Email marketing an excellent way to reach and engage your target audience and build a rapport with them. And, it’s not like throwing darts in the dark—you’re talking to people who showed interest in your brand and gave you the nod to enter their inbox.
Email marketing also costs less yet brings tremendous results over time—it has a 4,200% ROI, meaning you can get $42 for every $1 you spend.
While email is an excellent channel to nurture leads and convert them into clients, not all consultants have explored it to its full potential to grow their business.
In this article, we’ll help you change that by telling you how you can leverage email marketing to get consulting clients and sustain your business.
Tips for using email marketing to get consulting clients
The job outlook for consultants looks bright—it’s expected to increase by 14% through 2028.
But to get a piece of the pie and benefit from the increased opportunities, you need a steady lead pipeline and client base.
Here’s how you can leverage email marketing here:
1. Create a lead magnet
To start your email campaigns, you need an active email list, i.e., a list of people who’ve agreed to and shown interest in receiving communications from you.
The simplest way to build this list is to add an opt-in form on your website asking people to sign up to stay updated about your business.
However, a more effective strategy is to offer something valuable to your audience (a lead magnet) for free—to incentivize them to give you their email address.
Some lead magnets you can offer are:
- A guide
- A short consultation
- Monthly newsletter
- A report
- An ebook
- A checklist/cheatsheet of tips or resources
- A whitepaper
- A webinar
- An email course
The ideas can be endless, but the key is to create a lead magnet relevant to your audience—that's easy to consume, actionable, and highlights the value of your core service/offer.
For instance, Consulting Success gives the Consulting Blueprint for free to people who join its email list. It’s a great way to capture leads it can then nurture through its emails and showcase its expertise, further driving conversions.
Once you create the lead magnet you can write the delivery email, attach the document to the email, create an email signature, and set it up on your email service provider. Setting up all this can seem like a lot of work, but there are lead magnet design tools, email signature generators, AI writing software, and various other tools that simplify the task.
2. Promote your lead magnet
You’ve created a solid lead magnet that will interest your audience and establish your expertise and credibility—that’s great!
But to benefit from it and increase sign-ups to your email list, you need to promote your lead magnet and put it in front of your audience.
You can do this through an opt-in form on your website, which you can plug on your homepage, within your blogs.
Or, you can create a separate landing page to put your lead magnet front and center and convey its benefits. You can direct customers to this page from any page on your website like Constant Contact does below or link it in your blog posts.
3. Nurture leads with autoresponders and broadcasts
Once people subscribe to your email list and receive the welcome email, the next step is to engage them through an autoresponder series.
Autoresponders are emails with set content sent automatically when someone joins your list.
As aforementioned, your first email in this series should deliver the lead magnet the user signed up for. You can also treat it as a welcome email and introduce yourself, thank them for subscribing, and tell them what content they can expect going forward through it.
Follow up with informative emails to further build a relationship with your subscribers and warm them up to your business. Send them helpful information and insights or links to your latest blog or social media posts—the idea is to build (“know, like, and trust”) and not act sales-y by pitching right away.
However, you can soft-sell your services here. For example, Neil Patel, who’s won consulting deals with companies like Facebook and NBC, subtly sells his services with a “P.S.” towards the end of his emails.
You, too, can use a trick like this and offer a free consultation to your subscribers—this can help you build a connection with them while promoting your services. Once done with these calls, you can then upsell your core offer to these leads.
Another great idea is to follow up your educational emails with a link to a live event such as a webinar, where again, you pitch your offer.
4. Provide value through email consistently
With the help of the above points, you’d have got your welcome and nurture emails sorted.
Now, you need to focus on how you’ll continue building that relationship and engaging your subscribers, no matter where they are in the sales funnel.
The goal is to provide value and educate your subscribers through your emails—so they feel confident in your services and driven to buy from you.
Things can get tricky here—because differentiating the “free” value you provide in your emails from the value of your paid service can be confusing.
But remember, when clients hire you for your services, the strategies, methods, and solutions you provide to them will be structured and tailored for their business, and that’s what sets it apart from your free marketing emails.
Moreover, the whole point behind sharing your expertise through your emails is establishing yourself as a thought leader and eventually making sales. It’s not to dilute the value of your core offer but to convince prospects of its benefits and make it more attractive.
To do this, you can share your recent blog posts, industry updates, and your opinion on them in your emails.
Also, set up an email routine and stick to it. You should send at least one email per month, but whatever frequency you decide, be consistent—to stay top-of-mind, so people know when to expect an email from you.
Consultant Chris Brogan gets the above points right with his weekly newsletter.
5. Leverage analytics and segmentation
Once your email list expands, it’s time to tap into analytics and segment your subscribers, i.e., break them down into smaller groups so you can send hyper-targeted emails to each.
Using your email tool, you can split users based on whether they’re a new subscriber, a past or existing client, a hot lead, whether they opted-in for your lead magnet, their email open, click-through rates, etc.
These analytics will help you understand if your emails’ content and marketing messages resonate with your audience. And they’ll allow you to create emails tailored to each segment’s stage and needs to drive conversions.
So, for instance, you can send a specific broadcast to subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a while—as Jon Morrow does below—to show them you care and remind them about your services.
Or, you can send a link to a helpful blog to users who signed up for your lead magnet—to educate them further and demonstrate your expertise.
Bottom line: The more fine-tuned and relevant the emails, the higher the chances of conversions.
6. Retarget your email list subscribers
Besides the above examples, you can also use analytics and segmentation for retargeting your email subscribers and keeping your business on top of their minds.
You can send retargeting emails that will get triggered when a subscriber takes a particular action—like opening your email, clicking on a link, visiting your website.
For example, you can send a case study or a landing page link to book a call to users who opened and downloaded a PDF of yours. Or you can share information addressing their pain points based on where they are in their journey.
This way, you can provide them with content they’re interested in and potentially push them down the funnel and towards conversion.
You can also retarget your subscribers through Google and Facebook ads enticing them to download a case study or directing them to your landing page to book a call. The idea is to consistently place yourself before your target audience and build recognition, even if they don’t convert immediately.
7. Supplement with cold outreach
And lastly, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and wait for clients to reach out to you. Be proactive, and combine email marketing with your cold outreach efforts so that you can work with clients of your choice and land higher-quality gigs.
You can find clients to cold pitch through:
- Crunchbase or Angelist—see which companies received funding recently.
- Job listings—in your pitch, tell them how hiring a consultant who can prepare a strategy for them to implement can be more beneficial given the stage they’re at.
- New business announcements.
- Industry groups on LinkedIn or Slack. You can actually use the LinkedIn sales navigator for lead generation. It helps you find emails of LinkedIn users so that you can reach out to them.
- Industry groups on LinkedIn or Slack.
- Your professional network.
- Asking clients for referrals.
- You could also use sites like Fiverr and Upwork. If you study postings, you can find their company names and websites, figure out their email addresses and reach out to them. This will help you differentiate yourself from the masses that apply directly. You can charge them more too.
The key is to personalize and tailor your cold emails to the prospect you’re sending them to.
Do your research, go through their website and LinkedIn profile, and see what they post about—the idea is to understand what they need, how your services can help them, and show them that you did your homework.
Once you identify a problem they’re facing, you can even tell them how you plan on solving it in your pitch. This will help demonstrate your expertise and show prospects you went the extra mile for them.
You can also add one of your lead magnets or freebies to these emails to entice prospects. Another way to stand out is to attach a quick Loom video to them—introduce yourself, take them through your lead magnet, or the strategy you prepared for them.
Conclusion
There you go! These are our seven tips on using email marketing to build and nurture your lead pipeline, and ultimately, grow your consulting clientele.
A little parting advice—don’t hesitate to share your expertise, whether it’s through your lead magnet, nurture series, or cold emails. Do that, and you’ll build valuable relationships with your leads that will pay off for your business in the future.
About The Author
Rachel Bowland is the content manager at Social Marketing Writing and Creatiwitt - she likes to write about marketing and design.
