How to find and sell your hottest leads with email marketing

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The simple truth of sales is that not everyone is a viable lead for your business. Research shows that at least 50% of your leads are not a good match for the product or service you are selling. In fact, only 25% of your leads are good enough to actually make a sale. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your lead generation process is on hold.

Ideally, you should cast a wide net to create your prospect list and then qualify them through lead nurturing. The goal is for the sales team to invest their time only in Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) so they can do their job as efficiently and successfully as possible.

In the cannabis industry, email marketing is one of the best (and least expensive) ways to nurture leads and identify who are unqualified, viable, marketing qualified (MQL) or sales qualified leads.

The Rule of 7 and why it is important

It’s important to understand the crucial role lead nurturing plays in email marketing and sales. It is very unlikely that an email message will generate a sale unless that message reaches the right person at the precise moment they are ready to buy. If your product or service has a high price tag or a long sales cycle, a single email message is even less likely to generate a sale. This is why lead nurturing is essential.

The rule of 7 in sales and marketing has been around for a very long time. The rule states that a potential customer must be exposed to your brand, company, products/services and message at least seven times before agreeing to make a purchase.

Remember that the Rule of 7 is actually rooted in cognitive research. In fact, a new study, An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate, published in January 2023, found that people’s learning rates are “amazingly” similar. The researchers found that it takes an average of about seven sessions for a person to master a specific knowledge component.

If you apply this basic cognitive principle to marketing and sales, it takes an average of seven sessions for a prospect to learn the value of a product or service and understand it well enough to be motivated to buy it, to fulfill a want or need to satisfy.

This is where lead nurturing comes into play. Marketers invest in a variety of channels to introduce their brands, products, and services to potential customers, including advertising, email, direct mail, events, social media, and so on. Of these options, email marketing is both affordable and cost effective. You just have to be willing to put in the work of tracking recipient engagement so you can identify sales-qualified leads.

How to find your hottest leads with email marketing

Your hottest sales prospects have a budget make a purchase that authority to make the purchase decision, a need for your product or service and a timeline to complete their purchase (BANT).

Your hottest leads have already completed most of the buyer’s journey and know your company and your offer. They’ve also done some research and compared providers. You are at the bottom of the sales and marketing funnel and ready to buy.

With data, you can easily find your hottest leads based on their interactions with your email marketing messages and convert them into buying customers.

For example, the new and improved email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database puts information about your hottest leads at the heart of your dashboard, so you always know who your most interested and motivated prospects are. You can immediately:

• View your most engaged recipients based on how often they opened the email marketing messages you sent.
• See your most engaged recipients based on how many times they clicked links in your messages.
• Click on your most engaged recipients and contact them instantly via phone, email or social media without leaving your dashboard.

You can set your own timeframe for this data analysis within the Cannabiz Media License Database and see which recipients have been most engaged over the past week, month and more.

Which interested parties are currently very engaged? Who have been consistently involved in the last few months? Depending on the data, you can launch sales calls or create email campaigns to nurture people in the middle of the sales funnel (warm leads) to convert them into hot leads.

How to sell to your hottest leads with email marketing

Your hottest leads are instantly ready to buy, so you need to make sure your brand is front and center. Some effective email marketing campaigns you can use to sell to your hottest leads in the cannabis industry are:

• Comparisons of products (or services), companies and brands
• Product (or Service) Updates
• tutorials
• Case studies and customer success stories
• webinars
• video training
• demonstrations
• Free Trials
• Q&A Sessions

Make sure you personalize the email campaigns you send to your hottest leads and segment your email list to increase results.

Not only is it critical that you send the right messages to your hottest leads, but it’s also extremely important to engage with them at the right time.

It’s easy with the email marketing tool in the Cannabiz Media License Database. Subscribers can use the built-in recipient-based performance and send-time optimization tool and visual heat map to send messages at the best time of day based on past send results.

Subscribers can also optimize the delivery day of email campaigns sent through the Cannabiz Media License Database. Built-in artificial intelligence automatically identifies the best day to send each message over a period of up to three days to maximize response rates.

By creating the best messages for your hottest leads and sending them at the best times, you’ll get a better return on your email marketing investments, successfully moving leads down the marketing funnel and turning them into hot leads that you then convert customers can buy!

Get your cannabis industry email marketing certification to improve your results

Email marketing isn’t as simple as sending a message and hoping someone will bite. In fact, this approach sends your messages straight to spam folders. In order to get great email marketing results and actually find the right leads to sell to, you need to understand current email marketing dos and don’ts and best practices.

You can do this by earning one or more Cannabiz Media Email Success Academy certifications.

Free and self-paced, the online certification courses available at Email Success Academy will teach you all aspects of email marketing across five key knowledge areas:

Each of the courses available at Email Success Academy are free and open to the public so anyone can learn to become an expert in email marketing in the cannabis industry.

Key insights for cannabis companies and brands

Email marketing is one of the most effective tools for finding and selling to your hottest leads. Use the data available in the Cannabiz Media License Database to determine who is ready to buy and focus your direct selling efforts on them while continuing to nurture warm leads and turn them into hot leads. With the right tool, strategy, and processes in place, you’ll end up closing more sales and spending less time and money on them.

To see the Cannabiz Media License Database in action, Arrange a demo and learn how it can help you connect with cannabis and hemp license holders and increase your sales and revenue.

Originally published on 07/21/20. Updated 2/10/23.