In a previous post we learned about “The 5 value propositions of marketing automation” and in one of the points I mentioned the topic of “Increase Email Prospecting” in a general way. In this post I will develop a more detailed guide on how to increase prospecting for new customers and nurturing existing ones through email.
Despite the fact that digital tools have multiplied the resources and prospecting channels that a commercial team can have, email is still a key element in marketing campaigns. Could it be considered the best communication channel? It's definitely debatable, but the numbers don't lie, based on data from Salesforce, email marketing has an average ROI of 3800% for every dollar invested, followed by social media marketing. Also Chief's Marketers annual survey, shows that email is the best channel for generating leads.
The question here would be why is Email Marketing still stronger than social media? From my point of view, I consider that social networks are a way to keep up with friends and family (gossip), people go to social networks to see photos and updates from people they know and added to their friends list because they are interested in their lives. Do you subscribe to the social networks of your favorite companies? On the contrary, email is a more professional medium and people are waiting to receive information about products or services through this channel, in addition to that, most of the people on the internet "if not all" have an email, which today in day is necessary to open an account on any digital platform. In a social network, your publication is limited to the number of fans you have in your account and only some will have the opportunity to see your publication in their news, while if you create an email campaign of 1000 people, you know that at least 800 of them will have your email in the inbox.
Remember that the email’s content must be valuable information that allows us to awaken interest in the prospect or client and thus seek to know the particularities of each one in detail, once that is done, then we can proceed to offer the specific solutions we have for him. To reinforce the relevance of this channel, it is essential to detect the optimal sending times, create interactive emails and above all understand the interaction of the prospect with your email.
To carry out effective email campaigns, it’s recommended to use an automation tool that allows you to understand what actually happens when someone opens your email. I want to share some of the features that Pardot has to create successful email campaigns.
This is one of the most complex and robust functionalities that Pardot has, it allows marketers to create automated prospecting flows more intelligently, for example, under specific conditions and rules or characteristics that the prospect requires. A practical use case would be when you offer various services and you want to know which service the prospect might be most interested in, so you send an email with information about the VALUE of all the services and through engagement studio you can find out if the email was opened, if the prospect clicked on any of the links, among other things.
By knowing this, we understand what the next step would be for the prospect in our prospecting flow and therefore the next email will carry information of greater interest to the specific prospect. Are you interested in knowing how to configure Pardot’s Engagement Studio? Stay tuned as a specific article about this is coming soon.
Pardot allows you to classify prospects or customers in different lists depending on the interaction with our content, the List Emails functionality is commonly used to send mass emails to specific lists, an example of this functionality would be when you have an exclusive offer or you want to promote a specific product for a particular list. Again, we will take a deep dive into this functionality very soon, so stay tuned.
Can you imagine answering emails manually every time a potential prospect fills out a form? Pardot lets you automatically send follow-up emails after a prospect completes a desirable action. As a prospector, you always seek to obtain more information about your prospects, so you can place a form in which the prospect gives us an email, name, surname, etc. Once the form is filled out, an email will be automatically sent to him/her with an eBook, attachment or information that you want to share to this specific prospect. We will touch on this very soon, remember to subscribe to our RSS feed by adding this link to your feeder of preference and get instant updates on our new articles!
As the name implies, this functionality sends an email to a single customer with very focused information. Honestly, I have not found much value in this specific functionality since it is intended for vendors who work within Pardot.
In addition to the functionalities that were mentioned above, Pardot allows us to create different email templates that can be reused, as well as scheduling email sending, it also gives us the ability to perform A / B tests, personalize emails with the contact’s and sender’s information and has an email analysis system (reporting) that allows us to know how many times the email has been sent, how many times it was opened, if it was rejected, among other things.
By using Pardot, you will be able to understand the specifics of what your subscribers want to know about your business, every marketer’s end goal is to drive conversations and when it comes to conversations, there is no better channel than email.
