Email in the Eve of 2023

Aaaaand were back, thank you to all those who kept subscribed and welcome back to the weekly TL;DR (too long didn’t read) Marketing newsletter. For those that are just seeing this for the first time I am re-booting a weekly newsletter where I take timely marketing news and add action items. This will be an exception and longer newsletter

This week Email, I mean how could it not be after the news from google and yahoo.?

For those that have not read here is the breakdown

Yahoo starting in Q1 of 2024

• Screen emails from sender more strictly
• Make unsubscribing easier for users
• Limit total sends from STMP’s (bulk sending tools)

Google starting in February of 2024 will now ban senders that do the following

• Send over 5,000 emails per month per domain?
• Have a complaint rate over 0.3%
• Google mentions Yahoo’s announcement in their announcement and states they are working together

Even shorter version this now kills the saying everyone has hated in sales for such a long time “ sales is just a Numbers game” or at least from my perspective sales is just a volume game is now over. Change is hard and in reading the reaction to? this news on LinkedIn this week you could see people felt this way. It seems a lot of people leaned into the negative with titles like: is email dead or is cold outreached dead??

No one likes a Luddite. Ignore the negative and focus on the positive at least that’s what every successful person I’ve ever listened to said. Here are some really awesome positive takeaways that you can action in your organization to combat these changes before the likely trigger of all of this in February.

It’s time to get first party data second party data hell really any reliable data

The key is to get personal and understand where buyers are in their journey at a more intimate level to prevent being flagged. The Clearbit HubSpot acquisition a few weeks ago put an emphasis on who is on your website which is more important than ever. To acquire more data, ask vendors that you currently use technology for if these data points can be integrated into your email automation system as a marketer. Even more importantly, make sure your sales team has visibility of these things and an alert system set up for them to tee off success and build an Account Based Marketing engine (ABM).?

Content Management systems are now a requirement. You need to know when a prospect in the pipeline whether they’re in sales or in marketing are viewing PDFs, demo slides, videos, literally anything that you can get a data point on you will need. Although this may sound a tad overdramatic, any indication you can get about where someone is in the funnel will help diminish the total number of emails or touch points that that person is going to get the springing down the organization. Total emails sent per month, which is key.?

Looking for a full list of vendors? Look no further than your marketing automation or CRM’s App Store.

Data is great but what about first touch?

When I first started my career, I got the privilege of sitting next to someone that had over 30 years of sales experience. They used to joke with me about how difficult sales used to be back in the day, when you actually had to “ Pick up the phone and call someone“. I can’t think of anything more relevant today than to pivot to making a call as a first touch. While that might sound uninspired and uncreative, I have a couple other suggestions that work great as well that are new and modern era techniques.

Get your organization into communities. Sam Jacobs and Sangram Vajre are genius, pavilion and GTM groups have never been more important than now. If you’re pursuing titles, look at those communities where people are join Slack groups, discord groups, Facebook groups, subreddits, really any social media app. If you’re pursuing business outside of the US,? look to WhatsApp and WeChat. These social media places are now the online communities. These are this generations, golf courses and country clubs and office building elevators where people can come together from other companies and have conversations digitally. This can also be one of the best places to have first touches and gain trust of a prospect in the sales cycle.

Lastly, networking isn’t dead, events aren’t dead and they’re about to make a huge comeback. With first touch for inbox becoming more difficult it’s time to get out IRL and meet some people shake some hands and kiss some babies. Events have always been a great time to connect with people as have networking opportunities but now getting out into your community and attending industry conferences is a requirement for sales. If you're a sales or marketing leader reading this, evaluate your hires, more closely look at their social media following look at the conferences. Take a good hard look at how well networked individuals are before hiring. Set you organization up for success by hiring well networked individuals. Even a personal blog or having something like a LinkedIn newsletter can be even more valuable to your organization today.

Use that data to make better SOP’s

After data is integrated into marketing automation, and CRM have a serious sit down, heart-to-heart between marketing and sales and determine when in the funnel is the best place for all teams to pick up. Splitting the responsibilities of cold outreach here is key and understanding what accounts to target because of where they are in the funnel according to the data points that are now built is the absolute first priority.

The key here is to cut down emails going to an organization to under three people per organization.

Training and Buy In

Having data is great, having a plan is great but the thing that makes it all work is getting everyone on the same page. While it sounds simple and it’s easy for me to write down here. We all know how complicated that can be communication and understanding that the process is not perfect from day one is so key to communicate. This is my open letter to all sales and marketing teams: be patient with each other changes are coming and it’s going to be difficult because it’s going to be new not because it’s going to be worse.

Lots of organizations have had tremendous success with ABM. If your organization isn’t already doing this, that’s why you’ve read this far account base marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. It just requires being organized and understanding where people are in the funnel.

The hard part: Change

Turn off cadences, delete email templates and most importantly don’t assume that what you’re doing today will work when this update hits. It’s hard to hear and it’s hard to understand that things are going to change dynamically. Luckily everyone in this workforce has already been through something that was far more complicated and difficult to change with Covid, some sales and marketing teams will succeed because they already work well together and others will have a more challenging, uphill climb.?

Monitoring and flagging

Make sure to build a system that’s going to check all email KPI‘s, especially including the following: open rate, bounce rate, click rate, reply rate, unsubscribe rate, total sends. Work out a plan with senior leadership in both sales and marketing to flag warning signs Indies like high unsubscribe rates, or if a sender hits a certain threshold before the end of the month make sure action plans are made about what to do if these things happen and inform the teams of these items so they can self monitor.

Three key technology pieces that are important here are, checking your spam score (shout out to Nate Stoltenow for the awesome guide), validating emails my personal favorite is NeverBounce by ZoomInfo , and understanding when you were on a blacklist (make sure to set alerts with MxToolBox ).

The action to take here is to actually rehaul your own personal system.

In general best recommendations

• Don’t send more than three emails to one organization per day
• Be extremely picky about the data that you trust in your sales and marketing automation systems make sure emails are validIf you’re concerned about this build automation with an email validator system
• If you haven’t already use form validator
• Build an account based marketing system to keep sales targets and marketing targets under 5000
• Four larger organizations where this isn’t realisticLook into building sub domains, and dedicated IP addresses with other services
• Understand that there’s a difference between doing this ethically and doing a black hat version of this
• Always clean email addresses before cadencing?
• In general remove tracking from any email that you’re sending
• End emails with a question to prompt responses back to the email.
• Constantly analyze, and re-analyze weekly the following metrics, Open rate, Reply rate, Unsubscribe rate, Bounce rate, and Spam score
• Make sure your sales team or if you are a sales person that you get creative
• Look to outreach on social media platforms, where the user is most active as a first touch
• Look back to making cold phone calls
• Understand if the prospect is open to texting
• Get involved on social mediaJoin Slack groups, discord groups, really any kind of social media group that you can findDon’t just be a lurker, postGive people the opportunity to learn about you
• If you haven’t been listening to the marketers and sales people, screaming this from the top of their lungs for the last decade, build your brand become your own advocate. The content creator economy is now going to be more valuable than ever having your own audience is important.

Don’t panic you got this email isn’t dead. Your life isn’t over. Everything is going to be better for it!