Let me paint a picture for you. It's the holidays. In the first week you sign up for a gym membership because you have all this extra time and a new-found lust for life! You go for the first few days, but then the general smell and collective grunting start to get a bit much, so you decide the gym isn't really your thing. 

It's now week six and you're practically an extension of the sofa, watching serial killer documentaries and wondering whether you're in the right profession after all, only to hear a Ping! An email from that bloody gym. While the offer did look pretty cool, you ignore it. It now seems like less of a great offer and more just of a rude awakening to the life you now lead. So you unsubscribe from receiving emails and get back to your killer insights. 

 

Sound familiar? 

 

As a digital marketer with loads of contacts, you have to remember that each of them is in a different stage of the buyer's journey. Have a quick look at your inbound flywheel shrine. Go on, I know it's there. Take a minute to think about the core values of inbound. It's about attracting customers through relevant and helpful content that adds value to their stage of the buyer's journey


You need to cater your emails for people in the awareness, consideration and decision stages and for those who have bounced altogether! 

Sending the right email to the right person at the right time, means you have a much better chance of converting leads into opportunities because you are sending the most relevant messages based on where they are and what they're looking for. 

 

So buckle up, let's stay out of the junk and create that happy balance between context and content, and discover the three components of sending crazy good emails. 

 

Want content ideas that convert? Grab our FREE content e-Book here!

 

1. Create the Right Email

This comes down to the content you're sending. Remember those words on your shrine: Inbound is all about treating your customers as humans. You can do this super effectively by marrying up the context with the content you send them. Receiving emails for a part of the buyer's journey you haven't reached or have already passed can leave a company looking pushy, untrustworthy, and out of touch with your needs. 

 

You know those stock photos that everyone thinks are staged, where there's a lady laughing at her salad? Well fun fact: totally not staged. She actually just received an email that served the right content that was not only interesting and exciting, but also contextual. 

 

Sending the right email to those reading it is how you can develop trust, as well as create a healthy marketing strategy. Maybe even healthier than that lady's salad. 

 

2. Send the Email to the Right Person 

The way to send the right email to the right person is all about segmentation. Segmentation involves dividing your contacts into smaller groups based on their similarities. It allows you to tailor your message to be more relevant and engaging to the lucky recipient. 

The most snazzy businesses segment for their subscribers, leads and customers. 

These segments are extra important in that they allow you to send emails not only to your leads, but to your existing customers. Got to keep 'em wanting more. 

Just like your buyer's journey, your contact's lifecycle stages signal a change of your content. They provide that sweet, sweet info that you need to send relevant and timely content. 

 

3. Send the Email at the Right Time 

If that gym had sent you a cool content offering a few days after your first experience, would you have been more inclined to go back? Armed with a clothes peg and some hardcore headphones, I'd say you'd probably consider it. Timing is everything. Delivered at the wrong time, the content won't be nearly as impactful. 

So what is the magic formula for sending a perfectly timed email, I hear you ask? Well, it's all about where our contacts are in the buyer's journey, and pairing the right content with that stage. 

As different content appeals to different buyers at different stages of the buying process, your main focus needs to be on relevance. 

Perfection is hard to achieve, so providing relevant content at the right time means we can rely on 'send time personalisation' to take the guesswork out of the picture. 

Send time personalisation uses the data you have on your contacts, like when they open, click or convert, and schedules your emails through automation processes, to send when you know your contacts are most likely to engage! Nifty, right?

 

Sending the right email, to the right person at the right time is all about finding the right content, the right segment and the best time to send. Channeling the human I know you are through your email marketing strategy, will guarantee that it's all 'cushty' in the conversion department and that your customers are very, very happy people.

 

Click here to download the '30 Greatest Lead Gen Tips, Tricks & Ideas' Ebook!