5 Ways Email Marketing Can Enhance Your Inbound Strategy

According to an estimate by Not Another State of Marketing, 77% of email marketers have seen an increase in engagement over the last 12 months. 

This goes to show that even though email marketing may seem like an old-fashioned marketing tactic, people are still responding to it and it can be very effective if used properly..

If you’re not using email marketing as part of your inbound strategy, you could be missing out on a lot of potential leads and customers. 

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• What an inbound marketing strategy is 
• How email marketing can boost your inbound strategy
• How to integrate email marketing with inbound marketing
• How to make sure your email marketing strategy is effective

What is an inbound marketing strategy?

Inbound marketing is a unique marketing strategy that focuses on attracting customers to your company, rather than going out and finding them on different third-party advertising platforms.

It’s a more natural way of marketing that focuses on creating helpful content, building relationships, and providing an overall great experience for potential customers instead of just pushing your services or products to your target audience.

A successful inbound marketing strategy requires a multi-channel approach. And with more than 300 billion emails being sent and received every day, it’s safe to say that email marketing is one of the most important channels you can use for it. 

How can email enhance your inbound strategy?

Email marketing can help your business in a number of ways, but here are five of the most important ways it can help boost your inbound strategy.

#1. It helps you put content right in front of your audience

When you create great content, you want to make sure it gets in front of as many people as possible. Email marketing can help you do that. 

It allows you to nurture your leads and create dialogues with your target audience by delivering relevant, helpful, regular, and quality content right to its inbox. In fact, according to Kinsta, 87% of B2B and 79% of B2C marketers rely on emails as one of their primary content distribution channels. 

Every time you send an email using email marketing software, you have an opportunity to include links to your latest blog post, white paper, or other pieces of content. 

This is a great way to drive traffic to your website and get more people to read your content. Not only that, but including links in your emails can also help improve your SEO. 

Of course, you’ll need to automate your campaign if you want to update your audience on every piece of content you create. But with so many automation tools out there, that shouldn’t be a problem. 

Additionally, with an impressive ROI of $36 for each dollar spent, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways to reach your audience, develop a close relationship with them, and increase brand visibility.

Tracking ROI across multiple email campaigns and audiences might be complicated when done manually. To accelerate the analytics process, you might need a dashboard that shows ROI across campaigns, revenue generated by each sequence, email open rate, and more. We’ve created an all-in-one email dashboard template to help you track the performance of your email campaigns. 

#2. It lets your business stay at the top of your customers’ minds

If you want your customers to think of you first when they need the product or service you sell — which is what inbound marketing is really all about — you need to stay at the top of their minds. 

Fortunately, regularly sending marketing emails to your customer base can help you do that. 

According to Emarsys, approximately 80% of businesses rely on email marketing as their primary customer acquisition and retention tool.

By sending regular high-quality content emails to your customers, you’ll ensure that your business is always top-of-mind for them and position your brand as an expert in the industry. Remember, people check their email every day! And up to half of them even check their spam folders daily, as illustrated by 99Firms: 

#3. It helps you land returning customers

Email marketing is also a great way to land returning customers. According to a study by Invespcro, it’s up to five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one. So, it’s vital that you focus on retaining the customers you already have. 

They might have made a purchase or used your services once as a result of your inbound marketing strategy, but to ensure they keep coming back, you’ll have to supplement it with an effective email marketing strategy. 

This can help prevent them from going to a competitor when they need your product or service in the future, especially if they’ve had a good experience with your company in the past. 

For example, if you offer email tracking as a service, you can offer discount codes to customers who haven’t used your service for a while or use it sparingly. 

Similarly, Shopify store owners can send out weekly investment newsletters with deals of the week to keep customer interest high and rope in any readers who might be contemplating re-purchasing from you but are not fully convinced. 

Additionally, you can also use email sequences to let them know and generate hype about any new products or services your business is offering.

#4. It can be used as an effective strategy to prevent cart abandonment 

If you’ve ever been close to making a purchase online but then changed your mind at the last minute, you’re not alone.

In fact, a SaleCycle report using data from the top 500 global businesses showed that about 75.6% of online shopping carts are abandoned. 

The report also revealed that 44.1% of abandoned cart emails are opened, and about 1/3rd of opened emails (29.9%) lead to recovered sales.

This means that if your inbound strategy leads someone to your cart, but they abandon it at the last moment, you can still save this conversion with email marketing. 

There are a few different ways you can reduce the cart abandonment rate, but one of the most effective is to send a series of automated emails in the following sequence:

• The first email should be sent a few hours after the customer abandons their cart, and it should include information about the product they were interested in.

• The second email can be sent a day or two later, and it can include a special offer or discount code to encourage the customer to complete their purchase. 

• The third and final email can be sent a week or two later, and it can include information about similar products that the customer might be interested in to push them into making a purchase.
  

#5. It allows you to direct your audience to other marketing channels

Lastly, email marketing can also be used as an effective tool to direct your audience to other marketing channels in a bid to move towards omnichannel marketing. 

For example, if you’ve recently published a new blog post that you want your subscribers to read or are running a sale, you can use email sequences to drive traffic to your website or online store by including relevant links in your emails. 

You can also use email to promote your social media channels and encourage your customers to follow your brand on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

How to integrate email marketing with inbound marketing?

Now that we’ve gone over and discussed some of the ways email marketing can enhance your inbound strategy, let’s take a look at how you can integrate the two.

• Add a sign-up form to your website: The first step is to make sure that you have a sign-up form on your website so that inbound visitors can subscribe to your email list. You can add a sign-up form to your website in a few different ways, but one of the simplest is to use a website plugin.

• Use lead magnets: A lead magnet is an incentive that you offer to website visitors in exchange for their email addresses. This can be something like a free ebook, report, or video. Just make sure to offer something that’s relevant to your target audience and that they would find valuable.

• Create automated email sequences: Once you have a list of subscribers, you can start creating automated email sequences. An email sequence is a series of emails that are sent to your subscribers over a period of time. You can use a variety of email marketing services like Constant Contact or MailChimp to create and send your email sequences.

• Promote your content: This is the most important step when it comes to integrating email and inbound marketing. Use your email list to promote your content and boost your inbound strategy. Every time you publish a new blog post, YouTube video, whitepaper, guide, or anything that’s a part of your inbound strategy, send an email to your subscribers with a link to it. Remember, the goal is to keep holding their hand and ensure they stay interested in your brand. Furthermore, using an email verifier in your strategy ensures a high-quality email list, boosting content engagement and strengthening your connection with your audience. 

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How to ensure your inbound email strategy works well?

There are a number of things you can do to ensure your inbound email marketing strategy works well, but here are 6 of the most important things you should be doing:

1. Make sure you have a sizable audience

To ensure your inbound email marketing strategy delivers optimal results, it is important to first grow your email list and audience. 

You can do this by including a sign-up form for your weekly email newsletter on your website or blog, running social media ads, or even using physical sign-up sheets if you have a brick-and-mortar store. You can also try AI lead generation tools to supplement the leads you get from your inbound strategy. 

And before you start working on your list, make sure to verify it, so it contains only valid email addresses. If your list contains too many invalid email addresses, your efforts will go wasted and your marketing data will become skewed. 

2. Segment your list

Once you have a sizable audience, it’s crucial to segment your list. This will allow you to send targeted and relevant messages to different groups of people, which can lead to a stronger marketing strategy and better results.

Most email marketing platforms allow you to segment your list by demographics, interests, purchase history, website behavior, and more.

3. Create valuable email content

The next step is to create and include valuable content in your emails that your audience will actually want to read or watch. 

However, it’s important to remember that the content you create should always be related and relevant to your brand’s niche and overall content on other platforms.

Stand-alone marketing emails rarely produce great results as they don’t offer routes for further client engagement. 

This is why you should always try to ensure that the emails you send out to your target audience always connect to your blog posts, landing pages, ebooks, infographics, videos on other marketing platforms.

4. Format your emails properly

The way you format your emails can almost be as important as the content that they contain. 

Therefore, you should always make sure that your emails are properly formatted with short and concise subject lines and have a clear call-to-action (CTA) so your readers know what you want them to do. 

Also, try keeping them as brief as possible. Many experts have suggested that emails containing between 50-125 words yield the best results and are more likely to be read by your audience.

5. Design and implement drip campaigns

Drip campaigns are email campaigns that are sent out over a period of time (usually a few days or weeks) and are designed to nurture leads and move them further down the sales funnel.

Essentially, they’re email sequences that are triggered based on certain actions your subscribers take. 

For example, you can send a series of welcome emails to new subscribers or a series of abandoned cart emails to customers who have started but not completed a purchase.

6. Measure your results and experiment

Finally, you should always regularly measure your results to make data-driven marketing decisions. 

You can do this by using marketing tools like Right Inbox to track email data like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and conversion rates. 

Also, don’t be afraid to A/B test and experiment with different strategies when your current one isn’t giving you the results you’d hoped for.

If you want a more in-depth analysis on the overall marketing performance, you need to think of a marketing data platform. Tools such as Improvado can help you understand how prospects interact with email campaigns and how they move between different channels. 

Improvado integrates with 500+ marketing data sources to extract valuable marketing data and build a comprehensive picture of your efforts. With an automated data flow from Mailchimp, Salesforce, HubSpot, and other platforms Improvado can recreate customer journeys and explain how your marketing dollars influence revenue growth.

With a unified dashboard, all stakeholers from regular marketers to CMOs can get a grasp of email marketing efforts, analyze new trends, and make informed decisions on future campaigns.

Final words

As you can probably tell by now, email marketing can be a powerful tool to help businesses achieve their inbound marketing goals and one that should not be overlooked.

By following the tips and advice outlined in this article, you should be able to create emails that are more effective at driving conversions and moving subscribers further down the sales funnel. 

Just don’t forget to regularly test, measure, and optimize your campaigns to ensure they’re achieving the best results possible.