Stop Wasting Leads, Start Engaging Them With Email Marketing

There’s a cold, hard truth that I want to get out of the way immediately: you aren’t converting enough leads. Usually when I say this, I get a response like:

• “Our enrollment rates are fine compared to the rest of the industry, though!”
• “Our admissions team is simply the best, they’re doing everything right!”
• “Month old leads just aren’t worth our resources!”
• “If we had better leads or lead volume, we’d be able to do more on the admissions end.”

Here’s the kicker, all of those things are likely true. Your staff is probably fantastic, your process is probably built around years of boots-on-the-ground experience, and yeah, more leads is almost never a bad thing! What you might not realize, though, is how much you’re leaving on the table in the long-term.

Enter: Email marketing.

Make Your Marketing Budget Go Further

First things first, email is far from dead, especially with the younger demographics. In fact, most of your target market is checking their email when they are most likely to engage with your messaging and content. I cannot overstate the ROI that a well-managed email campaign can provide for businesses that rely on inbound leads to generate revenue. How, you ask?

Extend the Life Cycle & Value of Your Leads

You probably spend a pretty penny every month on PPC, social ads, or other paid channels. Let’s say, for the sake of the example, that you enroll about 10% of them. That’s not a bad ROI, but after a few weeks the other 90% of leads more than likely get a big, fat “icebox” tag slapped on them.

Your bottom line might be just fine at a 10% conversion rate, but if I told you that a properly executed email campaign could help you monetize the other 90% of leads you generate, do you imagine yourself saying no to that?

In a nutshell, email has the power to engage leads long after admissions stops dialing. We’re not talking weeks, we’re talking months and years, here. If you’re constantly delivering high-value, relevant content to the inbox of the people who, at one point, cared enough to fill out a form on your landing page, you’ll probably start seeing one or more of the following happen:

• Cold leads will warm back up. Maybe something came up in their life, maybe they were just tire kicking, maybe they weren’t sold on trade school yet. You better believe it, though, if they are continually exposed to your brand, the idea will stay fresh in their mind, and when they finally decide to pull the trigger, you want to be the school they are familiar with.
• Leads that went to your landing page and bounced right after start engaging with you on social media. An unfortunate reality with PPC, especially, is that people will fill out the form, lose interest, and bounce from your site, never to return. Don’t be surprised if you turn these would-be fleeting prospects into social media followers if you’re serving them great content in their email inbox.
• Clinic and salon traffic starts increasing. We already know the people filling out forms are interested in your industry, whether or not they come to your school immediately. Convincing them to come into your student clinic or salon for a service with a great offer or special is easy peasy with email marketing.

Key Takeaways: 4 weeks, 6 months, 2 years, it doesn’t matter. Email marketing keeps leads engaged and red hot LONG after admissions stops calling them, and the result is generally a spike in brand awareness, engagement, and of course, enrollments.

Increase the Value and Reach of Your Content

Let’s talk about content for a second. It’s the cornerstone of basically everything you do with your marketing. Without great content, you’re simply going to be irrelevant in the digital space, but great content needs to be amplified.

Whether you’re putting your valuable time into writing, or you’re spending your hard-earned money on an agency or freelancer, email marketing adds a whole new dimension to your content’s value.

Just like marketers create funnels of content for social media and SEO promotions, so it goes for email efforts. Email marketing allows you to put your content in front of more eyes, in addition to giving you yet another channel to leverage your content with. It’s already performing for you on social media and search results, but email marketing allows you to take advantage of your evergreen content (your unicorns!) in a targeted, strategic way. Great content should do its job of generating the form fill out or phone call if you let it, and the best way to let it is to get more people seeing it.

Goal & Interest Based Marketing

Email marketing is versatile as heck. Seriously. Some of my clients are severely hurting for traffic through their clinic or salon, but have nothing but 100% capacity classes. Others, more prominently and commonly, are anxious to fill those seats. Some, even further, like to focus on building their social media presence, or any combination of the above.

What’s so fantastic about email marketing is that you can build your funnels and tailor your efforts around the exact results you want. You have a direct line to the consumer’s inbox, so if you can hook them with a great looking email and a catchy subject line, it’s easy to point them in the direction you want them to go.

What’s more, is when your list is built out enough, with plenty of great data to analyze, you can start segmenting your lists based on everything from interest, to demographics, to psychographics, and more. This increases the efficiency of your campaigns, and allows you to better determine which content will perform well with different segments of your list.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered!

What floors me the most is that a business is willing to put time, effort, and (often A TON of) money into generating leads through SEO, PPC, social media, and more, but then turn around and waste the vast majority of them, especially knowing that their competitors are likely already taking advantage of email marketing.

If it’s important enough for you to have them, it’s important enough for you to keep them, and what you’ll find is if you’re willing to invest some resources in a concerted email marketing campaign, leads will stay warmer longer, your enrollment rates will start to increase, and you’re going to drive the kind of brand awareness that most of your competitors miss out on as soon as they hit the “icebox” button in your CRM.

Need help warming up your cold leads or keeping them red hot while you’ve got them? Contact us to see how we can help you.