Description: Driven mostly by content, inbound marketing has been adopted by several brands and companies in digital marketing. We discuss how inbound marketing in an email marketing campaign
Inbound Marketing
By definition, inbound marketing refers to drawing interested prospects into entering a dialogue with a brand or company, rather than pursuing leads through paid advertising campaigns and outreach.
Its increased reference in the digital marketing landscape has led to people confusing it with content marketing. The differences between the two are many, one being that inbound marketing encompasses all techniques which aim to draw customers in, while content marketing covers all content-related work in digital marketing. There are many areas where content and inbound marketing overlap.
There are many ways to run inbound marketing, one of which being doing it through email marketing.
Email marketing is by far the simplest way to bring inbound marketing to fruition. Its simple interface and easy-to-understand dynamics make it ideal to deploy inbound marketing on. Furthermore, email marketing is a practice most marketers in the field understand well. From a top professional at a global conglomerate to a fresher from a digital marketing course in Delhi, email marketing proficiency is common across the spectrum.
In this article, we discuss how inbound marketing can be optimized with the right use of email marketing.
Persuasive Email Content
Any email marketing campaign is powered by the presence of quality content delivering emails which have a reasonably high conversion rate.
Inbound marketing, with its simple principle to first draw prospects instead of promoting a product through advertorial methods, is perfect to establish a long-term trust-building exercise with a potential customer.
Inbound marketing is premised upon letting a prospect making their mind up. Leads are not bombarded with promotional messages in an inbound marketing campaign. Lead nurturing is an essential part of inbound marketing.
How are leads nurtured in email marketing then? Email content which is sent out to prospects should aim to inform and engage the reader. There should be little to no hint of anything being sold, especially when a prospect is at an early stage of their buying cycle.
Creating appropriate content comes with many additional factors of its own. Besides knowing the basic parts of content creation such as audience analysis, there are other factors which have to be considered to make sure content created is optimized in relation to inbound marketing.
Mapping a reader’s buying cycle is one such essential part. While creating email content for a given segment of the audience, content writers have to be mindful of how close the prospects are to buying a product or service from the brand. If they are close, the content should aim to push prospects into making the final call. If not, prospects should continue to be sent content with no hint of any promotion.
CTA Optimization
At the end of every email, there has to be a CTA button which seeks to trigger the customer into performing an action. The point of the CTA is to drive customers into performing an action. Even when a prospect who is at the beginning of his buying cycle should be shown a CTA, though not one to buy something.
The importance of CTAs is multi-faceted. The first and most obvious use of CTAs is to trigger the customer into performing an action. Secondly, if more and more people click on the CTA button, it implies that the inbound marketing campaign is working. CTA optimization is thus a key part of ingratiating inbound marketing into an email marketing campaign.
Do check: Boost traffic with email marketing
In Conclusion
Inbound marketing is best placed to make use of email marketing. With the right email marketing strategy at the helm, marketers can deploy the principles of inbound marketing successfully.
