Before the age of the Internet, written thank you notes were common in business interactions — marketing and sales reps would often send a written thank you note after networking events or meeting with clients. That personal touch has mostly disappeared in the digital era. Now, if thank you messages are sent at all after interacting with customers, they are generally automated emails that leads receive after signing up for a website subscription or filling out a form to download a digital product. Therefore, they’re often disregarded.
In an inbound lead nurture campaign, thank you emails hold a significant amount of weight. After the lead fills out a form on a landing page to receive a downloadable piece of content, they receive a thank you message that includes a call-to-action (CTA) to move them further through the sales funnel. If your thank you email doesn’t catch their attention as genuine, you won’t get the click, and you miss out on a conversion. However, if you include the right characteristics in your thank you emails, you can generate active engagement from your customers. These tips will help you improve the content in these vital emails and get the marketing results you’re looking for.
Sending out emails with personalized elements gives your customers the sense that you’re talking directly to them. Starting with their name, adding personalization can improve your clickthrough rate (CTR) and your conversion rates. You can use an email system that merges customer data they provided on the form with the email content and include details like company name, location, job title and many other specifics.
As mentioned in the introduction, your thank you emails are great starting points to lead your prospects down your sales funnel. Include a clear CTA that offers leads the next item in your lead nurture campaign. They’ve already expressed interest in some sort of downloadable you provided, so make sure you offer them something else that’s further down your sales pipeline and relevant to their needs. If you clearly express the value of the next proposed downloadable, your customers will be likely to take action because they have just concluded a satisfactory transaction with you.
Subject lines are an influential reason why people open emails. In fact, 33 percent of readers open emails due to just the subject line. So, make it something great. Some common words that have been shown to entice readers to open emails are free, sale, new, video and alert. Using 30 or fewer characters in a subject line also makes it more digestible.
Remind your customer how to follow you on social media, and offer buttons to help them share the content they just downloaded easily. The best referral is word-of-mouth, whether online or offline. Let your customers' fingers do the work and help promote your company for you to extend your reach to a new market of prospects.
When it comes down to it, your inbound strategy depends heavily on the success of your thank you emails. You’ve already jumped the first hurdle by capturing a lead on your landing page, so don’t lose them by not being strategic about crafting your thank you email. If you can get leads to click the CTAs, then you have a clear path to give them your bottom of the funnel offer and reach out to them to make a purchase. It’s clear that thank you emails are more than just a way to say “Hey, thanks!” They can be your marketing golden ticket that results in closing sales and earning customer trust, too.