INBOUND ACCELERATOR

While spam emails are irritating to everyone, more than 85 percent of consumers say they DO want to hear from companies they do business with, especially when companies take care to fill those emails with content and offers that consumers find useful.

So how do you keep your emails from hitting the junk folder or going unopened?

While it can be tempting to draw a distinct line between “email marketing” (often used strictly as an outbound tactic) and “inbound marketing,” in reality, email is an essential element in inbound marketing strategies as the vehicle for automated lead nurturing.

Carefully crafting each email in a lead nurturing workflow means providing your contacts with value that brings them back to your website and moves them further through the sales funnel. (Check out our Lead Nurturing Toolkit, including a Nurturing Workflow Template, for more details.)

When inbound marketers turn to email, their most important goal is increasing engagement — using emails to bring contacts and leads back to their website — followed closely by increasing customer acquisition.

While we frequently remind readers that inbound marketing means creating the content that brings prospects to you, rather than pushing advertising out to your prospects, email is one of those traditionally outbound tactics with a definite place in your inbound strategy.

While communications methods are continually shifting, and messaging apps are becoming more accepted, email remains a key channel for B2B marketers to reach out to target audiences with content.

Amongst inbound marketers, email marketing is an essential tool for connecting with prospects, contacts and leads, and while each brand and each industry will have a different approach to using email marketing, everyone should be measuring key metrics and seeking ways to improve them.

If you’ve been using inbound marketing and automated lead nurturing for a while, chances are your list of contacts includes a number of leads who downloaded one piece of content, but then went dark.

If you take time to read through the history of the Inbound Accelerator, you’ll see, if the name didn’t already give it away, that at JONES we are true proponents of inbound marketing. We believe in providing the information prospects are seeking, when and where they want to access it, not in blasting it at them through random mass email marketing or untested paid online marketing.

Inbound marketing isn’t the place for aggressive marketing emails to purchased lists, but email does still play a vital role in both promoting inbound marketing content and in nurturing leads once they convert on your website.

What makes you more likely to click on an email from a brand you trust? Do you find videos irresistible?