Why email marketing is the long game

As a coach or consultant, you know how important it is to attract and nurture an audience of potential future clients. Whether clients work with you on a regular basis or book a one-off session, your business relies on quality lead generation in order to grow.

One of the most effective ways to warm your leads is through email marketing. Yet, many of the clients I support as an Online Systems Specialist, express frustration at the time their email marketing is taking to bring in results.

I want to unpack this because while email marketing is a longer-term game, it continues to be one of the most effective ways for businesses to foster relationships with leads, and to make sales.

In this post, we explore why email marketing is the long game and how it can help you as a coach or consultant to warm up your leads and simplify your sales process.

What is email marketing?

Sometimes called EDM (Electronic Direct Marketing) or Direct Response Marketing, email marketing is all about creating and sharing specific email campaigns or newsletters that are designed to get your subscribers to take a specific action.

These emails usually include a mix of introductory content (Welcome Email Sequences), Nurturing content to build the know, like and trust with your community (Newsletters and Updates), and Sales Emails (including launch sequences for new service offerings, ‘how to work with you’ emails, and information on sales or promotions you’re running).

Email marketing is a long game because it’s all about building relationships

Email marketing is a long game because it takes time to build deeper connections with your subscribers. Just like building rapport with someone in person, a deep and lasting connection won’t be forged after just one email.

Instead, it will take a series of emails that are tailored to your audience’s interests and needs to build trust, establish credibility, and show that you’re genuinely interested in understanding your community.

Through consistent email marketing, you can warm up your leads, increase the likelihood of sales and grow a powerful community of long-term, loyal clients.

Key benefits of email marketing for coaches and consultants

Clients will rarely hire someone immediately, so through email marketing, you can nurture these relationships over the long term, and stay front of mind for the moment when someone is ready to invest in support.

Through email marketing, you can:

Share your coaching methods with your audience (how you’re different, how you work, what it’s like to work with you).
Build trust through regular communication
Improve your return on investment (email marketing can generate an impressive $36 for every $1 spent)
Use audience segmentation to build a personalised, yet automated, series of emails that warm your leads while you focus on delivering services to your clients.

How email marketing simplifies your systems and restores calm in your business

Aside from being an excellent way to nurture leads, one of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that it streamlines your business systems. By automating your email newsletters and campaigns, you can save a lot of time and reduce the risk of human error.

This frees up your time and energy to focus on other areas of your business, such as delivering amazing services to your clients, knowing your email marketing is taking care of the rest.

Email marketing can also help you to simplify your customer journey. With the ability to segment your email list based on their interests, points in the client journey, and much more, you can tailor your message to each audience segment, providing a highly personalised experience to your subscribers.

Over time, these strong relationships with your email community provide a reliable source of potential new work and revenue – because you have an audience who are interested in your offerings. Many coaches and consultants find that this reduces their stress and uncertainty about where to start promoting their services.

How to set your email marketing up for success

Your email campaigns are the place to provide valuable support and resources and to build relationships.

Here’s my top tips for creating emails that inspire clicks, reads and action:

1. Choose an eye-catching and relevant subject line

Pique the interest of your audience to encourage them to open your email to read more

2. Make your email scannable

This keeps it easy to digest for busy people and skim readers, who can gather the core points and any next steps with a quick glance over your email.

3. Start with your question first up (if relevant)

Inboxes are noisy places and being clear from the opening line of your email will avoid losing folks.

4. Map out the next steps or actions for your reader to take

Include relevant links or calls to action at various points throughout your email.

And, provide a summary at the end for your skim readers – what is the core takeaway from your email.

5. Preview all emails on your phone before you send

To make sure they’re easy to read, and look good on a smaller screen.

Support to ace your email marketing

Email marketing is a long game and a powerful tool for coaches, consultants and service providers who want to simplify their business, and warm their leads.

By building a personalised and targeted email list, automating your campaigns and delivering valuable content to your subscribers, you will grow and establish trust and credibility, build stronger relationships with your community, and ultimately grow your business.

If you’re eager to get your email marketing working hard for you, but your admin list is already never-ending, an Online Systems Specialist can help. Because they specialise in the tech and systems side of your email marketing, they take care of the set-up, make sure everything is working properly, and automate your campaigns to run for you.

So, if you’re ready to add email marketing to your kit of business tools, and would like support from a Systems Specialist, book a clarity call with me (Sophie) today.

Like this post? Pin it for later