Email marketing should be the cornerstone of the marketing strategy for your consulting business. Why? Email can help you build new business, strengthen existing relationships with clients, grow your brand, and help your business run like a well-oiled machine so you can spend more time on billable client hours and less on client acquisition.
Here’s why email marketing matters for consultants and how to use it like a pro. Let’s dive in.
From attracting new business to maintaining current client relationships, email marketing can help your consulting business operate more effectively and efficiently. Here are the top five ways email can help you nail your business goals.
Email marketing makes lead nurturing more effective and less time-consuming. Once a potential consulting client has displayed interest—signing up for a webinar, submitting an inquiry form, booking a meeting–-you can add them to a nurture email campaign designed to demonstrate the value of your services, speak to the client’s pain points, and ultimately drive them to convert. The best part of this? You can scale without additional labor.
Consulting clients come to you because you’re an expert in your space. Put that on display with thought leadership. Your email marketing gives you the opportunity to share insightful, actionable content (or to reshare content from your social media channels).
Let the value of your consulting work speak for itself by sharing case studies and success stories. Using case studies in your email marketing can help potential clients make the decision to sign. It can remind current clients of your value, and it just might entice a former client to return.
You can use your email lists to send survey emails and get direct feedback from your target customer. Learn more about their pain points. Find out where your services surpass expectations, where you could improve, and what gaps exist in the market.
Reduce client drop-off and churn with a series of onboarding emails. Send clients onboarding questionnaires and the tools that will help them make the most of your consulting services. With an onboarding drip campaign, you can improve the onboarding process by ensuring that information is spread out (say goodbye to that “drinking from a firehose” feeling) and all your T’s and I’s are crossed. When you increase the client experience, you increase client retention.
Successful email marketing starts with a high-quality list, so dedicate time and effort to building your list. Your email list can include different people like potential customers, current clients, past clients, collaborators, and more.
Offering webinars can be a great way to nurture potential clients and drive email sign-ups. It allows you to get in front of potential consulting clients and demonstrate your expertise and value. You can also use social media and your website content to encourage people to subscribe.
Hot tip: Avoid the temptation to buy an email list to “jump start” your business. Your business will be better served with a smaller list of high-quality emails and people who engage with your content. Internet service providers (ISPs) monitor behavior like email opens and click throughs. The higher your engagement rate, the better your sender reputation, and the less likely your email is to be sent to the Spam folder.
The right email marketing software will help maximize results. Look for a tool that;s easy to use and lets you customize your workflow. Customizable templates make email design easy breezy lemon squeezy, and you want to be able to drag and drop to make design changes. In addition to email design, you want your email marketing software to provide back-end deliverability support and to make email automation as easy as possible.
The next step to becoming an email marketing pro is to ensure you’re emailing the right people at the right time. Segmentation helps you do that. The three most common approaches to email segmentation are demographics, customer information, and email type.
Demographic segmentation splits your email list based on email recipient demographics. That can include age, gender, occupation, where they live and industry. Customer information segmentation separates email recipients based on their relationship to your business. Categories might include new consulting clients, existing consulting clients, former clients, non-converters, or average customer value.
Free up your time to focus on the parts of your consulting business that you love with email automation. Automation allows you to create scheduled content so that the right email is sent to the right person at the right time. When an email recipient takes a specific action, like signing up for an informational meeting or webinar, automation allows you to send a real-time, one-to-one email. It’s also worth it to take a little time to set up personalized email messaging, as personalized emails can generate up to $20 for every $1 spent.
Tracking gives you insight into whether your email marketing is working and where there’s opportunity for improvement. Pay attention to key performance metrics like email open rate and click-through rate. Those indicators will let you know what subject lines, email designs, and email content is working best. Once you know what works, you can practice finding opportunities to do more of it.
SendGrid Marketing Cloud has all the tools you need to help you deliver world-class email marketing. With an industry-leading email deliverability rate and easy-to-use templates, SendGrid Marketing Cloud delivers real results. Start sending better emails today.
