How to avoid overselling in email marketing

If the only email marketing messages you send to your audience are sales messages, chances are your results won’t always be positive. The reason is simple. Not everyone is ready to buy when they get your message.

There’s a reason we call it “email marketing” and not “email sales.” For email marketing to be successful, you need to meet your audience where they are. You can’t expect them to jump where you want them to.

That means most of the messages you send out via email marketing aren’t entirely sales-focused. Instead, send far more informational messages to build brand awareness, build trust, and nurture relationships with your audience. Your goal is to learn more about your different audience members, determine where they are in the buying process, and send them relevant content.

In other words, you need a strategy to move people down the marketing funnel — from the top, where you generate leads, to the middle, where you nurture them, and all the way down, where you turn them into qualified prospects, customers, or Convert returning buyers (depending on the specific audience and your goals).

With that in mind, here are some tips to help you oversell your email marketing messages so that leads who aren’t warmed up enough to be interested in buying aren’t turned off by promotional content.

1. Types of Content You Can Send

The key to success is targeting your news content to your audience — where they are in the marketing funnel and who they are based on their buyer personas. When you think about the three stages of the marketing funnel, your content should be aligned as follows:

tip of the funnel

Send lead acquisition and brand awareness messages that educate and inform first and foremost. The goal is to show people that they will continue to receive messages from you and want to learn more about what you have to say (and therefore your brand) because you are sending valuable content.

Messages that link to blog posts on your site, short ebooks, videos, checklists, and other low-risk but valuable content work very well as a call-to-action at the top of funnel email marketing. Very little content in your messages (or very little of the messages you send) should promote your products or services.

middle of the funnel

Send lead nurturing messages that educate and inform while positioning your brand as the go-to place for information about your industry, products, services and expertise. Keep adding value with your content.

People in the middle of the funnel are closer to making a purchase decision and may already have invested more in your brand than people at the top of the funnel. So keep encouraging them and include call-to-action links that lead to deeper content like longer e-books, mini-courses, guides, etc. You can include promotional content in your messages (or send fully sales-oriented messages), but don’t overdo it. This target group is not yet ready to buy. They need a little more care first.

bottom of the funnel

Send conversion messages that help solidify your brand as recipients want to buy or investigate further. These people are in the final decision-making stage of the buying cycle, so you want to give them the reason to buy.

This is the time to send messages that offer a paid trial, demonstration, or advice. You can also send sales-oriented messages to people who have already bought from you to try to resell them and generate another sale.

2. Set goals

You should have a goal for every message you send, and in order to achieve the goal, recipients should click your call-to-action button. If your goal for every message is to make a sale, you will fail.

Today, email marketing is a long-term marketing strategy for qualifying and nurturing leads. Ultimately, you can try to convert leads into sales using bottom-of-funnel messages sent to qualified audiences, or you can escalate those leads to your sales team to reach them personally. However, people who aren’t ready to buy need to get different content from you, and you need to set different goals for those audiences and messages.

To help you brainstorm goals to set for your email marketing messages, here are some call-to-action ideas to use at different stages of the marketing funnel:

• Top of the Funnel (acquisition and awareness): Click here to read a blog post on your site, access a checklist or worksheet, or download an e-book or white paper.
• Middle of the funnel (Nurture): Click here to watch an instructional video, read a case study, or register for a webinar.
• Bottom of the funnel (convert): Schedule a demo, sign up for a trial, contact a seller, or make a purchase.

Remember, the further up the funnel, the less time and energy people put into reading your message and accessing your content. Segment your lists and make sure you’re always sending the right content to the right people!

3. Track engagement to qualify leads

How do you know if your email marketing investments are working? How do you identify the people on your list who are ready to buy? The answer is engagement metrics!

Think of it this way: when someone opens a message from you, they must be interested in the topic based on the subject line. If someone clicks a link in your message, they must be even more interested as it means more of their time. And when someone clicks the call-to-action link in your message (to help you achieve your goal), then they must be even more interested! The more messages someone opens over time and the more links they click in your messages, the more you know about them. Use the information to score your leads.

Simply put, more engagement in your messages likely means more interest in your business. Using this theory, you can assume that people who have opened and clicked on a lot of your messages are more qualified leads than those who have shown little interest in your email marketing messages.

Lead scoring can get very complex. You can assign point values ​​for opens and clicks (e.g. five points per open and 10 points per click) and more points for clicks on your call-to-action button that lead to your message goal (e.g. 20 points per call-to-action click). Then set thresholds that indicate when a lead gets hot. For example, you could set a threshold where a score of 80 or higher is a hot lead that should move the person to your bottom of the funnel campaign list or be routed to your sales team for a one-to-one outreach.

Key insights to avoid overselling in email marketing

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Would you like to receive repeated sales messages from a company? If you’re ready to buy, these messages might be welcome (provided they’re relevant to you), but if you’re not ready to buy, these messages will quickly annoy you.

It’s up to you to track how people are interacting with your messages and then send them the right content based on their buyer personas and positions in the marketing funnel and buying cycle. Send sales-focused messages only to people who want them, and send informative, educational, and useful content to build brand awareness and trust with everyone else.

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