How to send the right email to the right person at the right time – Inbound 17

Email, as we saw previously, is essential to the success of your educational communication strategy. From the moment you have gathered prospects, you need to captivate them, be active, and exchange content with them. The goal is to come as close as possible to their expectations. To do this, you will need to send them relevant emails. But for these emails to reach the right prospect quickly and easily, you must follow certain steps when creating and sending them.

4 best practices for writing a good email:

1. Define the target you are addressing
2. Choose the right contacts in your database to reach the audience
3. Send the right content at the right time to the right audience
4. Use this content to inform and help your leads so that they subsequently become clients

Who receives the email, and when should you send it?

You must always bear in mind that a truly successful email must deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.

To achieve this, you must first define the audience.

Segment your contacts according to context and content: that is, according to the mindset of your leads and the data you have about your ideal customer.

For example, you may have several leads who are still in the "Awareness" mindset. That is, they are experiencing a problem and are searching online for content that will help them understand their situation. These leads are generally not ready to become customers immediately. You would therefore prefer to send them educational emails on the subjects they care about. Concretely, someone wondering why their website receives little traffic might be interested in articles such as "The 5 elements that drive visitors away from a website" or "Why is my bounce rate so high?". Over time, this type of email will interest them and position you as experts in their eyes, increasing the chances that they will turn to you when they decide to rebuild or work on their website.

Conversely, leads in the "Consideration" mindset already know the origin of their problem. Using the same example, their website attracts few visitors. This could be due to slow loading times, insufficient online presence, or poor SEO. These leads will open emails that offer solutions: "How do I improve my website's speed?", "How do I improve my organic search ranking?", "10 ways to attract visitors to my website". These leads are more action-oriented, closer to the third and final mindset: that of decision, where they will choose a service provider to meet their needs. And if they have been nurtured by relevant emails, that provider could well be you!

Bear in mind that sending targeted content considerably increases open rates and click-through rates. Emails sent with a segmentation strategy receive 62% more clicks than emails sent from unsegmented lists. This is why it is important to know the mindset your prospect is in when they join your database.

What data should you use to improve segmentation?

Here are a few examples of data you can use to better segment your contacts:

• You can segment people by geographic area using criteria such as IP address, time zone, area code, and postal address.
• You can use company data about a person, such as company size, type of business (B2B, B2C, for-profit…) and industry.
• You can also segment your leads (prospects) by: their role, their seniority, their department, or their specific function within a department.

If you use a CMS (content management system) that can track a lead's behaviour on your website, you can use it to assess the subjects (emails and articles) that interest them and how much they interest them. For example, you can see downloaded conversion files (such as an eBook or white paper), opened emails, and pages viewed on your site.

The segmentation strategy protects your database and prevents you from being flagged as SPAM

The main reason why you must use a segmentation strategy is to maintain your contact database as it is. It is important to know that 25% of a contact list decays within 1 year, meaning that from a list of 10,000 contacts you will be left with only 7,500.

You must be very careful — your email-sending method must not be confused with the bad practice of constantly sending unsolicited emails. These diminish the value of your brand, and your emails will in that case be treated as SPAM.

This is why you must segment your contacts, send targeted content, and complement your emails with blog articles to ensure your lists remain intact and grow over time.

Content is the key to success

How do you decide what type of content to send to your prospects and customers?

Here are a few quick suggestions on the different types of content you can send, and how they align with the active research process of buyers:

• Hold on to content so you can reuse it (videos, blog articles, free tools, and high-level guides). These are genuinely useful for captivating and educating prospects, and will help push them further along their active research journey.
• At the consideration stage, you answer questions before they are asked, in anticipation. During this stage, think about content suggestions to send by email (case studies, Q&A sheets, white papers, and third-party reviews…)
• At the decision stage, you should send free trials, ROI reports, product demos, consultations, and estimates or quotes, depending on your industry.

It is obvious that you will not win a customer from the very first email — you will need to redouble your efforts and build a genuine relationship of trust with your prospect so that they are ready to work with you. This is where you take charge and educate your lead. Most prospects are not ready to buy; it is up to you to send them a series of useful, relevant pieces of content to draw them towards you.

To achieve this goal, a few best practices:

• First, use responsive templates. This will ensure that your emails look elegant and well-designed across multiple platforms: desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Next, think about using large font sizes, which will give you better readability on both large and small screens. Space out the content as much as possible.
• Finally, do not forget to use clear and concise messages. People are increasingly inclined to skim your emails, regardless of the device on which they read them. You must get your message across despite a quick scan.

By applying these tips in the creation of your materials and content, your readers will see an excellent email whatever device they choose to use, and they will only be satisfied.

4 best practices for an email that hits its target

• Define a clear objective

Setting an objective before writing an email is paramount — it will help you understand why you are sending it. An example of a good objective: "Ask customers to register for an online seminar". It is clear, achievable, and quantifiable.

Beware of vague objectives, such as "increase your click-through rate". This is unlikely to work because it is unreliable and takes no account of your prospect. You need to think beyond click-through rates. You must think about the action you want your recipient to take. Be very precise in your calls to action and above all think about your future customer.

• Personalise the email

The email you send to your prospect must give the impression that it is addressed personally to them. Your future customer must feel unique and must not think that the email they received has already been sent to a large number of prospects before them.

Here are a few tips for personalising your email:

• First of all, keep in mind that you are sending this email to a person, not a company. Therefore use the name of the person you are addressing.
• Find out about your prospects — the more you know about the company, the better you will reach your target.
• It goes without saying that you will use your own name for the sender address alongside your company name. This is how you will begin building a relationship with your prospect.

Personalisation has an enormous impact on your engagement.

• Prospects who receive personalised emails generate a 20% increase in sales.

• 40% of consumers tend to trust and buy from retailers who personalise the shopping experience.

• Personalised emails improve click-through rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10%.

• Encourage action

This practice reinforces the usefulness of having clearly defined an objective to achieve. A call-to-action (CTA) button will help you make that objective a reality.

Incorporate short action verbs to simplify understanding and save time. Your leads only need to click, for example: "download"…

All of this becomes even more important given the growing number of people reading emails on their phones. Make good use of CTAs that facilitate understanding, align them with your offer. And do not forget your signature containing an attractive CTA.

Another way to increase engagement with your emails is to extend your reach by enabling your recipients to share your email content. Most email tools allow you to activate social sharing buttons directly in the editor.

You can also encourage your readers to share your content.

• Test and analyse

Your email must be checked and analysed before sending.

There are specific metrics that tell you whether your overall method is properly implemented: bounces are good indicators to consider when assessing the state of your contact database.

• The bounce rate should be monitored. This is the percentage of emails that did not reach recipients due to an address error. There are soft bounces, which are temporary — often occurring when the recipient's mailbox is full or the server goes down. And hard bounces, which are permanent errors, meaning the addresses do not exist or have been deactivated. Both forms of bounce must be taken into account when building your contact database, to avoid an excessively high bounce rate.
• The open rate only indicates the effectiveness of your email subject line, not that of your offer. It is nonetheless an important indicator: to convince your leads, you first need to encourage them to open your email. And the subject line is the only tool available to you at this stage of the process.
• Click-through rates allow you to see which emails have been opened and by whom. It is not the number of clicks that matters — what matters is seeing who opened the emails and why.
• You must know which links your prospects clicked on. This will tell you whether your CTAs helped you achieve your objectives.
• Check the popularity of URL clicks, social shares, the unsubscribe rate, and the CTA click-through rate.
• Verify all results by running tests: use them to learn more about the relationship between your prospects and the emails you send.

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You now know how to send the right email to the right person at the right time. If you follow these best practices in their entirety, bearing both content and context in mind, you will maximise your chances of turning your prospects into new customers.

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