Emails have been among the most effective ways to reach out to your prospects for years now. Its simplicity and convenience make it the most sought method deployed by several businesses in every industry. The rise in the demands of email appending services and email data validation clearly establishes the popularity and power of emails in connecting to your clients.
A follow-up email is an excellent way to draw the prospects’ attention and persuade them to convert. These emails are all about what you want. However, it is important to deliver what clients want to achieve that objective. Services like data scrubbing, skip tracing, and email verification helps you gain great insight into your client. This helps in crafting effective follow-up emails that are most likely to yield conversions.
Importance of follow-up emails
When it comes to email marketing, follow-up emails are often more crucial than initial emails. It is important to understand that initial emails are just a small part of a larger picture. To complete the picture, you need to make effective and right kinds of follow-ups. You cannot deny that a deal takes dozens of contacts before you can seal it. In nearly 70 percent of cases, initial emails go unnoticed. It is the follow-up that does the task for you.
You can use data mining services to know vital details about the prospect that helps in crafting the right content. Also, these services along with data appending help target your efforts in the right direction and save plenty of time and human hours. If you can craft the right follow-up email, the time it right, and maintain the right frequency, it can delegate excellent marketing results.
Possible reasons for the failure of follow-up email
Despite its popularity, many businesses fail to draw maximum benefits from follow-up emails. One reason for failure is random emails. You need data scrubbing services and data verification services to ensure that you are sending emails to the right audience. These services help you pick the right targets and provide accurate information about them. There can be several other reasons for follow-up email failure related.
Uninteresting subject line
Businesses in every domain are using email to approach prospects and lead generation. For that reason, it can be easily assumed that your prospect already has a large number of emails in their inboxes. To get noticed, an enticing and compelling subject line can make a remarkable difference. Nearly 50 percent of the customers go through an email for an interesting subject.
Irrelevant content and no context
A common mistake many businesses do is not classifying their client base. You need to know what your customers prefer, need, and expect. Email appending services can help you get this insight and craft emails that interest every prospect. Such information is instrumental in ensuring that what clients get is as close to what they want as possible. This also helps you to create a relevant context for your email that makes it more understandable and relatable.
Absence of a clear CTA
The primary object of follow-up emails is to persuade the prospect to act. Ultimately you want to lead generation and convert your leads. Including a CTA or Call To Action is the best way to make your prospects act. For instance, you can add a link to your campaign page and ask the reader to click at the end of the email. Such actions elevate the conversion chances multiple times.
Wrong timing
Reaching out to your audience at the most appropriate time is crucial in ensuring productive outcomes. You need to study the trends and behavior of your audience to know the right timing. This can be easily done using data scrubbing that keeps you abstract with the prospects’ behavioral and contact information. With data verification, you can ensure that your efforts do not go wasted and your emails are reaching the right individual.
Disclosure of custom field accidentally
You cannot afford to have mistakes and misses in follow-up emails. Many companies prefer to have templates to ensure they include all vital information. However, this also increases the chance of mistakenly leaving a custom field unfilled. This reflects negligence and unprofessionalism to the prospective clients and they may lose interest in your emails.
Addressing only the top players
Decision-making in businesses is no more an individual task but a group activity. You need to be cognizant of this fact and be courteous to all the people in the decision-making chain. Often marketers focus on the people they are the key buyers and leave others unaddressed. Addressing all the players in your follow-up emails escalate the chances of a positive response.
Lack of personalization
One way to make follow-up emails stand out in the crowded inbox of your prospect is to personalize them according to the recipients. In the fiercely competitive market customers have become more demanding than ever. They have plenty of options and pick only the ones that deliver to their needs. Use data mining services to know your customers through different platforms and personalize follow-up emails to influence your prospects.
Insufficient research
Before you send an email, you must know whom you are approaching. Insight into the preferences, likes, and dislikes of the prospects helps you customize the email and deliver useful offers. You can create a bond with your prospects immediately. For instance, a prospect named Jonathan has all his social media accounts with the name Jon, making it clear that this is the name he prefers. Addressing him with the preferred name can draw his attention in no time.
Effective ways to fix follow-up email failure
In the present day and age, marketing has become extremely time-bound. You need to be quick and straightforward with your prospects. Many businesses seek technology to ensure that they are the first ones to contact the audience for a given service or product. However, in this quest, they often overlook the importance of being human. While the first email is mostly considered bot-generated by the prospect, a follow-up email indicates its personal. Here are some ways you can create effective follow-up emails to boost your marketing campaigns for greater profitability and higher ROIs.
Catch the lead with a creative subject
The subject line establishes the fate of your email. It is the piece of content that the prospects read first. It distinguishes your email from the rest. A catchy, relevant, and luring subject line increases the opening and reply rate of the follow-up email. You can entice the prospect by creating interest in the follow-up by adding ‘we forget to mention..’ in the subject.
Stress on personalization
Personalize the follow-up email to address the prospects’ specific problems and resonate with their interests. This helps to build a connection with the prospect beyond professional terms and make them feel valued. Also, ensure that you are sending the emails to the right people through email verification to avoid spam generation and wastage of time and effort. Such personalized emails are generally responded to 10 percent more than generic follow-up emails.
Add subtle humour to create interest
Marketing is all about playing with the psychology of your target audiences and influencing them for conversion. Humor can be a great tool in achieving that goal. However, you need to be cognizant of the fine line between humor and unprofessional. Be subtly funny or stay formal to avoid a negative reaction from the prospect.
Add proper context and deliver value
Creating a context boosts the chances of your email being read multiple folds. You can mention any previous interaction, a common reference, or simply add a personal touch using information about the prospects. Use email data validation to ensure you approach the prospects at the right connection point. Try to provide value by including solutions to the specific problems of prospective customers.
Capitalize on social proofs
Social proofs such as reviews and ratings can also convince the prospects about your credibility. You can filter out the prospect audience using data appending and provide them proof of your quality services and products. Studies have shown that such proofs are trusted by over 80 percent of people and increase your conversion significantly.
Pay attention to timing
Timing is critical in email marketing in many ways. Firstly, you need to respect the time of your prospect. Wait and give enough time to your prospect to respond before sending a follow-up. Create a proper schedule for follow-up so that your emails are neither too soon nor too late. Also, add clear context to your previous interaction and save the prospects’ time that goes in searching the older emails to understand the current one.
Add compelling CTA
Even if the prospects open and read your email, there are chances that they forget or miss to respond. A call to action is a way to make your prospect react to the email immediately. You can include any type of CTA such as a link to your landing page, campaign page, or user information form. You can make these CTAs time-bound like link text saying, ‘40% off sale ends tomorrow and include a hint to them in the subject line to increase the effectiveness.