How to attract more consulting clients using email marketing

Marketing is the livewire of every business, whether you’re trading or you’re a service provider. It is the tool for creating or increasing awareness about a business and getting clients to buy what a business offers. However, with the rising advertising costs, getting clients today has become harder than ever despite the myriad of marketing options available. 

One easy and comparatively cheaper marketing strategy, which though old yet very effective to date, is email marketing. Recent statistics suggest that over 80% of marketers throw email outreach into their marketing mix. If it weren’t working, more people wouldn’t be using it. 

Usually, launching an email marketing campaign for your consulting brand begins with consensually obtaining the email address of strangers who are technically referred to as “prospects.” Here, a business reaches out to non-customers hoping to convert them into customers. 

However, to get meaningful results, you must go about it properly. This article examines the proper way and the best strategies for consulting email marketing to get the best results within the shortest time possible.

What is consulting email marketing?

A consulting email is a prospecting email sent out to acquire new clients for a consulting business. This mostly comes in cold emails sent to strangers or people who know about the business but are yet to transact with it.

The aim of sending a consulting email is to introduce the business to the prospect and to services to turn the prospect into a customer. 

Often, consultant emailing works better with prospects that know of your services via other sources before they get the email. Such people are less likely to mark the email as SPAM, block the email domain, or report it, which could ruin your email consultancy efforts.

Why should you use email marketing as a consultant?

Consulting email marketing is useful for consultants for two main reasons:

1. Brand Awareness: get more people to know about your offerings or service(s).

2. Lead Generation: easily turn strangers into clients and returning clients who patronize you repeatedly at no additional marketing cost. 

3. Comparatively cheaper: yes, email marketing costs less than pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media ads, radio/TV ads, and most other types of mass media ads. A recent study suggests that brands make $36 for every $1 they spend on email marketing. This is impressive, especially for those seeking affordable but effective marketing avenues.

How to get consulting clients by sending cold emails

There are three stages in getting consulting clients via a cold email marketing approach:

Preparation

This stage involves defining the psychological metrics and dynamics about you and your prospective client.

1. Define your brand

Who you are is who you attract. Your persona can influence your target market: are you a high-value person or a low-value person? This would reflect in what you are selling and to whom you are selling it.

So, start by defining yourself and have a good mental picture of who to attract, your pricing, the consultancy service you’re offering, etc. High-value marketers and consultants who want to walk with high-ticket clients go after such clients.  

Doing a careful self-appraisal will help to set the tone for your email consulting services for your clients or yourself and get good results.

2. Define your clientele

There are currently over 4 billion email users worldwide; many marketers make the mistake of trying to sell to everyone on the market. Hence, they send consulting emails to anyone they can get an email address. This is not a feasible approach. Rather, in planning your email consulting, you should define exactly who you wish to sell to:

• Are you looking for deep-pocket clients or low-ticket clients? 

• Where do you want your clients to come from (i.e., industry, location, connections, etc.)?  

• What are the specific needs of the market that you want to solve? 

• What is the possibility that your prospect(s) will accept your proposition? 

To avoid wasting time, money, and other valuable resources, these and more related questions are the cardinal issues you should consider before launching your email campaign.

3. Plan your email

This is more about sales. Here, you develop strategies to deal with client objections and doubts that could prevent them from responding to your request. The approaches are offering a gift, conversing with present realities, and triggering the client’s needs or desires. 

You could also infuse emergency, emphasizing ease of use, reiterating the reason for the price, showing benefits and features, or giving a discount. If it’s a duration-based solution like a course or mentorship program, this is where you define a suitable timeframe for the program. Doing these helps speed up your consulting email marketing.

In all, try to show why your offer or approach is better to compel the prospect to respond as you wish.

Draft your email sequences

You’ve planned your email; what next? Next is to develop your first draft email and the next until you’re satisfied with the final email. You’ll then develop other (follow-up) emails to form an email sequence of at least seven emails. These final, enhanced emails are what you’ll plug into your email marketing software to launch your cold email marketing campaign. 

2. Execution

Now that you’ve finalized the psychological aspects of your cold email consulting strategy, drafted, pruned, and gotten your email copies, the next thing is to send them. 

Here are the steps to achieve this:

1. Get your email addresses database

You need a list of viable email addresses to do email marketing consulting. There are many ways to acquire email addresses to market to. You can collect email addresses from social media or use the email addresses you collect from your website/blog visitors. 

You can also get an email address database for your consultant emailing from your friends, family, or institutions. Also, you can get emails from data management companies like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

2. Filter the email contact list

As a consultant email marketer who wants the best result, it’s highly recommended that you audit and clean your email addresses to eliminate unwanted, closed, and dead emails. Some tools you can use for this include NeverBounce, Kickbox, Gmass, and ZeroBounce.

3. Select your preferred emailing software.

Many free and paid email marketing software is available today for sending, receiving, and managing your email list. This includes basic proprietary and common email platforms like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. However, having something more robust to get better results would be best. 

Some email consultants set up their email servers while others use third-party established email marketing services like Getresponse, Mailchimp, SendGrid, etc. These have different prices and features to meet different customers' different needs. It’s up to you to decide what’s best for your consultant email marketing.

You’d then import your cleaned email addresses list into your email marketing software to kick-start your campaign. Not sure how to do this? Each email marketing platform has helpful tutorials and guides. Please see these guides to learn how to use their services. 

4. Send your first outreach email.

Sending your first email marketing consulting mail to your prospects involves two things. The first thing is your cold email subject line. This should be catchy yet simple. Next is the body of the email. The body of your first cold prospecting email should be short and welcoming and clearly describe you, what you’re offering, and why it’s appropriate for the client. 

5. Send out the emails

How many emails you send out in a day/week is up to you, but you shouldn’t overdo or underdo it. Sending 1-3 emails daily or 4-5 weekly is okay. Although not a rule, using this approach could help avoid being seen as spammy or buggy by your email contacts. 

It could boost your email open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate if you have clickable links. You can do this yourself manually or outsource it to someone else. However, the best way to run a consultant email campaign.

Tip: sending emails daily could be fun initially, but over time, it becomes tedious, redundant, and stale. Besides, it can take too much that could be allotted to other productive activities. Why not cut the stress by automating the process? Deploy automated email sender tools and enhance your conversion results by including your Workee website link. Clients can come to your Workee dashboard and immediately book sessions with you when you include your link to the emails you’re sending out. Signup for a free account here.

After you’ve sent the emails, wait for the response, and proceed to the follow-up stage of this marketing. See below.

3. Follow-up

When people respond to your email, it’s time to follow them up, and it starts with scheduling or booking an appointment with your prospects.

1. Book an appointment

If done properly, people will begin responding to your email, and this is where the follow-up comes in. You can do this via email, phone, social media, or in person. What to do is offer the respondents several meeting times and ask them to pick the time that suits them most. Also, check if this time favors you. If it does, then proceed to agree on the time to take the discussion further from there. 

Recommendation: If you want to take advantage of opportunities and not miss out on client inquiries, you should get the Workee. Workee is a smart business management tool that automates booking and scheduling functions. You can include your Workee website link to emails with a CTA. Prospects can click on this link to schedule sessions with you based on your preferred timing. 

Conclusion

Email marketing remains a viable means to canvass clients, and many businesses and consultants benefit from it due to its comparative advantage over other marketing strategies. However, it is one thing to get clients from a cold email strategy, but you should be knowledgeable in other aspects of sales and marketing to convert or close them. The entire effort begins and fails with you understanding your target client and their needs. If you get this wrong, it can affect your entire email efforts.