Perfecting your sales email campaigns and delivering the desired metrics.
Before we get started, let’s take a look at some interesting facts about emails:
98.4% of consumers check their emails daily - the other 1.6% have forgotten their password
Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders.
86% of business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes.
The median email marketing ROI is 122%. That’s four times higher than any other digital marketing channel.
And I could go on and on. It is evident that email remains one of the best ways to reach and engage your target audience, no matter how many other innovative digital sales and marketing tactics emerge. It has been an integral part of sales strategies for all businesses for decades, regardless of their size and budgets.
Use of email for B2B sales is here to stay and businesses should leverage it to their maximum profits. So before you start deciding on your next email campaign, ensure that you have a very clear understanding of the following.
Goals and objectives
Take as much time as you want, but ensure that you know why you are considering an email campaign in the first place. What are your objectives: Is it to improve sales, or increase traffic to your website, or reach out to a wider audience?
Every day, millions of cold emails are sent across the world with no clear intent or purpose, resulting in none, or low responses, and a waste of precious resources. To add to this, every email sent without a clear objective, is one less lead you can reach out to again (they will usually mark you as spam).
Write down your goals and objective on a piece of paper or on slack and internalize it. Consequently, inputs, ideas, and collective brainstorming will flow.
Personalization
Once you have finalized the goals and objectives for your campaign, personalization should be the first check on your list to bring any sort of effectiveness in your campaign. A personalized email can strikingly outperform a generic one. A personalized email includes:
An intriguing subject line - without a great subject line, it would not matter how great your email content is or how relevant it is for the receiver, because your email would not be clicked on in the first place
CTA (call to action) - Again, your CTA cannot be generic to say “lets talk” or “how does this week look like for you”. CTAs can have an entire blog dedicated to them, but just know, if you don’t show love to the receiver in your CTA, they won’t either.
eMail Content - Obviously your email content has to be relevant to the receiver. What you also should keep in mind, is that you need to keep it short and simple. Boomerang discovered that the ideal length of a cold email was 50-125 words.
A quick note on that: Your email doesn’t need fancy HTML elements, pictures, or fonts. If there’s an excess of HTML or pics compared to text, your deliverability could get hurt.
Timing your emails
This might sound obvious, but timing your email is as important as the email itself. Do consider:
Time of the year: Yes. Even the year. Know when your prospect’s fiscal year starts- it might be a good time to reach out. Or know when they are on leave and obviously don’t reach out to them then.
Time of the week: Know which days your prospects like receiving emails. For example, Monday’s are usually not the right days for a cold email. Similarly, your hyper-busy leads might read their emails over the weekends - so it might not be a bad idea to reach out to them then.
Time of the day: Obviously not early mornings, or late nights! - Duh!
Following Up
According to research, you would lose more deals to "not following up" than to your competitors. Yes! Around 80% of your deals will take >5 follow-ups for a close. A good idea is to incorporate drip campaigns in your strategy.
But take this with a pinch of salt. Figure out your sweet spot. Keep in mind the below when determining your follow-up strategy.
How many times to follow up: The number of follow-ups depends on the nature of the interaction you previously had with a prospect. If you are contacting the prospect for the first time, he/she is a cold prospect, and you shouldn’t go beyond two follow-ups.
Frequency of follow-ups: It is a good practice to follow-up within the first week of sending a cold email. And then do a second followup within the first two weeks. It is a good practice to explicitly allow your prospects to opt-out of your email campaign (if uninterested) in one of your followups.
Mobile optimization and overall formatting
No news that more people check their emails on the phone than on a laptop. Optimize your emails for that. Format them properly (for mobile and laptop viewing), take care of spacing, spelling, punctuation, grammar, and choice of words. Again, obvious things, but you would be surprised at how many sales reps don’t give importance to this.
We highly recommend the use of Grammarly to avoid the often, tiny and overlooked errors in emails.
Tracking and Analytics
No surprise that at do.sales, we are preachers of personalization and predictability and repeatability in a sales process. We also get super excited about tracking and analyzing campaigns that we execute for our clients.
Let’s face it, numbers (from tracking/analytics) is what makes you and your campaigns smarter over a period of time. Measure your success with parameters such as
Delivery percentage
Bounce rates
Open rates
Reply rates
Click-through rates
Conversion rates
ROI etc.
If you are unable to track the exact revenue of each email directly, you can still calculate the average return on investment when it comes to email revenue. Multiply the number of conversions you have made through email by the value of an average order. This helps give you a better idea of how much revenue you are generating through your email marketing even when exact numbers are not available.
Tools such as Reply and Hubspot let you measure these metrics out of the box.
Conclusion
You just read a guide that will not only help you initiate your next sales email campaign, but also be relatively successful at it. Just remember this, and as we have mentioned earlier too, your sales plans, your campaigns, your email templates, etc. need to account for and adapt to new features and technologies, your target market, trends, campaign results, and even new members that you hire.
Review progress regularly (at least monthly) on your campaigns, analyze the data that you have collected, solve issues, re-align your efforts based on real-world feedback, and evolve.
AND OBVIOUSLY, WE ARE JUST A PING AWAY IF YOU HAVE ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS, OR NEED A HAND EXECUTING ANY OF THE ABOVE. WE UNDERSTAND THAT DEFINING A COLD EMAIL CAMPAIGN FROM SCRATCH MIGHT BE A HASSLE, AND THAT IS WHERE WE WOULD LOVE TO HELP.
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