Email for Conversion — 5 Important Components for Converting Prospects to Customers

by Cyndie Shaffstall

The harder you make it for your prospect to become a customer, the fewer will.

Most marketers agree that lead generation and lead conversion are the bedrocks of their efforts. As you scrutinize your internal process designed to convert prospects to customers, remember that in order to consistently convert you must at least:

• Provide a clear, concise path to becoming a customer.
• Enable your prospect to become a customer.
• Resolve any concerns your prospect has about becoming a customer.

1. Be timely, relevant, and easy

Conversion begins at the moment of acquisition — waiting to engage is the kiss of death if you hope to hold the attention of your new prospect. We humans have a very short memory — and attention span — and marketers who allow the opportunity for one to forget a recent engagement will be saddled with lower retention and conversion rates over the customer’s lifecycle.

Your first touch to new prospects must be prompt and direct as you remind the recipient of how the relationship began and, ideally, lay out the path for becoming a highly valued customer. Using email, converting prospects to leads can be quite easy and when you group likeminded prospects into segments, you can also create highly relevant content appropriate for this audience.

When relevant content is bolstered by personalization, your messaging can transcend a timid first step and become a flat stone skipping through sales ripples reducing necessary touches to a simple few.

Tracking of clicked links and buttons within your email will enable you to appropriately respond to engagement with auto-responders recognizing specific engagement activities. Auto-responders are unique tools for reminding the prospect of their engagement with your brand and help them to resume the process if they’ve become distracted somewhere along the way.

2. Provide high-value content

Inbound marketing represents one of the most successful approaches to converting prospects to leads, leads to subscribers, and subscribers to customers. Your content should be well written and professionally designed while establishing your brand as an expert.

Your eBooks, slide decks, videos, webcasts, demos, and the like must be honest and forthright in order to establish your credibility, and should not shy away from areas where your competitors have you bested. Recognizing and addressing these areas will foster trust and help you to build upon these new, budding relationships.

When you post inbound content to your website, you will drive repeat visits; visits that naturally develop, deepen, and nurture the relationship to the next stage.

Inbound content such as blogs, videos, and online tools also extend the time of visit and this is an important metric that contributes to your search-engine optimization effort.

Though content at your site is important for this reason and others, resist the urge to keep your content to yourself. Create partnerships with companies that will post your content or choose apps such as SlideShare, YouTube, or edocr.com to syndicate your content beyond your own reach. Requiring a form submission to download your content will result in capturing some leads, but you will benefit far more from unrestricted content that is shared liberally.

3. Convey urgency and scarcity

Certainly not news to most seasoned marketers, urgency and exclusivity still motivate prospects to act more quickly. Procrastination is a sales killer, so text within your email reminding the recipient of how few widgets remain or how few days to buy the widget remains, can dispel bouts of procrastination that grips many of us at one time or another.

Positioning your offer as time-sensitive, quantity-bound, or event-based will boost your conversions, but the lack of instructions on how to take advantage of your urgent or scare offer can easily negate the benefit gained.

4. Provide instant gratification

In our email marketing, it’s key to first identify and then solve the customer’s problem — as quickly as possible. Your customers have come to expect and even demand instant gratification in not just electronic platforms but physical as well. (It’s unbelievable that Amazon is currently testing same-day drone delivery and delivery before we’ve even ordered in order to meet such demands.) You must strive to deliver now.

In your emails, recognize that your clients want it now and use words such as instant, immediate, and now as trigger words to put them in the buying mood. If your product doesn’t lend itself to being delivered via drone so they can get it now, offer an instant rebate or immediate download. By solving your customer’s problem more quickly than your competitor, you will be more likely to gain the coveted conversion.

As with urgency and scarcity, it’s imperative that you are clear on what steps must be taken in order to achieve instant gratification

5. Test, track, and tweak

Don’t guess at what it takes to reduce clicks and shorten your sales cycle, nor should you be a focus group of one. While your opinion about what works and what does not is important, you are not the customer. Use your opinion and expertise as the starting point for your testing, but analytics must be used to prove or disprove your educated guesses.

As you begin to understand areas or components slowing your conversions, consider paths that provide information in a more compact and effective manner. Videos are a great solution and a preferred vehicle for many, but podcasts, self-running demos, and other online options are also ideal for replacing overhead-heavy meetings, site visits, and other person-to-person events.

There are myriad sales-funnel processes but all can benefit from trusting relationships and consistent experiences. Your blast, drip, and nurture emails should be professional, branded, and graduated in order to nudge your constituents along. It’s important to remind your prospects why they should choose you — both explicitly and obscurely.

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