As a small business, you understand the importance of maintaining one-to-one relationships with your prospects and customers.

While there are many customer touch-points through which to communicate with customers, distribute marketing content, and promote your offers, email outreach is one of the most effective ways to develop a personal connection that nurtures relationships, builds trust, and increases conversion.

In fact, 62% of consumers expect companies to send personalized content and offers based on their interactions with the brand.

However, you can’t deliver the best products and services that’ll attract and retain customers if you don’t have the best people working for you.

Once again, email marketing is an effective method for communicating with job candidates. You do need to be responsive and on the ball at all times during the hiring process. Otherwise, you could lose the best candidates to your competition.

It’s often quite challenging for small businesses to juggle email correspondences with prospects, customers, and job candidates while making sure all responses are sent out in a timely manner.

Not to mention, keeping track of all the interactions so nothing falls through the crack could seem almost impossible.

Thankfully, you don’t have to do it all on your own.

You can use an automation tool to take advantage of email’s ability to build one-to-one relationships in these three main areas: lead nurturing and sales support, customer retention, and recruiting.

Lead Nurturing and Sales

Finding high-quality leads and building relationships with them is the key to accelerating the customer journey and increasing your conversion rate.

Email offers the opportunity to establish a two-way dialogue with prospects, allowing you to speak to their unique challenges and address specific concerns.

Email automation can increase the productivity of your sales team with these key functionalities:

• Advanced email tracking: identify leads with the highest purchase intent by analyzing who has opened your emails and engaged with the content. You can then focus your sales resources on following up with these prospects.
• Meeting scheduling: allow potential customers to schedule an appointment right in the email with one-click scheduling. This eliminates the frustrations and errors caused by numerous back-and-forth, thereby reducing friction and improving customer experience.
• Email templates: don’t reinvent the wheel! By selecting from a library of high-performing templates, you can send personalized emails at scale. You can also track the performance of these templates to refine the messaging and identify the winners.
• Follow-up sequences: by creating drip campaigns right within Gmail, Google Inbox, or your CRM system (e.g., Salesforce,) you can send personalized follow-up emails with the most appropriate messaging at the right time to accelerate the sales cycle.
• CRM integration: with the ability to send emails right from your CRM platform, reps can easily reference a prospect’s record when crafting the email to send highly relevant information at the most appropriate time. You can also track open, clicks, downloads, and replies, then have the information synced to the CRM platform in real-time to inform future interactions.

Customer Retention

You’re probably aware that it’s more costly to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. In addition, returning customers often have higher customer lifetime value and average order value, so each sale you make is more profitable.

Loyal customers are also more likely to provide glowing testimonials and refer others to your business, helping you acquire new customers at a lower cost.

Email offers the personal touch that allows you to keep in touch with current customers, make sure that they’re happy with your products or services, and nurture relationships that will make future upsell and cross-sell more effective.

With email automation, you can deliver seamless customer care and increase the effectiveness of your customer success team:

• Email sharing: by creating a link for an email thread that customer care specialists can share internally, inquiries can be passed to the most appropriate team members and get resolved in a timely manner.
• Polls and surveys: build loyalty by showing your customers that you care about their opinions. An email productivity tool allows you to insert polls and surveys directly into an email, making it easy for customers to share their thoughts with just a click of the mouse.
• Email metrics: by tracking open rates and engagement, you can identify your biggest fans. This will allow you to focus customer care resources on making sure that these loyal customers are happy with your products or services and promote offers (e.g., upsell or cross-sell) that will add value to their experience so you can increase their customer lifetime value.
• Follow-ups and reorder reminders: with drip campaigns scheduled to send out based on each customer’s interaction with your brand, you can effectively provide post-purchase support, ask for review or referral, and deliver onboarding content to enhance the customer experience. You can also send emails to remind customers to reorder or reactivate lapsed customers with a special offer.

Recruitment

Delivering an outstanding candidate experience is the key to attracting top talents to work for your company, which can directly impact customer experience, sales, and your bottom line.

A well-orchestrated hiring process needs to be supported by well-timed emails that address questions, provide relevant information, and get the candidates to take the appropriate actions.

Email is the perfect tool to create a personalized candidate experience that makes a positive impression and automation is the key to delivering the right message at the right time so you can reach more candidates, land more interviews, and hire the best talents:

• Email tracking: use advanced metrics to gauge which candidates are most interested and responsive. Besides open rate, you can track clicks, replies, and downloads to identify the most promising candidates.
• Candidate engagement: keep candidates engaged throughout the interviewing process by sending drip campaigns with the most relevant messaging for each stage, e.g., by providing more information about your company, having your employees share their experience, or thanking a candidate for attending an interview.
• Personalization at scale: with automation, you can write one message (or select a high-performing template) and customize hundreds of emails instantly with personal information. This allows you to deliver a personalized experience to each candidate without sacrificing efficiency.
• Interview scheduling: eliminate time-consuming back-and-forth that could create a frustrating experience by allowing candidates to schedule interviews right in the email. You can get on the calendars of the most promising candidates right away and avoid errors caused by having to manually re-enter the information into the calendar app.

Conclusion

Email is a great way to communicate with customers and potential hires so you can build relationships, increase sales, and attract the best talents to grow your company.

The key to successful email outreach is to create a personalized experience by sending the most relevant message at the right time.