10 Tips To Convert Prospects Into Customers
When it comes to running a successful online business, it’s a well known fact that you have to build an email list of prospects. These are people who have shown an interest in your business and given you permission to email them more information about your products or services.
Most people use email to some extent in the daily workings of their business or personal life. Email marketing has proven to be not only an effective, but also a cost-efficient way to keep in touch with prospects, no matter where they are living in the world.
But just having prospects on your email list isn’t enough. You need to convert prospects into customers.
FREE Checklist: Create An Effective Sales Funnel
How To Convert Prospects Into Customers With Email Marketing
An email list is a collected list of email addresses that are either given by customers when they make a purchase or by prospects that have filled out a form to receive your messages. Sometimes they fill out a form to get a free item, or just because they want to get the information from you. These email addresses are collected into a database that allows you to easily send out messages both immediately and automated to all the people on your list, or specific ones that you choose.
1. Get Emails Opened
You can send all the emails you want to, but if no one opens and reads them, they won’t get you any results. Start out right by setting up the right kind of email so it looks and reads in a friendly way. Take the time to create subject lines that get emails opened. Plus, don’t forget the pre-header space. This is the area of the content inside the email that users can see before opening. Make the most of this area.
2. Find Ways To Connect
Don’t create ‘no-reply’ emails. Today, people like to feel as if they can easily reach the person who sent the email. Allow them and invite them to reply to your emails. If you’re too busy to do this, you can hire a virtual assistant to check the email and help manage your  inbox. But if you have time, answering these personally will help your audience like you even more.
3. Focus On Content
It goes without saying that your emails are there to inform your audience about your products and services. However, one of the most important aspects of your email marketing is the content you deliver. To convert prospects to customers you have to focus on delivering some of your best content to your email subscribers. That will encourage them to keep opening them and clicking through.
4. Make Sales
Every email shouldn’t be trying to sell something. But that doesn’t mean that you should never send a sales related email. Writing emails to sell is a completely different type of writing emails to communicate. Just for reference’s sake, what you’re reading right now is an example of writing to communicate. You’re given a lot of information and (I hope!) finding the information valuable. Emails that are exclusively focused on making sales use tools of the trade like emotional buying triggers that help a reader choose to make a purchase.
5. Get Traffic
In order to convert prospects into customers, leverage the email subscribers you already have by sending them to your website for more freebies to segment them better. Then provide more content in order to educate them. This is the beginning of a new email marketing sales funnel. The more that you can segment your audience, the more you can offer products and services that specifically fulfill their needs.
6. Consider Lifetime Value
As you move your list members through your funnel, segmenting them more as you go, think about how important each list member is to your profits. When you put your list members first, you’ll see a bigger return on investment.
7. Pick the Right Email Provider
This is probably one of the most important aspects that you can leverage to make your email list perform best for your business. Read all the terms of service for your chosen email provider, then try them out using their free or low-cost trial options. You can even buy a couple months to run a short campaign and see how it works for your needs.
8. Use A Branded Email
Don’t use a free email account for your email list. Not only do most autoresponder services make it against their terms of service, it’s just not very professional and makes you look untrustworthy. Yourname@Yourbusiness is going to perform a lot better.
9. Test Your Time
The time you send your email out matters a great deal, because most people check their email at certain times. Your email autoresponder software will have stats about when people open emails overall on their service. Start there, but test out other times too so that you can adjust for your audience. This means you will see how many of your email recipients actually click through to your website or sales page. With this information you can judge what is useful information in your campaigns, as well as what isn’t.
10. Segment Your Audience
Your autoresponder can use tagging or other methods to segment your list members. In addition, you can create content upgrades that help segment the audience better. Reading emails is intimate. Clicking to open an email only happens if the email subject line somehow connects emotionally or mentally with the reader. Email is the virtual version of a personal, one-to-one connection. Though you may send an email out to 5,000 people on a list, each one of those individuals believes you are speaking just to him or her.
Free Checklist:Â Create An Effective Sales Funnel
An effective email sales funnel will help you to make the most out of all your subscribers and convert prospects into customers who are ready to buy. It can put your business on autopilot if you structure it the right way. To learn more about conversion strategy marketing, download my free Sales Funnel Checklist which outlines the best practices on how to convert leads into clients so both you and your client get the best possible result.