Stop Bombarding Your Prospects with Batch and Blast Email

prospect email best practices

Think about it: Do you like it when you are inundated with email from a company listing offers and new services? Does it get your attention? Do you feel like reading every one of these emails and acting upon them? If you answered no to all of these questions and you’re actually annoyed by the virtual buckets of email you receive every day, you’re ready to accept that the days of batch and blast email marketing drives are over.

If you want results, you’ll need to set up a real marketing campaign. Don’t be scared to move away from the email approach – you can still email customers, just make the communication more effective. Our simple steps to gathering quality information about your leads will help you set up a worthwhile marketing campaign.

Establish a better marketing campaign foundation. Determine what it is that you want from your prospects (is it information, subscriptions). Giving them quality content on your web site and in the emails you do send will help them better understand you and help you gather what it is you need from them. Don’t inundate them with useless information and numerous forms, for example, but give them relevant and useful information to help them with their purchasing decision in well-timed emails.

Personalize your emails accordingly. Use emails to gather information and to further segment your prospects into at least four or five categories. This way you can personalize according to their likes and practice target marketing. No one has time to sift through generic emails, but if you can target a customer’s specific needs or likes, then they are more apt to read the email. Studies have actually shown that clients will assist you when it comes to gathering information just so you send them something relevant.

Provide decent and thoughtful content. The old batch and blast method provides lots of leads, but if you want quality leads, then you’ll want to provide prospects with good quality content. And in keeping with the last point, if you send the material to the right people at the right time, you will have a better chance of piquing the interest of your prospects and keeping it.

Interact with your customers via email or on your web site. Getting them to fill out surveys or forms via either medium, for example, can help you decide who you’re marketing to. You can increase the incentive for gathering information by offering gifts or rewards to those who fill out surveys or forms – for example, a free gift on your birthday or a percentage off for taking the survey.

Use marketing automation to help you. Emails used to be stand-alone so you couldn’t see what other interactions your prospects were having with your company. But with marketing automation software, you can perform multi-step campaigns, link web behavior with email behavior and nurture your prospects as they travel through the marketing funnel.

How do you see email campaigns working with new marketing techniques?