customers. If you use your time wisely, and determine what will interest your customer base, then you’ll be able to improve your small business’s social media strategy.

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About the Author

Katie Alteri is the content marketing coordinator at Fora Financial, a company that provides working capital solutions to small businesses across the U.S. Fora Financial can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Among all marketing channels, email has the highest potential to deliver growth, revenue and return on investment (ROI). It’s the most efficient marketing tool, that returns, on average, $38 for each $1 spent according to a recent study by eConsultancy.

That’s an ROI of 3800%! And companies in the top 20% report even higher ROI which means they can make returns of 7000%+.

But with every email campaign you send out, you could be missing out on conversions. Which means you’re ultimately leaving money on the table. The only question is: how much?

So why aren’t your email campaigns performing as well as they could be? Let’s start with the fundamentals.

You Don’t Really Follow Your Data

A lot of companies that claim to be data driven really aren’t – they follow the high-level best practices and don’t go beyond that. As a result, they’re not really growing, they’re not innovating, and they’ll end up as a follower rather than a trailblazer among competitors.

Yes, there are plenty of case studies and valuable information out there surrounding data practices, but at the end of the day, your market and your customers are unique and nobody understands them better than you. (Unless it’s your competition, then you’re in trouble)

Today data rules the world of marketing. You should always be A/B testing, analyzing user behavior and talking to customers and prospects to understand their motivations. As advertising legend David Ogilvy once said: “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

Your Copywriting Fails to WOW

In 2015, the number of emails sent and received per day totaled over 205 billion, according to Email Statistics Report, 2015 – 2019. The average number of emails an office worker receives each day is 121. And that number is only going to continue growing.

I certainly get well over 120 emails a day between my personal and professional inboxes. I’m subscribed to 100+ newsletters, but I probably only open one or two of these emails a day. When I think about what the successful emails have in common the answer is: their subject line stands out, and the copy inside is relevant to my particular set of needs. In other words, even if you get customer’s email address, you will still be competing for attention.

Copywriting is a science which is still being studied, but in general, the emails that get opened follow the four ‘U’s of copywriting:

• They provide prospects with a sense of urgency, so they don’t leave the email for later.
• They deliver a message that is unique and stands out in a crowded inbox.
• They address an ultra-specific problem the recipient faces, making the email seem super personal.
• And most importantly, the email is useful to the recipient.

Your Design is Just Wrong

Like writing copy, design involves understanding data about the recipient’s motivations and behavior. Brilliant newsletter design is like a funnel, it emphasizes the important parts of your email leading all the way to the call-to-action (CTA).

If your emails are cluttered, people won’t pay them any attention. When we’re online, we’re in a state of hyper-distraction. Unless you can keep prospect’s attention on the important things like copy, offers, a value proposition and your CTA, you’re going to lose them.

You Don’t Close

According to Ben Gay who wrote the sales classic The Closers, 90% of professional sales people do not close. They do not ask for the order. They do not request action. In marketing, it’s often the same. Many businesses make their CTAs weak and generic which makes their product unmemorable.

However, even if you have your CTAs perfectly crafted, it won’t matter if they lead to a subpar homepage or a poorly optimized landing page (a mistake that happens way too often).

If your email is focused on a specific product or offering, you want your CTA to lead to that specific product or straight to a download page. If the email and CTA focus on some other resource, you’ll want to have a specific landing page crafted.

Your Value Proposition is Not Relevant

“Mediocre copy and a good offer will out-pull great copy and a mediocre offer any day of the week. Make a good offer and if your grammar is incorrect, if your spelling is bad, or even if you have orange type on a green background, it could still work.”

This quote, from Breakthrough Copywriting by David Garfinkel, almost perfectly sums up the importance of a terrific value proposition. In order to provide your prospects with an offer they love, it must be relevant and personalized according to their needs. If you can do that, your sales will skyrocket. However, the offer isn’t always about the product, it’s more about how you sell it.

To learn about how to run engaging, personalized email campaigns download this marketing guide.

You’re Not Using Relevant Data to Segment Your Lists

It’s not easy to get personal if you blast the same email across your entire list. There’s no one-size-fits-all customer and likewise, your email list contains a diverse set of prospects.

Studies show that email marketers who segment their email campaigns see better open rates, lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates, better email deliverability, increased sales leads, and greater revenue.

Yet a recent study by Relevancy Group suggests that majority of marketers segment their audiences based on demographics or geography, ignoring customer and revenue-centric data that matter, such as customer profitability or lifetime value. Rather than segmenting based on superficial categories, use your data to segment based on customer behaviors, roles, and interests.

Your Leads are Weak

A perfectly crafted newsletter email with a personalized and relevant offer won’t deliver results if you’re targeting wrong prospects. A successful campaign starts with great lead generation. In order to generate a steady stream of quality leads, you need to make sure that you understand the basics of who your customers are and what they’re looking for.

If your only concern is adding numbers to your email database, you’ll have very little success converting prospects into customers. By building customer personas and optimizing your targeting, you’ll be able to grow your email list while adding qualified leads into your pipeline.

Before even beginning to build email campaigns, make sure that you have a solid idea of your customer personas so that your emails don’t fall flat.

Once you’ve landed a new customer, you’re on your way to earning repeat and bigger purchases. Customers that have bought from you once are three times as likely to purchase from you again, and repeat customers will spend 20% more with your business than first-time buyers.

Keeping customers engaged with your brand after the sale is a crucial part of scaling revenue – if you aren’t keeping in touch, you’re leaving money on the table.

That’s where email nurturing comes in.  Email nurturing is an automated way to stay top of mind with your customer base through the pairing of marketing automation with your CRM database.

Here are four simple nurturing emails you can use to build a customer loyalty and drive repeat sales.

Welcome New Leads To Your Business

An excellent, logical first step when adding a new customer is to welcome them with an introductory email. With marketing automation, you can automate your welcome email to send when someone fills out a form on one of your landing pages, or when a contact’s status is updated to “customer.”  

Your welcome email can be short and sweet, but it’s a good idea to summarize in bulleted format what they can expect to receive from you in the nurture series. You can also link to further information for them to check out, and include a contact phone number or email if they’d like to get a hold of you.

The following are some examples of great welcome emails I’ve received from brands and small business owners.

The Outbound Collective’s welcome email is visually pleasing while also combining a few tips on how to get started on their website to maximize using their product:

Comparably’s welcome email is an example of personalizing a nurture email—it doesn’t appear to be overly designed so you can’t tell it’s a marketing email, and the founder signed it. This gives the impression the founder is interested in interacting and hearing from his customers, and the email has a nice, personal touch.

 

Send A Setup or Support Guide

Once you send a welcome email, it’s a good idea to send tutorials, guides, how-to videos or other types of supporting content that can help your customers get associated with your business. If you’re a gym, you can send post-workout tips or fitness advice. If you’re a restaurant, you can send tips on joining you for future events or weekly specials you might have like 25 cent wing night on Wednesdays.

Make sure the content you’re sending adds value to your customers and highlights the benefits of your product. If a nurture email with setup or supporting docs doesn’t fit your type of business, then you don’t have to send it. No email at all  is always better than an email that is fluffy and doesn’t add value to an ever-growing inbox.

One example of an email including supporting information is from SoulCycle. After the date of your first class, they’ll send a great nurture email that tells their customers how to make the most of a SoulCycle studio and their new exercise regime. This is a value-add for patrons of their spinning studio:

After signing up for SquareSpace, their nurture email series is all about onboarding new customers to their platform. The below email is a great example of including a mini tutorial or guide to getting started in the body of a nurture email:

Tell Your Customers About Your Social Accounts

I don’t see brands and businesses doing this enough, yet a lot of businesses are running cool communities on social media. It’s not enough to just list the links to your social accounts in the footer of the email or the footer of your website. Be sure to send an email that tells your customer the neat things that you’re up to online. Invite them to join a Facebook group you’ve started where they can connect with other community members or let them know your business is on Instagram and will feature customer photos every week by using a particular hashtag. If you’re launching interesting campaigns on your social sites, alert your customers to these campaigns so they can choose to engage with your business on social as well. For example, Lyft sent the below email to alert their passengers of a fun Halloween campaign they were running:

Send Additional Content & Resources

Finally, another best practice is to send content to your customers. Even better, segment your customers to provide them with content that directly speaks to an interest you know they have. For instance, have them identify a specific interest within a drop-down menu on a form. Then you can create content campaigns for each of the interests featured in the drop-down menu.

If you’re sending content in a general welcome nurture campaign for new customers, it works just as well to inform your customers of the fresh blog posts and videos your business is creating. Point them to your blog or resources center, or send a newsletter that highlights content they can click to read further. By sending your customers content they want to read, they’ll have an extra incentive to stay subscribed to your email list.

The below email is a great example of a welcome email from a small business owner, Cody Sattler at CSATT Fitness. In his welcome email, he’s combining two tactics I’ve mentioned: 1) telling his customers about social communities they can join and 2) providing content he’s created that his customers can consume.

BONUS TIP: Email Nurturing Best Practices

Finally, here are some best practices to keep in mind as you send nurturing emails to your customers:

Send Emails From the Right Person

Email nurturing is effective because it’s personal.  So don’t have emails to your customers come from a generic email address.  Instead, have emails come from someone within your company. For instance, have emails come from a name your customers will recognize – like their account manager or support contact.

Personal communications are always better than a ghost behind a business, and your customers will feel like you’re making a personal effort to reach out and welcome them.

Respect Unsubscribes

Always give email recipients the option to unsubscribe from your email communication – even your customers. Remember, an engaged contact who wants to hear from you is always better than a giant list of leads who aren’t interested in becoming a buyer.

Nurture campaigns are the easiest way to make sure you’re continuing contact with customers. Keeping your customers engaged is crucial to winning the repeat business most companies thrive on.

When it comes to marketing to your audience, email has the highest conversion rate (66%), when compared to social, direct mail and more (DMA).

You can offer the lowest price or best product on the market, but if you don’t have a way to reach your prospects and customers on a one-to-one basis through email, you’ll have trouble converting prospective buyers into customers.

Even if you do have an email list of thousands of contacts, your list can go stale over time. People change jobs, lose interest, abandon email addresses and so on.

You have to make a conscious effort to continually build your subscriber list year over year (and ensure that those contacts are qualified and interested in what you have to offer).

If you’re building your email list from scratch (or using the same tired pop-ups or display ads with less than stellar results), we’ve got four fresh ideas for building what could be your most valuable marketing resource – your email list:

Give Them a Free Education

Email drip courses are a powerful way to generate and nurture leads. You set up a landing page where people can signup and then you build out a campaign of emails that will be sent out periodically. Each email contains one lesson.

For instance, if you run a mobile app development agency, you can create a 10-lesson course on finding and testing the right idea for a new mobile app. This would contain topics like idea generation, market research, wireframing, and so forth.

The best thing about an email course? It’s a gift that keeps on giving – and converting. It’s more than a way to capture leads – it’s a vehicle for educating your audience, driving them down-funnel toward conversion.

In fact, one of the best performing resources on the Hatchbuck website is our Lead Gen 101 course.  Nearly 20% of leads that sign up for our course reach out to us for a demo of our software – a solid conversion rate for a piece of content that runs on its own.

Offer (an Effective) Giveaway

A giveaway can be a super effective way to generate new subscribers. For instance, a daily deals website for digital products and services, Appsumo, gained over 200,000 subscribers by giving away free Dropbox accounts.

Surprisingly, few companies try this tactic – or end up executing it poorly.

Giveaway campaigns commonly fail because the offer doesn’t fit the audience. In other words, offering something generic, like the latest iPhone, isn’t enough. Everyone wants a new iPhone.  Instead, offer something uniquely specific to what your target buyer would want.

This is where Appsumo nailed their giveaway. Their legendary campaign offered entrants lifetime-unlimited Dropbox data or a lifetime-free Evernote subscription. These tools are extremely appealing to  – Appsumo’s target audience – entrepreneurs.

Once you’ve settled on a sweepstakes, you need to be sure your landing page is optimized for entries (and for sharing). With a few simple additions (like offering extra entries for a share on social), you can motivate users to promote the giveaway and expand your potential customer base.  

Give the People What They Want (Free Stuff)

There’s a term for this marketing strategy. It’s called “engineering as marketing,” and it was first coined by Gabriel Weiberg in his book Traffic. The concept is simple. Create tools and products for your customers and offer them for free in return for a sign-up.

This type of lead-in tool can anything from an e-book to a browser extension, but the most important aspect of these tools is capturing the user information at sign-up to continue building your contact list.

A successful example of “engineering as marketing” tools is Pablo – a free tool offered by social media scheduling app, Buffer. Pablo allows users to edit and add text to any image to create customized stock photography. The product itself is great, but the real genius behind it is that it’s a rational stepping stone to Buffer.  If you’re creating images for social media, you’re posting them on social media.  It’s an effective lead-in to the next step – purchasing a social media publishing platform.

Another great example is the website analyzer offered by marketing consultant Neil Patel on his website Quicksprout.com. Users submit their website URL and email address and get a free analysis of its weak points on their site. By offering this free website analysis teaser, Quicksprout is quickly able to demonstrate the value in their product while simultaneously adding a new subscriber to their email list.

P.S. also – check out Neil’s heat-mapping tool, CrazyEgg. We swear by it here at Hatchbuck

Get Social With Your Sign Ups

There are several ways to use social media to grow your email list. While followers are great, if they’re not engaging with your content and getting pushed further down your inbound marketing funnel, they’re not worth much to your business.

Social media can be a great first interaction between potential customers and your brand. You can capture email newsletter signups through a Twitter card. You can use your Facebook page to promote an offer on a landing page that requires an email submission. You can also collect emails directly on your Facebook page.

MarketingProfs allows visitors to sign up for the email newsletter through their Facebook page rather than driving them to their website to sign up elsewhere.

In the same way, you can use Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest to run creative campaigns that can drive followers to landing pages that offer email signup opportunities.

An email list can be a hugely valuable asset for your small business. But like the leads you’re trying to sell your product to, your email list needs to be nurtured to remain relevant and beneficial. Make sure you’re optimizing these channels so you don’t miss out on capturing prospect emails.