Inbound Marketing Basics: Email Marketing

Email marketing is the final step in your inbound marketing efforts. (Well, almost. The final step is hopefully a sale.)

All of your inbound marketing work has led up to this moment. Your prospective customer has given you permission to start a conversation with them. You only have one chance, so don’t blow it.

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What is email marketing?

When someone reads your blog and then exchanges their email for your lead magnet, they give you permission to send email to them. Email marketing consists of sending a series of emails to a prospect with the hope that they will eventually become a customer.

What’s truly beautiful about email marketing is that the whole conversation can be automated, just like the rest of your inbound marketing system. Once you write your email series (or several series, depending on how many buyer personas, lead magnets, etc. that you have), you put the whole thing on autopilot with a powerful program like HubSpot and then sit back and watch.

Inbound email marketing strategy

Inbound marketing is about attracting potential customers, not shoving your product in front of them and yelling at them to buy from you. But wait, isn’t that what email marketing is all about? Not at all.

Email marketing is about giving people something they want, something valuable, not blasting them with buy, buy, buy. When you give them something of value, you build trust. Heck, they might even start to like you.

Your top secret strategy for creating the most effective email marketing system is simple: Be useful.

Email marketing content

Now we get to the heart of the matter. The content of every email you send is of vital importance. One slip and they might be gone forever.

If you’re going to email valuable content to your prospective customer, you first need to know what is valuable. Don’t email content that you think is valuable. Email content that your prospect thinks is valuable.

To understand what content is valuable to your prospect, you first need to know and understand them. Which, of course, you do because you already put in all that work on your buyer personas. (You did that, right?)

Conclusion

There is far more to email marketing than what I can give to you in this article. Today, I only wanted to introduce you to the idea of using email marketing as a key piece of your inbound marketing efforts. Subscribe below, and when I start our series about email marketing, you’ll be the first to know.