Email marketing is an incredibly effective marketing channel for most businesses, and if utilized properly, it can increase your sales.
But how can you turn your subscribers into buyers?
There’s actually a simple system you can put in place that aligns with the customer buying cycle.
This covers three key stages: the awareness stage, where the consumer gets to know your brand and what you offer; the consideration stage, where they shop around for other options and weigh up the pros and cons; and the purchase stage, where they take the plunge and hit that “buy” button.
When you implement a strategy for each of these stages, you can quickly move your email subscribers from being passive and turn them into active buyers.
QUICK TIP: It’s important to start off on the right foot and use the right email marketing software to get your subscribers!
1. Offer Upfront Value
There is so much free information available on the internet these days that anyone can find information about anything anywhere. This means you have to stand out if you want to build a loyal customer base.
Offering upfront value before the consumer has committed to giving you any money is vital. Not only does this build trust, but it gives them a free preview of what you can offer and how you can help them solve a key problem they have.
Attracting People in the Awareness Stage
Value, value, value. That’s the most important thing you can focus on in the awareness stage of the buying cycle. This could come in the form of:
- Blog posts
- Thoughtful social media updates
- Downloadables
- Videos
- How-to guides
During this stage, you want to be educating your audience, and one of the most successful ways to do this is by providing what’s known as a “lead magnet” – something valuable and educational that users exchange their email address for.
It’s a win-win situation. They get some awesome free information, and you get their email address to market to.
IMPORTANT: Capturing email addresses is vital because, unlike on social channels, you own them and have complete control over them.
Let’s take a look at some free, valuable content that other brands offer to capture email addresses and to educate people in the awareness stage.
Survival Life is offering consumers the chance to learn how to make something.
Bidsketch offers users a free template for creating client proposals.
2. Put a Nurturing Email Sequence in Place
“What is a nurturing email sequence?” you might ask.
This is what you need to implement in the “consideration” stage to groom your subscribers and show them why they should buy from you instead of your competitor.
It’s a series of automated emails that are triggered to go out over a period of a week or two after someone has downloaded your free, valuable content.
During this phase, you want to answer any objections your audience might have about buying from you, and agitate their problem so they’re desperate for a solution.
Let’s take a look at a sample nurture sequence:
Email 1 (awareness): send the free download or valuable content and introduce your business.
Email 2 (consideration): introduce the subscriber to a key problem they might be having and guide them towards a specific blog post or more free, valuable content that helps them with that.
Email 3 (consideration): touch on any objections the subscriber might have about your business or product. FAQ style emails are great here, as are case studies or extended user testimonials.
Email 4 (purchase): now it’s time to shift the subscriber from the consideration stage to the purchase stage. Pitch your product to them and offer a discount or a bonus as an incentive for them to act quickly (we’ll talk more about this technique in a moment).
Email 5 (purchase): remind the subscriber of their problem and your solution for it, and follow up with the offer or bonus.
As you can see, the sequence aligns with the customer buying process so you’re slowly shifting the subscriber from one stage to the next while building trust and providing free value.
3. Employ Key Copywriting Techniques
There’s a reason copywriting is such a huge industry. Communicating with your audience isn’t just about putting a few words down on paper (or screen), it’s about tapping into the human mind and employing psychological marketing techniques that have been proven to work.
You can use these techniques in your nurture sequence to speed up the subscriber-to-customer process, but you can also use them to turn blog visitors into buyers and when you’re communicating with your audience on other platforms.
3 Different Copywriting Psychology Techniques
1. Scarcity Theory: People don’t like to miss out on things. Fact. If you’re struggling to shift subscribers from the consideration stage to the purchase stage, consider adding a sense of scarcity by offering a limited number of products.
2. Outline the benefits NOT the features: A lot of businesses make the mistake of highlighting the features of their product or service, like how easy it is to use or the super-duper interface they run it on. In reality, consumers don’t care about this. Instead, they want to know how those features will help them reach their goals and solve their problems.
“I Will Teach You To Be Rich” uses a bullet list of benefits on its sales page.
3. Upsell or offer an incentive: People like more bang for their buck. If they see that they’re getting a great deal with an added bonus or an attractive price cut, they’ll be more likely to buy.
You can inject this into your pitches by offering a limited-time discount for new subscribers or by adding in a few valuable bonuses if they purchase quickly.
WarriorPlus use a combination of limited-time price cuts AND scarcity for maximum impact.
WarriorPlus use a combination of limited-time price cuts AND scarcity for maximum impact.
Turning your subscribers into customers doesn’t have to be a case of hitting and hoping.
Once you know what each stage of the customer buying process involves, you can gear your content and correspondence with them to align with that, moving them from one stage to the next seamlessly.
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