In nature, “nurturing” always implies a particular relationship between the nurturer and the nuturee: the party with more knowledge/experience/information/power shares those qualities with the party possessing less, with the goal of bringing about positive change. Appropriately, “lead nurturing” in the email marketing world refers to the educational relationship you create with subscribers, with the goal of persuading them to act. When you get it right, you’ll not only get more customers to say yes, you’ll also build a core of loyal clients who throw their business your way again and again.

Basics of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing isn’t just sending emails once a week. It involves providing relevant, useful information to the subscriber about the offer you want him to accept. And it requires planning.

• Create a target audience persona. Your email list includes a variety of personality and customer types, but in order to create the most effective email campaign, you’ll need to choose one target persona to focus on. Create each email with that personality in mind. What motivates them? What information do they need? What questions do they want answered? Focus on building a relationship with your target audience in order to earn their loyalty.
• Determine a consistent email frequency and sequence. Every new lead on your list should receive the same emails in the same order and at the same frequency. Each new message should have a specific goal and call to action. Frequency should be no less than once a week; every five to six days works well in most cases.
• Create content. Each email should contain helpful, actionable, and educational content. Be creative. Try videos, FAQs, surveys, special reports and other formats to get the most important information about your company and your offer into the hands of your subscribers. Emails should build on each other, creating forward momentum and culminating with your ultimate call to action.
• Use offer-based opt-ins. Provide an incentive for opting in to your email list that is related to your ultimate offer. If you’re selling a weight loss e-book, for instance, your opt-in offer could be a free report detailing seven secrets to reducing the risk of Type II diabetes.
• Use autorepsonders. Autoresponders ensure that each new lead gets the same emails at the same frequency. It’s the smartest way to keep your email campaign ducks in a row.

Securing Action With Lead Nurturing

Once your campaign is up and running, keep a close eye on your analytics. Monitor which links are being clicked, how many subscribers convert, how many new leads you get, and where those leads are coming from. Tweak your campaign based on subscriber behavior.

Persuading your target audience to say yes begins with a strong lead nurturing campaign designed to educate and build relationships. Strong content, effective planning, and a solid approach to email creation and distribution will create a loyal audience that wants what you have to offer.

Statistics show that roughly 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made. Crazy. 7 out of 10.

It takes too much time and effort to get someone to your site, get them to shop, put items in their cart to only walk away with nothing 70% of the time.

Obviously, physical stores rarely have this problem.  Of course you can walk in and walk out with nothing if you don’t find what you are looking for at the price you are willing to pay.  However, if you grab a shopping cart and start filling it with things you need or want, you are not going to just leave the store without paying for and taking those things home, it just doesn’t happen.

Now there are a lot of people who can go beyond these simple statistics and give you reasons why ecommerce shoppers do this, we just want you to know that through email marketing there is a way to increase your abandoned cart sales.

Fickle Shoppers

Of course, there are many things you can do to convert more visitors into paying customers such as the design, price pointing, special offers, etc. But with all that said, clients are fickle and may change their mind and walk away.

So by all means, do everything in your power to provide an optimal shopping and check out experience. But regardless of why they didn’t complete the transaction – you’ve got a secret weapon that doesn’t care and it’s called email marketing.

The eConnect Email solution to making your cash register go cha-ching!

eConnect Email has a solution to this cart abandonment saga.  Our email system triggers real-time, automated email follow-ups to your potential buyers, helping to convert abandoned shopping carts into money in the bank. By delivering timely follow-up messages, cart abandonment emails can remind, gently push and motivate lost sales to come back to you. Here’s a few simple examples of how customers use cart abandonment:

• Remind customers of the products they left in their cart
• Cross-sell/up-sell complimentary products
• Offer discounts or incentives to complete the sale
• Run surveys to ask why they didn’t complete the purchase
• Trigger special messages after purchase that entice new sales

Recovering lost sales with the help of email marketing will be worth the time and effort.  I would highly encourage you to use the technology at your fingertips and statistically speaking you can recover 50% of those lost sales.  Do the math yourself and ask why you’re leaving money on the table.

To learn more about email marketing automation, and specifically cart abandonment services, connect with us. We’d love to hear about your business and e-commerce goals and how we might help.

The explosion of social media and mobile devices has proved to be a game-changer for email marketing. While email marketing is alive and thriving, strategies must change to capitalize on consumer behavior in order for companies to leverage their email marketing campaigns most effectively.  As we look back over 2010, we can note the shifts in online behavior and use those to project the coming trends for email marketing in 2011.

1. Consumers want real-time value.

The ability to post instant updates, tweets, and comments have trained consumers to expect those things from marketing campaigns as well.  You can begin incorporating real-time value into your email marketing by tracking customer behavior on social networks and using that data to create automated campaigns that deliver relevant messages based on triggers and auto-responders created with eConnect Email.

2. Mobile versions increase in popularity.

Some experts predict that 2011 will see mobile device sales outperforming PC sales for the first time in history.  Because people check email on mobile devices more frequently than ever before, you’ll need to make sure your email templates/ campaigns are designed to accommodate these users.  Curious how your email campaign will display within a specific email system or mobile devices?  We’ve got you covered, check out Inbox & Mobile Previews, a premium feature available within eConnect Email.

3.     Social media takes center stage.

2010 was the year social media came into its own, and 2011 will be the year that it takes center stage in a wide variety of marketing efforts, including email marketing. You can incorporate you social media efforts into your email marketing campaign by including links to Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites within your email campaigns. You can also include eConnect Email’s built in social sharing tools which will allow your subscribers to share your email campaigns via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz (talk about expanding your reach).  Now also available is a feature that allows you to integrate a Facebook “Like” option into your email campaign, the whole process takes less than 10 seconds!

4.     Social media gives back.

Not only can you use email to help promote your social media efforts, but you can also begin using social media to increase email opt-ins. By placing opt-in opportunities on your Facebook fanpage and in your Twitter posts, you can increase the number of overall subscribers.

5.     Dynamic content becomes the norm.

As people share their opinions and product review information, they’ll become more likely to expect businesses to incorporate this data into their marketing campaigns. Using eConnect Email’s Dynamic Content tools will allow you to create a one-to-one email marketing experience which will keep your subscribers engaged!

As email marketing sets sail in 2011, businesses will need to embrace social media and look for tools that will enhance and engage your subscribers like never before.  eConnect Email can help you stay on course by giving you the tools you need to meet and exceed user expectations every time.

The year 2010 brought huge changes in the way consumers interact with companies online. As social media opened the door for increased interaction between businesses and their customers, marketing efforts were often left scrambling to keep up with the changing demands of the new marketing landscape. As we head into 2011, the lessons we learned in 2010 can point us in the right direction and keep us on the right track.

• Customer expectations constantly change.

Because customers can now interact in real time with businesses, they expect faster responses to their concerns and requests. For your email marketing campaigns, this means staying on top of customer interests and providing real-time value. eConnect Email can help you achieve these goals through email automation by the implementation of email triggers and auto-responders.

• Social media is here to stay.

While no one knows what the next big “thing” in social media will be, we do know that social media as a technology is not going anywhere anytime soon. While that idea can be intimidating to some businesses, social media actually provides excellent opportunities to grow both your email marketing list and also engage your social media followers online.  This being said, we have embraced social media and have actually integrated with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.  Click here for information about the integration of social media with eConnect Email.

• Customers expect stellar service.

While customer service has always been a top priority for successful businesses, customers now expect even greater attention to be paid to their needs due to increased interaction online. This means staying on top of subscriber’s preferences and making sure each email arrives at its intended destination.   eConnect Email ensures that your mailing lists stay up to date by using list cleansing, suppression lists, list segmentation as well as giving your subscribers the ability to manage their mailing list subscriptions through the online preference center.

• What works for someone else may not work for you.

It’s easy to put together a list of best practices and slap them up on a website for others to emulate, but building a truly successful email marketing program takes a little more planning and insight. The truth is that what works for one company may not work for another, so it’s vital that you incorporate testing into your email marketing strategy. That’s why I would recommend that you A/B Split Test each and every email campaign.  Split Testing will help ensure that you deliver only the most effective messages to your audience.

With 2010 in the past, businesses will need to take the lessons learned over the past twelve months and build on them to create a strategy that will effectively meet the challenges of 2011. eConnect Email stands ready to help you accomplish this goal with a vast array of tools and features that will help keep your email marketing strategy on the cutting edge.  If you have any questions about the capabilities of our application we’d love to hear from you!

Do you read the welcome emails that show up in your inbox? For most people, the answer would be “probably not.”  For me it depends on whether the subject line captures my attention, whether I remember the company, and whether I think it’s going to be worth my time. Fail to achieve any of these goals and you can kiss your readership good-bye. Superb welcome emails show personalization, relationship, timeliness, and value for the reader. With eConnect Email, these key elements are easy.

Personalization

“Dear Stella” works much better than “Dear New Member” when it comes to capturing a viewer’s attention. Make the reader feel like you value him enough to remember his name and he’s more likely to keep reading past the salutation. In addition, sign your letters with a person’s name rather than with a generic “thank you from the team.” Make your welcome emails look like a letter, not like a form. Keep it personal by using the custom fields/demographics feature that eConnect Email offers to merge subscriber data into each welcome email you send.

Relationship

Your welcome email should say more than “welcome.” It should also include a hint for the reader of what they can expect out of their relationship with you. Intrigue them, but don’t put all your cards on the table at once. For instance, if you’re a fitness gym, talk about a six-week program to achieve the goal the user specified at sign-up.

Timeliness

Have you ever received a welcome email from a company you don’t remember interacting with? This usually happens because the company sends welcome emails out in batches, meaning that an individual subscriber might not receive his letter for two or three weeks when the next batch gets sent out. Keep readers interested in your company by using autoresponders to send an immediate message to new subscribers. Also, don’t forget to personalize the messages too by using eConnect Email’s merge tags, or dynamic content to create unique content for each subscriber.

Value

Because of the sheer number of  email messages competing for your subscribers attention, it’s vital that you communicate value to your readers from the very first email you send. Offer a discount, give them a sneak preview of an upcoming event, or provide a tip of the week.

Takeaway

By incorporating personalized, timely messages that communicate value and build relationships, you can capture your readers’ attention from day one. Use the tools available through eConnect Email’s customizable delivery system to deliver brilliant welcome emails that will leave new subscribers hungry to read more.

I recently subscribed to Entertainment Weekly and naturally gave them my email address when I created my profile online. Not long after, I received an email from Entertainment Weekly that said I could register for the Advance Screening Program and see new Hollywood movies before they hit the theaters.

Unfortunately, the email was too good to be true. After reading the first paragraph it was pretty clear that this email was not recently updated as it referenced Shrek The Third, which came out in 2007 and Dreamgirls, which was released in late 2006. Rush Hour 3 which is pictured in the movie poster was also released in 2007.

It appears that this email was set up as an autoresponder but was later abandoned by Entertainment Weekly. Do they still offer advanced movie screenings to their subscribers? Do they even realize that their subscribers are still receiving these emails? Surely, if they realized that the emails were still being sent they would take the time to update them every few months with more recent movies. It’s just good advertising.

If you have autoresponders and triggers set up, think about their content. Will any of it become dated? How quickly will your autoresponders become irrelevant? How often should you update them? Do you need to set up a system to remind you to update that information frequently to keep everything in your triggers fresh?

Updating your triggers and autoresponders won’t take much time and it will keep your content from looking as dated as last summer’s top ten list.

Our development team is always working to make our email marketing application the most robust in the industry.  We are always introducing new features or helping our clients improve their inbox results.  So, I wanted to take a few minutes to outline some pretty cool features about our system that you may not know about. Take advantage of them – they’ll make you a better email marketer.

1. Snippets: Save yourself some time by reusing key elements to your emails like a header, footer, or side bar.  Snippets are small pieces of HTML that you can create and save and use over and over when you need them.
2. Social Share: Did you hear Twitter is going out of business? Me neither. Social media is here to stay and so is email. Insert a simple tag and boom: your subscribers can share your emails with their networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz.
3. Cart Abandonment: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned.  70%! Wow.  eConnect Email can help you recover those lost sales by firing off triggered emails to each person that abandons your cart with an offer, incentives or reminders to complete the purchase.  Studies show nearly 50% of abandoned shop carts can be recovered and turned into cold hard cash!
4. RSS-to-Email: Why work harder than you have to. With this feature you can update a blog and then reuse your content for your newsletter too, automatically!  Some of our customers do this and use the next item to schedule the deployment and deliver while they sleep. It’s hands-free email marketing, baby.
5. Scheduled, Automatic Mailings: Want your emails to be working for you while you play? Just set it and forget it. The eConnect Email advanced scheduler deploys your emails on time, every time. So while you’re grilling on a Sunday afternoon with Sam Adams, we’ll be delivering your messages whenever and wherever you need ‘em.
6. Inbox Preview & Spam Report: Want to know how your email will render in all the top email providers including the Blackberry and iPhone? With one-click, Inbox Preview will provide a detailed screenshot report ensuring emails appear as intended. In addition, we’ll run it through all of the most popular spam filters (gateway, desktop and server-side) to see if your stuff might be mistaken as spam before you send.
7. Advanced Triggers: eConnect Email can communicate with your CRM. While we provide stock Salesforce.com integration, you may want to integrate with some other system. With a standard SOAP API, you can have us “talk back” to any system you’d like.
8. Dynamic Content: Readers will want to keep reading your stuff if it’s relative to them.  So tailor your emails to your client’s specific interests and you’ll keep them hooked a whole lot longer.  It just takes a little set up but the results will be well worth your time.  It’s no longer a one-size fits all world.
9. Browser Image Editing: We have a simple way to edit your photos or images inside our program.  Photoshop can be overkill and sometimes we just need to make a simple edit.  We have included the most common image editing functions inside of eConnect Email through our integration with Google-owned Picnik. Pretty neat.
10. Auto-responders & Triggered Mailings: Let our system go to work for you once again.  Set up your welcome emails and targeted mailings based on subscriber interactions with an auto-response or triggered mailing series, and relax.
11. API/Integration: For you developers out there, here’s one for you…with our API tools you can integrate your stuff with ours like never before. Want to build a custom reports interface for a client? Want to have your CRM and ours talk to one another? Well now you can.
12. The Free Plan…Forever!: Want something that will really entice you …You can have a free account with us for up to 150 emails per month as long as you wish.  That’s a good one…free emails!  Woo hoo!  Here’s what you get: 150 email/month, store an unlimited number of subscribers, access to all account features, no contract or credit card required!  So give it a spin, activate your free account today and see why eConnect Email is simply, email done better.
13. Email Marketing Services: Need some help with your email design and delivery, or maybe your just too busy doing what you do best? Put us to work for you whether it’s one really important campaign or all of your email marketing efforts. Our professional services team helps marketers design, develop and deploy better email marketing campaigns everyday.
14. The most flexible pricing of any ESP: When it comes to pricing, we’ve learned that flexibility is a cool, refreshing approach. We want you to feel comfortable with how you are billed, whether it be monthly or on a pay as you send basis. You give us an idea of your volume, we’ll show you where you fall. And the greatest part? You’re only charged for the emails you send not the number of contacts you have within your account. Simple.
15. You can talk to us: This one is usually the most pleasant surprise to folks checking us out as a potential solution. Many self-service email service providers even refuse to publish a phone number. That’s ok, but that’s not us. We love to talk to you and want you to feel like we’re in this together. Give us a ring we’re here to help – 888.596.9997.

I wish there was more we could do to get email marketers to use the tools available to them to help increase reader response. So much effort is put into making campaigns look beautiful but often the technology to help increase reader statistics are never used. So, on your next campaign, please consider the following tools to help make your emails a success.

1. Split Testing

This one is a no-brainer.  How awesome would it be to be able to test which headlines or titles would be most successful before sending a newspaper or book to print?  I guarantee if an author could do this he would because more purchases equal dollars in his pocket.  With email marking, this is easy and it’s called split testing. With split-testing, any reputable email platform will allow you stage a few options, hit send and let the system pick the winner based on the criteria you choose (opens and click-thru’s) and then delivers the remainder of your campaign to the winner. We’ve seen open rates at 20% spike to 45% and click-thru rates jump from 4% to over 10%, just by trying two different subject lines.

Benefit? Find out quickly what works and get a better response rate.

2 . List Segmenting

OK- another no brainer: Targeted emails are obviously more well received so let’s stop batching and blasting those emails to the entire mailing list and take a minute to segment that list.  By importing contacts into a single list with relevant fields of data for your market you can then search for specific criteria within that one list.  For instance if you would like to send an email to everyone on your list with a 92009 zip code you can, or even what products or services a group purchased previously and so on.

Benefit? Cleaner management of data, more targeted mailings, greater response rates.

3. Triggered Mailings/Auto-responders

Let your email marketing go to work for you…and forget about it.  It just takes a little time to set up a series of timed emails but once it’s done you can put your feet up and know that your customers are being informed or reminded of your services automatically.  Scenario: Someone visits your web site and requests a white paper or a trial of your software or perhaps they made a purchase.  Connect that information to your platform and stage mailings to “auto” deploy based on the criteria you set.

Benefit? Let technology go to work for you and keep the right (timed) communication in front of your audience.  Multiple touches and BAM!  They take action!

4. Personalization

This is email marketing 101, but do it in a creative fashion.  Think outside the box and work with the data you know about your subscribers.  Why not personalize an email with some details you know that wouldn’t be what you’d typically store in an email database.  Here’s one, “Hi Brett – we feel horrible.  Your birthday was yesterday and we were late.”  How clever.  Now, I may know intuitively you automated this somehow, but you cleverly spin it to sound human (we made an error!).  Have a purchase history on your customers stored somewhere?  Why not use that to merge the last product purchased or the last interaction with you.

Benefit? Email is all about relevancy.  You must know who your prospects and customers are, right?  Why not demonstrate that?  You’ll keep them engaged MUCH longer.

5. Social Follow & Social Sharing

At this point, if you are not working your email marketing and social networking together, you’re probably living under a rock.  You have to go where the eyeballs are and email/social is a powerful one-two punch.  If you have a Twitter feed or a Facebook fan page like us, you need icons in your emails to not only prompt your customers to follow you, but also to share the content inside your emails with their networks.  Forward to a friend is still a standard and many subscribers will use this, but the NEW forward is really the share feature.  It allows folks to connect this with their personal and professional networks quickly and easily and may garner you some new subscribers.

Benefit? Everyone knows hundreds, sometimes thousands of people you or I don’t. Why not tap that? Let them remarket on your behalf.

So there you have it.  These things are within your grasp today, and as always, the eConnect Email marketing platform lets you set these things up quite easily.  If you need help setting any of these things up in your account, as always, you can reach out to us at anytime.