First impressions are crucial. From greeting your customers as they cross the threshold to walking into that first business meeting, the moment you engage with your prospective customer, he or she starts making hundreds of computations:

• Are you someone he or she can trust?
• Do you have a quality product or service?
• Will he or she benefit from doing business with you?

Because of the prehistoric survival mechanisms in humans, your prospect has made a major decision on whether or not to do business with your company in just seven seconds.

In this day and age, digital communications often take the place of the old-time meet and greet.

Instead of saying, “Hello,” you have a pop-up on your website; instead of a handshake, you send an email.

To save an invaluable amount of time, you can even automate many of these processes. Read along, as we explore how to wow your prospects on your website and in their inbox.

Wow on your website.

There are over 60 trillion web pages indexed on Google with over 2.3 million searches per second.

With all of that content at your prospect’s fingertips, you need to engage and capture your prospect within seconds of them hitting your website.

A simple way to wow your prospects and grow your email list is through Privy, a website solution that offers popups, banners, email bars, and mobile-friendly subscription forms to help you automatically grow your email list.

To borrow from The Field of Dreams: “If you [automatically] ask them, they will join.”

At BJC Branding, we’re huge fans of Privy, integrating it with the majority of our clients’ Constant Contact accounts. As a result, our clients have experienced outstanding email list growth.

To learn more about Privy and how organizations like yours are using it, take a look at our previous blog post.

Here’s an example of how we’ve used Privy on the BJC Branding website to grow our own email list:

A few helpful observations:

• We configured the splash page to appear after 3 seconds on the site (remember: first impressions)
• We establish instant credibility by mentioning “Hundreds of Small Business Owners”
• We collect just enough information (name, email, and company) without asking for too much
• We include a strong call to action (Let’s Do This)

Wow in the inbox.

Once your website visitors join your email list, it’s time to lay on the inbox charm with a real-time Welcome Email.

The Welcome Email is the first campaign in your autoresponder series, and it’s one of the most important. According to a recent Experian study, the average open rate for a real-time Welcome Email is 57.8 percent along with a click rate of 14.4 percent. (These are very impressive metrics in the world of email marketing!)

Tip: Here’s how to customize your Welcome Email in your Constant Contact account.

The key to the real-time Welcome Email is the instant gratification experienced by your subscribers. They sign up on your site, and they instantly receive a greeting in their inbox. It’s professional, punctual, and, best of all, automated.

You can’t just send any run of the mill message as your Welcome Email. It’s important to put some thought into your campaign (both from a design and content perspective) to really wow your new subscriber.

Following our BJC Branding example, below is the Welcome Email subscribers receive when they sign up through our Privy website form.

A few helpful observations:

• We establish our branding by adding our logo in the email header
• We welcome the subscriber with a big, beautiful headline
• We add the subscriber’s first name to add a level of personability

Our Welcome Email is extremely effective because it welcomes our new subscribers to the list and engages them with an informal request to reply to our email.

A lot of thought went into the written content (we’ll cover that in a future blog post) so we are keeping it hidden. Not to fret, you can see our entire Welcome Email (and even use our content) by subscribing to our mailing list at www.BJCBranding.com.

Keep up the wow factor.

Now that you’ve made an impactful first impression with your automated Privy subscription form and real-time Welcome Email, you need to keep the momentum going:

1. Create an autoresponder series to take your new subscriber through the “journey” of learning more about your business
2. Send out bi-weekly or monthly email campaigns to keep your subscriber engaged with the brand
3. Invite your subscribers to connect with you on social media to interact with them on multiple platforms

Hopefully, you now know how to wow your prospect and make a long-lasting, positive first impression.

Want more email marketing tips and tricks? Join our email list at www.BJCBranding.com.

The post How to Wow Your Prospects on Your Website and in The Inbox appeared first on Constant Contact Blogs.