If you’re looking to grow your email list, you’re in the right place. With just a few tweaks to your email marketing program, you can be generating quality leads and growing your business.
People love to receive offers and discounts. Whether it’s a 25% off sale or a free pair of sunglasses with their order, you’ll always see a spike in sales when an email marketing program includes deals and discounts. This is called a ‘referral promotion’ because it encourages people to ‘refer’ (or recommend) a business or product to another person. When you incorporate a referral promotion into your email marketing strategy, you’re essentially asking people to share your email address with someone else and potentially earn a reward (like a free trip or a discount on a purchase) for doing so.
What if you could harness this excitement around a referral promotion and turn it into a lead magnet? You can with a simple yet effective tactic known as a ‘referral prompt’.
A referral prompt is a piece of content, usually in the form of an email, that prompts your subscribers to make a purchase or lead more easily.
If someone subscribes to your email list but never makes a purchase or leads after joining your list, you’re losing out on a potentially valuable lead. Having a piece of content, like an email, that you can use to engage with this person and get them to take action is critical to the success of your email marketing program.
The power of a referral prompt email is that it’s able to draw more qualified leads due to its personalized messaging. Since your email is personalized, the content will feel more relevant to the person reading it. This makes it more likely that they’ll take the time to read your email and, subsequently, make a purchase or join your list.
How to Create a Referral Prompt Email
To create a referral prompt email, you’ll need to consider a few key points.
Firstly, you’ll want to choose a deal, offer, or discount that relates to your industry. The key to a successful referral promotion is choosing a relevant deal that will pique the interest of your audience. For example, if you’re an e-commerce store, you might choose to offer a 10% off coupon or free shipping on all orders. If your business is in the travel or hospitality industries, you might choose to offer a discount on rooms or travel packages.
A solid referral prompt email will always start with a short and snappy intro about the offer. Make sure that you’re engaging with the reader and that your language is easy to understand. Try using short and simple phrases to connect with users. For example, ‘Newegg has a limited time offer of $10 off your next order of organic beef jerkey’
Your offer should relate to something that your audience cares about. If you can relate the offer to a question your audience is likely to ask yourself (such as ‘Will this discount work for me?’), you’re guaranteed to grab the attention of your readers.
You can use tools like Google Trends to easily find the ‘hot’ (i.e., most searched for) topics in your niche. Doing this will reveal the most relevant topics your readers are searching for and enable you to create content that will be of interest to them.
The next step is to take a look at how you can personalize the content. Differentiate yourself from other brands in your industry by giving your email list members a reason to choose you over others. One way to do this is to implement A/B testing on your webpages. During this process, you can randomly assign subscribers to receive either a standard version of your web page or a personalized version with modified content. The goal is to see which version performs the best.
The final step is to follow up with a call to action. This might be as simple as ‘click here’ to learn more about the offer’, ‘click here to see our discount’, or ‘click here to purchase now’.
To drive more leads to your website, you can either ask for a visit or, if you’d like, invite them to sign up for your mailing list. After they’ve visited or signed up for your list, you can follow up with another email to provide more value.
When you develop an email marketing plan, you’ll want to set a particular date by which you’ll follow up with the person who joined your list. Doing this will help you track the success of your plan and identify any areas in which you might need to make changes.
Wrapping Up
The key to a successful email marketing campaign is to ensure that each element, from the offers to the design of the email itself, relates to and reinforces the others. If you can integrate a few key points into your workflow, you’ll be on your way to driving more qualified leads to your website.