5 Ways to Leverage Email Marketing to Drive Customer Acquisition in 2022

Email marketing is one of the most powerful customer acquisition tools in today’s business environment. Whether you’re running an Ecommerce business or you’re trying to implement effective B2B sales strategies, email marketing should be a key element in your acquisition process.

Today, we’re going to talk about email marketing for customer acquisition and the best practices you need to implement in your strategy. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. How to grow your email list
2. Techniques to automate email processes
3. How to write winning subject lines and copy
4. How to leverage ad banners in your emails
5. Optimize emails according to the buyer’s journey

Grow Your Email List Organically

Email marketing offers you a direct line of communication with your target customers. You can try to grow your email list by simply purchasing email addresses in bulk or by getting them in any number of ways, but that won’t deliver the results you want.

Only by taking the time and putting the effort into growing your email list organically can you build social proof for your brand, build trust and awareness, and inspire people to act. The emails you acquire organically are the emails of the people who are already interested in what you have to offer.

A few ways to organically grow your email list include: 

• Create and publish high-quality blog posts
• Disseminate quality content on relevant social platforms
• Provide snippets of your content in your social media posts with a link leading back to your site
• Inspire visitors to subscribe to your blog at the bottom of every page
• Run live events, webinars, and promotions
• Offer free products like eBooks, guides, and discounts in exchange for an email address

Use Email Automation to Your Advantage

Automation is a key element in running effective email marketing campaigns in Ecommerce, Saas,  and other businesses. There are many processes in email marketing you can automate, saving you time, money, and costly human errors. In turn, email automation can help you send more high-quality emails to your subscribers and paying customers.

Some of the email marketing processes you should consider automating include:

• Welcome emails for new customers and subscribers
• Confirmation emails for purchases
• Exit emails for unsubscribers
• Cart abandonment emails to bring people back to your site
• Email drip campaigns to feed customers with useful information and content regularly
• Reminders for your events, promotions, deals, and discounts
• Company announcements and policy changes
• Remarketing emails to remind customers of the products they viewed

When it comes to using automation tools to your advantage, you have several popular options at your disposal:

• MailChimp
• HubSpot
• Drip
• ActiveCampaign
• Salesforce
• Sendinblue
• Marketo
• Keap

Optimize Your Subject Line and Email Copy

Powerful subject lines compel recipients to open your emails, while value-driven copy inspires them to take action. Without a clear strategy for all stages of your email marketing funnel, you can’t optimize your subject lines or email copy based on your target audience.

Keep in mind that different recipients are at different stages of the buyer’s journey. These stages include:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Purchase
• Post-purchase
• Re-purchase

With these stages in mind, some of the best Ecommerce email marketing tips and tactics for creating powerful subject lines are:

• Be concise
• Avoid spam words
• Ask a relevant question
• Use an intriguing statistic
• Add a deadline
• Be unique with your tone of voice
• Personalize your subject lines

When it comes to creating winning email copy, make sure to:

• Optimize the preview text to improve open rates
• Keep paragraphs short with concise sentences
• Optimize your copy for different stages of the buyer’s journey
• Provide relevant and personalized content
• Avoid marketing speak – be conversational
• Add social proof to your emails like testimonials and customer ratings
• Integrate two calls to action – after the first paragraph and at the end
• Add visual elements to avoid plain text emails

Use Email Ad Banners as Powerful CTAs

Email ad banners are a simple tool you can use to add value to your emails and inspire your recipients to reply or take the next step in the journey. An email ad banner is an image that offers a concise call to action. You can design it to fit your brand’s aesthetic and personality, and you can position it at the beginning of the email or at the end.

Putting your email ad banners at the beginning sets the tone for the rest of the email copy. Putting it at the end helps seal the deal and gives the recipient a quick and easy way to move forward in their journey. 

When creating email ad banners, make sure to:

• Align the visuals with your brand identity
• Use concise copy with a clear CTA
• Position the banner in your email signature to make the end of your emails actionable  
• Put the banner near the top of the email to set clear expectations for the recipient

Implement Segmented Follow-Up Sequences

We talked earlier about the different stages of the buyer’s journey and why it’s important to optimize for each stage. If you try to push transactional emails to customers who are in the awareness stage, you risk losing them for good.

Another email marketing mistake is to push educational emails to customers who are ready to buy. Both will deliver the same result – you’ll lose leads and customers. This is why it’s imperative to optimize your follow-ups.

Keep in mind that you typically won’t inspire customers to buy anything on the first email. You need to follow up with them several times, adding value and optimizing your content with each new email. This is called an email sequence, a chain of follow-up emails that add value and guide the recipient towards conversion.

To optimize your sequences, you need to:

• Use your CRM data to group recipients according to the stage they’re at
• Once grouped, identify their needs and what they’re trying to achieve
• Build subject line sequences that naturally follow up on every previous email
• Have at least three follow-up versions per email sequence
• Each sequence should aim to guide the recipient toward the next stage
• Once they move forward, put them in the new stage group in your CRM
• Keep guiding them through the stages until conversion
• After they convert into paying customers, make sure to follow up with valuable content

• Aim to inspire repeat purchases or get your recipients to share their positive experiences with others
• Use value to push customers through stages, such as quality content, promotions, and discounts, limited-time offers, or free products like eBooks and guides.

Grow Your New Business with Email Marketing

Whether you’ve just acquired a new business or if you’re trying to elevate the value of your company before selling, email marketing can help you acquire new customers. But that’s just the beginning.

When done right, email marketing can help transform those new customers into lifelong brand advocates who will boost your word-of-mouth marketing and inspire others to join your community. Make sure to use these best practices to boost customer acquisition and retention in 2022.