3 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for Service-based Businesses

Email marketing has the power to grow an audience, raise brand awareness, and transform leads into conversions. In fact, it’s 40 times more effective than marketing on Twitter and Facebook combined.

That’s why well over half of marketers cite email as their main source of ROI. For every $1 spent, email marketing returns $44.

So far, so good (to say the least!).

Thing is, email marketing can be tricky to get right; not everyone is going to see results like this.

Unlocking the full potential of email will require an effective email marketing strategy — you need to know which campaigns have the highest click through rates, and how to attract leads with persuasive offers, encouraging them to move further through the customer journey.

In this post, we’ll outline three ways to achieve real results from email marketing. 

1) Email Broadcasts

Email broadcasts sound impressive, but what are they?

An email broadcast (aka ‘bulk’ email) is an individual message you distribute to some, of all, of your contacts list. Newsletters are a popular example, but updates on exciting promotions are common too. 

In particular, email broadcasts are great when your business has an important announcement to make, such as the launch of a new service, a change to your site’s privacy policy, etc.

So, what is it about bulk email that’s so effective? How can it help drive ROI?

For one, newsletters forge and build bonds between your company and your customers. Even people who have registered their interest yet never made a purchase may take notice of your newsletters if they’re well-designed and tailored to their interests/transaction history. 

What’s more, you might choose to produce a few different newsletters catering to specific segments of your audience, based on varying ages, locations, income, transaction histories, etc. 

While creating multiple newsletters might incur extra work, it’s well worth the time: segmented email campaigns generate a 100.95%-higher click-through rate than non-segmented ones.

News could cover:

• Staff changes/new appointments

• Upcoming events where your brand is set to showcase its services

• Updates on influencer/celebrity endorsements that build credibility

• How-to articles with images and/or video

• Infographics

• Polls or surveys, with results from previous ones

• Troubleshooting tips related to your business’s services

Some of these ideas will work brilliantly for some businesses, less so for others. Look closely at your audience’s responses to previous newsletters to identify the best content. 

Next up: promotional broadcasts. These focus more on special offers or specific services. As such, they should be punchy and eye-catching, with a dynamic subject line that makes the value explicit. After all, you don’t want to be ignored or lost in the flood of similar marketing emails. 

Promotional emails can be an effective tactic, and are welcomed by a high number of people. Research shows 49 percent of consumers claim to be happy with weekly promotional emails from their favourite companies. 

You probably don’t need to send promotions more than once a week though. The secret is to keep your business top of mind for subscribers, without inundating them.

2) Nurture Campaigns

Lead nurturing is the process of supporting on-going relationships with consumers, at every stage of the sales funnel and customer journey. It’s an essential activity for every service-based business to invest in.

More importantly, lead nurturing requires an in-depth understanding of what customers and prospects need from your business at that time. Only meaningful, useful content will encourage them to convert.

That’s why a lead nurturing email campaign aims to educate or inspire the reader to move onto the next stage of the customer journey — whatever this might be. These emails should ease them from A to B with minimal delay, without pressuring them or rushing their decision process.

For example, you might send emails to a customer a couple of days after they use one of your services, offering information on others which complement it or a discount for future transactions. You might include a free download to improve their experience, such as a how-to guide.

For best results, you should utilise critical customer data stored in your CRM to target individuals at the best time, with the most appropriate content or incentives.

True, you will likely have many different customers at various stages of the journey. And customising, organising and sending emails to each contact could be an arduous task. But you can always lean on an automation platform to make this more manageable.

Taking advantage of marketing automation software streamlines the email marketing process significantly. Emails can be written, personalised, and sent to all contacts in a specific group in far less time than doing it all manually.

In truth, manual lead nurturing tactics become less and less plausible as a business scales. Reliable lead nurturing marketing automation keeps human input minimal and frees up more time to channel into other tasks.

Lastly, it’s important to note that nurture campaigns are evergreen. Unlike promotional emails, messages designed to nurture customers throughout their journey can be used throughout the year to engage all contacts in a certain segment. Simply set it up on your automation platform, and save to use it again. This saves further time and budget, increasing the ROI of your email marketing efforts.

3) Time-bound Offer Campaigns

A time-bound offer campaign is exactly as it sounds: a campaign built around a limited-time deal.

Businesses tend to leverage time-bound offer campaigns on a seasonal basis, e.g. Christmas, Black Friday, Easter. We’ve all received at least one marketing email cashing in on major occasions like these.

But time-bound offer campaigns aren’t only for seasonal events — they can be rolled out whenever companies launch a special offer, too. This might be a way to celebrate the announcement of a new service or opening a new location.

All time-bound offer campaigns have a defined start and end date. They could run for a few days, a week, a month. But regardless of the timeframe, these campaigns play on customers’ fear of missing out on a competitive offer.

This is why matching offer emails to audience segments is so important: you want to generate interest with the demographic most likely to take advantage of the deal you’re presenting.

At best, sending the same message to everyone in your contact list is a waste of your time. At worst, it could frustrate those customers with no interest in the services related to the deal, resulting in mailing list dropouts.

So think carefully about the specifics of each offer, and its relevance to the customer’s interests, buying habits, etc. Consider this in relation to your lead nurturing tactics: where is the recipient in the customer journey? And what you can do to move them along to the next stage?

Ready to boost email ROI?

These three effective email marketing strategies can transform the way you communicate with customers and promote your company. Email broadcasts, lead nurturing, and time-bound offer campaigns suit brands of all sizes — but they can take time to get right.

When you’re ready, it’s a good idea to implement automation software into your company’s daily operations to boost efficiency, productivity, and customer engagement. A quality platform like Ontraport is designed to help businesses streamline their marketing processes, cultivate stronger relationships, and cut down on time invested into unnecessary tasks.

Want to know more about bringing lead nurturing marketing automation into your brand? Have questions about any of the lead nurturing tactics or email marketing strategies discussed in this post?

We’re here to help in any way we can. Schedule a call with us today!