email marketing

How to Use Email to Lure in Your Small Business Leads

small business leads

Pretend you’re trying to lure in a stray cat. How would you go about it?

You’re not going to run toward it, arms flailing and screaming “Here, kitty, kitty” at the top of your lungs. You’ll scare it away.

You’re won’t try to trap it, either. You’ll have the cat, but it won’t be a happy one, and you’re going to have to work even harder to earn its trust.

No, what you’re going to do is lure it slowly, over time. You’re going to figure out whether it prefers Fancy Feast or Friskies. You’re going to move their food bowl closer and closer to your back deck. You’re going to keep tempting it until it’s finally purring in your lap.

Here’s a secret: Your small business leads have a lot in common with your new cat. They too require luring and nurturing. And an email campaign is a great way to make that happen.

Here’s how to do it.

5 Steps for Luring in Small Business Leads

Start With the Right Tools

Lead nurturing is a highly automated process. You need to know exactly what a customer is looking at, clicking on and interacting with. That’s because these behaviors are going to be the key to knowing how to personalize your marketing.

You can do it, but you can’t do it alone.

A basic customer relationship management (CRM) tool is an absolute must. These tools are effectively designed to manage your relationship with your customers — not just across marketing, but sales, customer service and more.

There are plenty of other tools you should consider adding to your arsenal, as well.

Find a Connection

Many of our emails seem to come from robots these days. So much so, that if we see a message pop up that looks like it’s written by a real, live person, that’s often enough to shock us into opening it.

People naturally crave connection, so it’s best to have one salesperson running point through the entire customer journey. Each email needs to be signed by that person – even if they are being sent automatically. That way, it’s not “Ugh, another email from Company X,” it’s “Hey, Jane from the bakery just emailed to tell me about her new cookie!”

Use a Natural Progression

Back to your new cat. Remember how you kept moving its food bowl closer and closer until it finally hopped right up on your patio table? That’s how you need to nurture your small business leads.

You need to hold your would-be customer’s hand through a series of emails with plenty of different types of content. No email should ever end without telling them the specific step they should take next, and each step should bring them closer to the finish line.

A plain, introductory email can lead them to your latest blog post, which is embedded with your latest video, which talks about the complementary whitepaper or eBook they’ll get when they fill out this simple form.

When your email campaign follows a natural progression, you don’t have a cat running circles in the yard; you have one who knows exactly where to go to find what it wants.

Test, Test, Test!

We cannot overemphasize the importance of testing your email campaign (or any marketing campaign, really) on a regular basis.

You might think that a flaw in your plan will be easy to notice. After all, if you stop making sales, you’ll know what you’re doing isn’t working. But regular testing allows you to see the problem — and fix it — before it starts affecting your bottom line.

Don’t Let Your Small Business Leads Go Unnurtured!

One of the biggest reasons that leads get lost is because no one is constantly nurturing them. Don’t let your potential customers fall out of your sales funnel — hold their hand the whole way!

If an email campaign seems exhausting, Mischa Communications can take some of the weight off your shoulders. Contact us now.