Growth Marketer Academy: Episode 5 – Why Email Should Be a Cornerstone of your B2B Lead Gen Plan, Part 2
Email can be the most effective tool for your business to business marketing arsenal, or it can be a massive black hole of time you’ll never get back. The proper email automation program can nurture leads into customers and return dividends for years to come.
We’ll help you learn how to find the right email automation tool for your business that gets you the functionality you need without breaking the bank.
In this episode – Part Two – we’ll cover:
The structure of an effective email campaign
AND
How to choose an email automation platform that’s right for your business.
So you’ve sent out 50 outreach messages. Now what?
You need information.
- Who opened your email and who didn’t?
- Who watched your video and clicked on your CTA?
- If someone didn’t open your email, would a different subject line work?
- If someone watched your video but didn’t click the CTA, would another hook work better?
- Did the person watch your video, click on the CTA but still didn’t proceed, what could be done to convert them?
You don’t have time to do all that by hand.
Use email automation to do the follow up for you until that potential lead engages.
Send the first message, then based on if they open it or not add them to a sequence.
They Did Not Open – Send them the same message 10 times with different subject lines and preview text.
Be careful here:
69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line
(according to optinmonster.com)
Check out our post Supercharge Your Email Open Rates With These Killer Subject Line Tricks for tips and tricks to get your messages opened
If they don’t open the message after 10 attempts, they aren’t going to. Move the address to your “dead” list
- Could be a bad email address
- They could have a super robust spam filter
They Did Open – Send a series of messages that follow the Gain, Logic, and Fear system.
The first message you’ll send to people that open your engagement message but don’t take you up on the call to action is:
Gain
Point out the cool stuff they gain by taking your offer
- Get your super amazing marketing report
- Make more money
- Earn more customers
- Have a successful product/service launch, etc.
If they open your gain message but don’t bite on your CTA, move on to:
Logic
This is where you point out the logical reasons they want your offer.
While this is a logic sequence, it’s really playing on their emotions.
- “You want my marketing report because it’ll make huge increases in your business”
- “You want to make more money because it’ll let you reach more people”
- “Grow your business and buy that Ferrari,” etc.
Those that open Logic but don’t act on CTA should be moved on to:
Fear
Play on the recipient’s fear of loss
- Fear of missing something
- Fear that their competitor will get something they won’t have access to.
You’re about to lose out on this stuff, I’m going to give it to your competitors, you won’t hear from me again.
Special low price deal is going away in XXX days. Act now!
You may have noticed us saying if they open but don’t act.
What if they don’t open?
Send it again with a different subject and preview text up to 4-5 times.
“Man, that’s a lot of emails to send someone.”
Keep in mind that most people will only see one or two of your messages.
The average email user is exposed to 5,000 advertisements and brand mentions each day.
You want to be able to compare open rates of different subject lines and improve your series over time.
This is going to be the passive tool you use to stay engaged with leads and give them the selling points to convert them to a customer.
What if they open all the messages and still never go for your CTA?
Here’s where an email-based reengagement campaign can be helpful
- They engaged before – opened, clicked, etc
- Maybe it wasn’t the right time
- Maybe the offer wasn’t right
Create a series of messages that will send periodically.
Try different offers
Try different email formats (maybe video isn’t their thing – try animated GIF)
But at some point, you want to cut them.
A huge list of disengaged leads isn’t any benefit to you.
(many automation programs are priced based on your number of leads)
You’ll risk getting marked as spam or junk which can get your messages auto-sorted to your stronger lead’s junk folder.
All this would be hugely daunting and – let’s face it – impossible to do by hand.
Let’s talk email automation software
What does an email automation program do?
It depends on the program you use.
All email automation programs should allow you to:
- Segment a list of leads (emails) into specific email lists
- Schedule messages to be sent at specific times
- Give you the ability to send 100s or 1,000s of messages without Gmail automatically tagging your email address as spam
Marketing automation gives you all that functionality PLUS:
- Schedule messages to be sent based on behavior of the message recipient
- If – then statements
We recommend marketing automation platforms
Go for tracking!
More data is always better!
*well, not necessarily… but still.
Entry level/basic
These give you limited solutions for limited costs
Best for small to mid-size companies
- Those with a smaller lead pool
- Those that don’t have the resources to track or monitor lead response
- Just want to send messages on a set timetable
Most of these programs should
- create email sequences
- run A/B tests
- run analytics to monitor campaign effectiveness.
Examples of basic email automation platforms:
Typically limited to templated message formatting
That said, they have some really nice, professional templates
Sometimes less customization = easier
But limits can get frustrating
- If you want to link to a specific page, include a GIF or something not supported.
- Your messages will look a lot like all the others in their inbox
Consider instead, a basic marketing automation platform:
$9/month
- monitor email campaigns
- run site tracking
- monitor post-sale activity.
Mid-Tier
Mid-size (and some small) companies need a more robust solution.
Businesses with:
- social media profiles
- multiple products or services
- a full-time staff of employees
- a dedicated marketing team that can improve campaigns based on tracking data
- a need to structure specific follow up path for customers based on their behavior
- a need to send specific follow up messages based on actions taken on the website
Think, abandoned cart follow up emails.
Controls 41.6% of the small business marketing automation market
Offers automation for
- Marketing
- Sales
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Relatively easy interface
Lots of great learning materials available
Cons: Steep price tag
Not all features are well made
Like they tried to add on too much and spread themselves too thin
Can automate & track everything from inbound stage to CRM
Less expensive
Cons:
Interface is a little clunkier than Hubspot
Users have complained about low email delivery rates.
Might be due to a lack of enforcement by Act-On against spammers using the platform.
Rolls Royce/Top Tier
Large enterprise organizations
Those that want close collaboration between dedicated marketing and sales teams
Market leader = Marketo
- Marketing automation
- Behavioral targeting
- Landing page editor
- Integrations
- Great customer support
Other options in this tier include Pardot and Eloqua
How to choose?
In addition to budget, you’ll need to take into account:
- The number of contacts you already have
- The number of contacts you expect to add each week
- The kinds of analytics and reporting data you want to be able to generate
- The other platforms you want the program to integrate with (such as Google Ads, Salesforce, etc)
- How much customization you want to be able to achieve over email design
In our experience, we’ve used
- MailChimp
- Active Campaign
- Infusionsoft
- Wishpond
- Hubspot
Each has its advantages and challenges.
- A useful tool for sending regular newsletters or one-time promotions to a large list.
- The platform offers a low-cost option for unlimited contacts
- But: limited – doesn’t offer much more than email management.
- relatively easy to learn interface
- decent site integration for smaller sites built on a template format with compatible coding.
- You’ll need to build landing pages on a different platform.
Infusion Soft was, frankly, frustrating.
Didn’t make it past integration before we ditched them
- Cheap and relatively basic
- Gave site tracking and landing page editing
- Could work for basic needs
- Can be challenging to get started due to its extensive features and capabilities
- offered the most custom integration for a large, existing site with custom code and a unique Point of Sale system.
- Pricing requires active negotiating with the sales team
- It’s easy to get stuck in a contract with a high monthly cost for features you don’t end up using.
Marketing automation gives you the opportunity to tie your marketing efforts together
A well-developed, automated email campaign allows you to stay connected with leads, and nurture them into customers
Without going crazy trying to do all the follow up by hand