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Email is an effective outreach method for sales teams to connect with prospects, nurture relationships, and deliver a personalized sales experience that will increase conversion rates.
In fact, 86% of professionals prefer to use email for business communications, 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel for revenue generation, and 73% of millennials indicate that email is their preferred way of communication for business purpose.
However, juggling email communications can be quite overwhelming for many small business owners. Spending hours managing a crowded inbox not only lowers productivity but can also cause delays and errors that impact the customer experience and lead to missed opportunities.
Thankfully, you can have your cake and eat it too by leveraging email communication and automation technologies. They allow you to tap into the power of email marketing to increase sales productivity while helping your sales team manage their inbox efficiently so they can focus on building customer relationships and generating more sales.
Automation enables you to streamline workflow and give you more bandwidth. It helps increase operational efficiency and drive revenue. Here’s how you or your sales team can use automation and email communication tools to avoid getting overwhelmed by email and improve results:
1. Get Notifications To Improve Response Time
Prospects are 7 times more likely to make a purchase if you reply to their inquiries within one hour, as opposed to after an hour.
To make sure prospects are getting prompt responses, set up engagement and tracking notifications so you will receive real-time alerts on desktop, email, or Slack based on pre-determined actions.
You can then reply to time-sensitive emails or give prospects a call right away to deliver a responsive sales experience and increase conversion rates.
2. Eliminate Scheduling Back-and-Forth
Appointment coordination is time-consuming and adds friction to the sales process. Plus, imagine how much time your sales reps can save if they can get sales meetings set up with just one email instead of five!
With MixMax’s one-click meetings feature, you can embed clickable dates and times into any email so recipients can choose a meeting time right away. The app can automatically send calendar invitations, meeting notifications, and reminders while adding the appointments to Google Calendar to minimize time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks.
3. Use Tracking and Analytics To Fine-Tune Communications
Set up person-based tracking to receive automated alerts when prospects engage with your emails. You can see how they interact with the content (e.g., clicking a link, downloading an attachment) so you can send highly relevant follow-up emails to progress them down the sales funnel.
You can also use automation technologies to get real-time reporting and gain insights into how recipients interact with your emails so you can find out what content is generating results.
4. Automate Drip Campaigns To Nurture Leads
Most prospects don’t respond to the first cold email so it’s important that you have a follow-up sequence in place to increase the response rate. In fact, a study saw an 18% response rate to the first email and 27% to the sixth.
You can automate a drip email sequence across multiple touch points to engage leads on their terms based on their customer lifecycle stages. This helps deliver the most appropriate content in the right place and at the right time to accelerate the customer journey.
5. Improve Customer Experience With Personalization
Customers expect highly relevant content and personalized experience. In fact, personalizing sales emails with custom snippets has been found to double the reply rate.
For example, you can integrate Salesforce with your Gmail inbox to send highly relevant emails using data from CRM fields or real-time insights about the recipients. This will help you deliver personalized sales experience and build relationships with prospects at scale.
6. Deliver a Consistent Customer Experience With Templates
Consistency builds trust and trust leads to conversion. You can create branded email templates to enable sales reps to respond faster, smarter, and with better information in every communication.
Templates help ensure that all the sales emails are on-brand while allowing you to leverage content that has been proven to yield results so your team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.
You can also fine-tune the templates based on tracking and insights so everyone in the organization can have access to the most effective content in real-time.
7. Automate Workflows and Sync Up Data
If you or you sales reps are manually handling tedious tasks, such as updating CRM data after each email interaction, they’re not spending their time on nurturing leads or making sales.
You can create custom rules and automate email workflows to minimize manual and repetitive tasks. This ensures that prospect information is updated in real-time to avoid delays and frustration caused by human errors.
For example, if someone opens your email 1 time then you can automatically send them an email with more information about your company or product. If someone opens your email 2 times (then it’s likely there is more interest) so you can automatically send an email with a suggestion to have a phone call and include your available calendar slots.
8. Trigger Automated Follow-Ups
Set up rules to engage leads by triggering automated follow-up sequences based on specific behaviors (e.g., clicking on a link in an email). You can send additional collateral, calendar invites, surveys, and special offers to build your pipeline, increase engagement, and accelerate the sales cycle.
You can also sync up the sequence with your CRM platform to leverage real-time CRM data (e.g., a prospect’s interaction with your brand on other touchpoints) so you can send the most appropriate content.
9. Send Perfectly-Timed Emails
Timing is key to capturing prospects’ attention when they’re most likely to engage. Instead of having your sales reps sit and wait to hit the “send” button, automate the process with an email-scheduling feature to make sure your emails are reaching each lead at the right time.
With MixMax’s Send Later feature, you can get the most engagement with each recipient using AI-powered technology to optimize email delivery based on the recipient’s activity.
10. Automate Data Collection Workflows
The more information you have about your prospects, the better you’ll be able to deliver a highly personalized experience to increase sales.
Based on users’ responses, you can integrate your Gmail inbox with Typeform to automate downstream actions at scale, such as automated thank-you messages, reminders to send thank you swag, and synching prospects’ data with other systems (e.g., CRM) to ensure that you have the most accurate information, eliminate data silos, and protect data security.
Email is a highly cost-effective sales tool. When Gmail is used with the right automation technologies, it can improve your productivity without compromising the delivery of a highly-personalized experience that will help you nurture relationships, drive conversions and grow your business.
About the Sponsor
Mixmax is a Gmail-based automation suite for small and mid-sized businesses. Create personalized communication and automate manual processes at scale, improving productivity without compromising the delivery of a flawless customer experience. Mixmax makes it easy for your prospects to do business with you, so you can drive conversions and grow your business. Sign up for a free trial or get a demo today!
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