Email Marketing For Consultants: Write Emails & Get Clients

Email marketing for consultants is the most underrated marketing method for consultants.

What other marketing method enables you to reach out to prospective clients who signed up to hear from you right in their email inbox — at scale?

But here’s the truth: the size of your list isn’t what matters.

As a consulting business owner, you should focus on building a QUALITY list instead of quantity.

In this article, I’ll cover how to create an email marketing strategy that will help you start more conversations and win more clients.

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Email Marketing For Consultants: Table Of Contents

• What Is Email Marketing For Consultants? 
• Types Of Email Marketing For Consultants
• Email Marketing Best Practices & Action Steps
• Email Marketing Tools For Consultants
• Email Marketing For Consultants Case Study
• Get Help With Your Consulting Email Marketing Strategy

You’re in the consulting business. You don’t need a huge number of clients to build a very profitable business.

What Is Email Marketing For Consultants?

Email marketing for consultants refers to collecting email addresses through your consulting website and social media. With email marketing, you are sending emails to your list of people who have given their permission to email them.

The reason why email marketing is so powerful is because it allows you to communicate directly with your ideal clients at scale.

Through email marketing, you can “reach into your ideal client’s pocket,” getting your message straight into their hands.

So, does that mean you should buy a list of tens of thousands of your ideal clients and start blasting them with emails?

Not quite.

You often hear about businesses with lists of hundreds of thousands of subscribers. In an age where people boast about 1 million YouTube subscribers, it seems like you need huge numbers to make anything happen.

Consider this: a Clarity Coaching Program client based in Europe has a total of 7 clients. He does over half a million dollars in business each year as a solo consultant with no team or assistant.

You’re in the consulting business. You don’t need a huge number of clients to build a very profitable business.

I’d much rather have a list of 100 high-value ideal clients that are likely to be buyers instead of 10 thousand tire-kickers.

So don’t be distracted by vanity metrics. More isn’t always better. There are people with massive amounts of followers who can’t monetize.

Forget about impressions: focus on what will move the needle for your bottom line.

And in the rest of this article, I’ll show you how to build an email marketing strategy that will help you generate a high-value list of your ideal clients.

Types Of Email Marketing For Consultants

What are some types of emails you can send to your list that will help your prospects get to know you, like you, trust you, and want to work with you?

Here’s what has worked for us. Think about how you could do something similar for your own audience.

1. Weekly Email To Promote New Content

Every time you publish an article, speak on a podcast, or write a case study, email your list and tell them about it.

For example, we send out our Consulting Weekly Insights email every Monday. On this email, we share our best work and interesting articles from around the web.

This helps create “top-of-mind awareness” that is extremely powerful from a marketing perspective.

Your ideal clients will find this type of email valuable.

You’re not directly selling. Instead, you’re sharing what you know: information that will help them get what they want.

2. Follow-Up Emails To Generate Calls

One-off “follow-up” emails are sales emails that you’ll send to prompt your list to book a call with you.

• If you have a spot available to take on a client, email your list.
• If you’ve created a new consulting services offering, email your list.
• If you’re raising your fees and you are offering grandfathered rates for those who invest now, email your list.

For example, we send out dedicated case study emails that explain how we help our clients get results — and then, invite consultants to join our program and get results for their business.

The key to these emails isn’t to send them out too often.

You have to earn the right to sell by providing value first.

Once you do that, you’ll have ideal clients who’re glad you’re telling them that you are accepting new clients.

3. Survey Emails For Market Research

Survey emails are emails where you ask your ideal clients questions.

Think of these emails as market research.

You want to understand your ideal client’s problems, objections, and desired results. So ask them about their problems, objections, and desired results.

For example, we write a few studies each year: like our Consulting Fees study. We ask our list of 48K+ consultants everything about how they price their services.

In doing so, we’re able to create valuable content with new insights and data. And we learn a lot about our audience and ideal clients.

Don’t be afraid to email your list with questions.

Although these emails might not directly lead to sales, they will lead to new insights, content ideas, and conversations.

4. Auto-Responder Emails For Audience Onboarding

One of the best ways to grow your list is to offer your website visitors a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a piece of valuable content you exchange for their email address.

For example, we offer our visitors the Consulting Blueprint: a PDF that helps you set profitable fees, productize your offers, scale your business, and much more.

But more than that, we also send them a free email course.

These emails contain insights, stories, and perspectives that help them take action on what they learn in the Consulting Blueprint.

From a marketing perspective, these emails are incredibly powerful: they are full of daily value that gets our new readers to engage with our content, take action on what they learn, and see results inside of their consulting business.

When deciding to join our Coaching Program, many clients say “If the free content is this good, then your paid programs must be amazing.”

By creating an auto-responder series of valuable, engaging emails, you can “prepare” your new readers to become your clients.

This is an advanced email marketing strategy for consultants. But, if you’re serious about your website and your marketing, doing this will take your marketing engine to a new level.

The key principle with these emails (and any other marketing emails) is to make sure they’re valuable.

Give, give, give — and then ask.

As long as you lead with value — insights, knowledge, and data that your ideal clients would find interesting and helpful — then your ideal clients will stay subscribed and reading your emails.

You have to earn the right to sell by providing value first. Once you do that, you’ll have ideal clients who’re glad you’re telling them that you are accepting new clients.

Email Marketing Best Practices & Action Steps

Most consultants wait too long to start building their email list.

Why?

Because they have no idea where to start.

Here is a list of email marketing best practices and action steps to help you get started building your list TODAY.

1. Set Up Your Consulting Website

If you haven’t already, now is the time to write and design your consulting website.

Practically speaking, it’s your website where your ideal clients will join your email list.

From a high-level, your consulting website should articulate:

• Who you help
• What problems you can solve for them
• What results you can create for them
• Why ideal clients should choose you over your competitors

Your website is an expanded version of your value proposition.

It should provide evidence for the points above, showcasing your proof of work: testimonials, case studies, blog articles, videos, podcasts, etc.

2. Sign Up For Your Email Marketing Platform

Once you’ve set up your consulting website, sign up for an email marketing platform.

Your email marketing platform is the software that will host your database, send out your emails, report on your analytics, etc.

If you’re a solo or independent consultant, we recommend MailerChimp or MailerLite.

If you’re a consulting business owner with a dedicated marketing person, consider Keap or ActiveCampaign.

I’ll share more about each of these options in the next action.

3. Start Creating Thought Leadership Content

At first, your consulting website will function like a brochure.

It will be about you, your clients, and your services.

To take it to the next level, you’ll use your website to publish content.

As a consultant, you don’t publish just any form of content.

You’re an expert, so you publish thought leadership content: content where you share your expertise and authority on a specific topic.

Examples of thought leadership marketing include:

• Content on your website
• Content on other websites
• A weekly newsletter
• Writing for other publications
• Speaking at in-person events
• Hosting webinars and presentations online
• Writing books
• Speaking on podcasts
• Researching and publishing white papers

By creating thought-leadership content, you’ll also start attracting traffic to your consulting website via SEO.

4. Ask Ideal Clients To Join Your List

It will take a few months of creating and publishing content for people to find your consulting website organically.

In the meantime, reach out to your ideal clients directly, and ask them if they’d like to join your email list.

You could say something like…

“Hey NAME, you’re a POSITION at an INDUSTRY company: is it accurate to say that you’re also dealing with PROBLEM?

I’m a TYPE consultant who helps INDUSTRY business solve PROBLEM. And I’m starting a newsletter to share everything I know about how to solve PROBLEM and get RESULT.

If you’re interested in joining, I can add you to the list. I’ll make sure it’s highly relevant to your particular interests. And you can unsubscribe at any time.”

Instead of direct outreach to get them on a call, you get them onto your list. This is a softer form of direct outreach that helps you play the long game.

5. Develop A Lead Magnet

The best way to get people onto your email list is by offering them something of value that they would give you their name and email address to get.

This is called a “lead magnet.”

It could be…

• A free email course
• A valuable whitepaper
• A cheat sheet or action plan
• A list of best practices
• A book chapter
• An ebook

The medium isn’t as important as the fact that it’s valuable to your ideal clients.

In most cases, that means helping them better understand their problems, helping them take action, and get their desired results.

Then, you’ll use software like Sumo or OptinMonster to create forms on your website that offer your lead magnet to your website visitors in exchange for their name and email address.

6. Promote Your Content

You can create all the content you want, but if you don’t actively promote your content, nobody will see it.

In our Clarity Coaching Program, we teach an entire lesson on “Marketing Engine” — how to promote your content and your business so that you’re consistently attracting new clients.

You should spend some time each day promoting your content where your ideal clients hang out.

For consultants, start with LinkedIn. Take some of your content, and create little snippets that get people interested. If they want to read more, link them to your site where they can read the full piece.

Promoting your content takes many forms. But the primary goal is to drive people to your consulting website where they can sign up for your email list.

Consultant, treat your email list like gold. Your list is the most important marketing asset you have.

With a list of your ideal consulting clients who sign up to hear from you, your consulting business can always survive.

In my book Act Now: How successful consultants thrive during chaos and uncertainty, I wrote about this phenomenon.

For example, I knew many consultants whose business relied on speaking.

During COVID-19, they could no longer get in front of people and speak. And this meant they couldn’t get in front of their ideal clients.

However, some of those consultants were building up their email lists on the side. The consultants who, in addition to speaking, were also building a list were able to pivot as soon as the world shut down.

Instead of speaking, they began creating new offers: online trainings, virtual workshops, interactive courses, and more.

Sure, they couldn’t speak in person in front of their clients.

But armed with their email list, they had another means by which to reach their ideal clients. And, in doing so, many of them were able to GROW their business when the rest of the economy was shrinking.

This speaks to the power of email marketing for consultants. If you take it seriously, you’ll have a more robust, “hard-to-kill” firm that can weather any storm.

Treat your email list like gold. Your list is the most important marketing asset you have.

Email Marketing Tools For Consultants

So, you’re interested in investing in email marketing for your consulting business.

What tool should you use?

Here are a few email marketing tools we’ve used ourselves and would recommend to consultants.

1. MailChimp

MailChimp is a comprehensive email marketing platform that is renowned for its extensive feature set and versatility, making it an excellent choice for consultants. We used it ourselves for many years.

Its range of template designs, customizable layouts, and built-in photo editing tools enable you to easily create professional-looking marketing emails.

With its segmentation capabilities, you can target your communication based on your client’s behavior, preferences, or previous interactions.

Its advanced automation features, including autoresponders and behavioral triggers, can help you send targeted emails. This is a more advanced feature that I only recommend if you have a dedicated marketing person on your team.

Its integration with numerous other platforms and detailed analytics also make MailChimp a fantastic email marketing tool for any consulting business.

2. MailerLite

MailerLite is an affordable and user-friendly email marketing tool. It’s especially suitable for consultants looking to streamline their email campaigns.

It provides a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor that helps you design professional-looking emails.

Along with standard features like contact segmentation and campaign analytics, MailerLite shines with its strong emphasis on simplicity and ease of use.

It also offers landing page creation and embedded signup forms, making it easier for consultants to grow their email lists.

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a powerful email marketing solution that merges CRM, sales, and digital marketing into one platform, making it a great choice for solo consultants and small firms alike.

Its standout feature is the advanced automation builder that can handle both simple and complex email sequences.

With its sales automation feature, you can follow up on leads efficiently and keep track of all your prospective client interactions.

ActiveCampaign also provides rich data insights with analytics, heatmaps, and split testing to improve your email campaign performance.

4. Keap

Formerly known as Infusionsoft, Keap is an all-in-one sales and marketing software designed for consulting firms that need more than just email marketing.

It combines CRM, email marketing, and sales automation in one interface. It’s what we use ourselves.

Keap’s email marketing platform offers a wide variety of customizable templates, so you can create professionally designed emails quickly.

The comprehensive CRM keeps track of all client interactions and tasks, which makes it ideal for consultants juggling both prospective and current clients.

Keap also offers a strong automation feature set, which can save time by automating follow-ups, tasks, and email sequences.

With built-in payment processing and e-commerce capabilities, Keap is a complete solution for consulting business owners looking for more than just email marketing — but an entire platform from which to streamline their business.

The most important factor when choosing your email marketing software is this: use something simple that you feel comfortable using — a tool that you can be consistent with.

Sign up for a free trial of the tools above, and play around with them. Stick with whichever tool you find the easiest and most intuitive to use.

The most important factor when choosing your email marketing software is this: use something simple that you feel comfortable using — a tool that you can be consistent with.

Email Marketing For Consultants Case Study

In our Clarity Coaching program, we recently had a client who had been following your typical “marketing guru” advice. They were getting a good amount of web traffic and growing their email list.

But they were not generating any meaningful leads or new clients.

We helped them change this by restructuring their emails.

Their newfound focus wasn’t just about sending out any type of email. Even though sending emails with valuable content is better than not sending anything at all, the real opportunity was in crafting a more strategic approach.

Your emails can serve multiple purposes. They can tell stories, share data, and provide value.

But it’s crucial to remember to include a well-thought-out call to action.

Not every email needs a call to action, but you should include them in most. We worked with this client to ensure their marketing emails had a clear, compelling call to action designed to generate conversations.

The call to action concentrated on the challenges their potential clients were facing and the results the client could help them achieve. Thus, their potential clients were excited about reaching out and getting in touch.

The first time the client sent out this newly structured email, they saw immediate results.

They went from getting no leads for many months to having seven prospective clients respond instantly, requesting a consultation. And the trend continued, turning their once dormant email list into a vital asset.

The key takeaway here is that an email list is not just for sending information. Instead, it should be used to create a dialogue and spur your ideal clients into action.

In the consulting business, your marketing must focus on generating conversations.

So, if you have an email list but aren’t seeing many leads, or if you need help building your list, we can help.

We can show you how to transform your email list into a genuine asset for your business. Our strategy will help you generate a consistent flow of high-quality leads, leading to more conversations with actual buyers.

The key takeaway here is that an email list is not just for sending information. Instead, it should be used to create a dialogue and spur your ideal clients into action.

Get Help With Your Consulting Email Marketing Strategy

If you’re looking for help with your email marketing strategy, we can help.

But before you start your email marketing, you’ll need to set your marketing foundations first.

Email marketing only works once you’ve…

• gotten clear on your ideal client;
• developed messaging to attract their attention;
• and created strategic offers that solve your clients’ pressing problems and get them their desired results;

Without this foundation in place, your marketing will fall flat.

We teach all of this — and much more — inside our coaching program for consultants.

In our Clarity Coaching program, we’ve helped over 850 consultants to build a more strategic, profitable, and scalable, consulting business. And we’ve helped many of them become leaders of their consulting businesses — growing from independent consultants to consulting firm owners.

We’ll work hands-on with you to develop a strategic plan and then dive deep and work through your ideal client clarity, strategic messaging, consulting offers, fees and pricing, business model optimization, and help you to set up your marketing engine and lead generation system to consistently attract ideal clients.

Learn More About Clarity Coaching

You’ll learn how to make more money with every project you take on — and how to land more clients than ever before. Learn more about Clarity Coaching and get in touch to talk about your situation and goals.