Embrace the Inbox (You’ve Got Mail)

One of the most recognized sounds computer lovers remember is the dial-up connection and AOL's announcement that says, “You've Got Mail!” It was like a sugar high whenever you heard that sound. Nowadays, most of us feel like we have the stabbing pain of a cavity when we hear our Outlook or Gmail inbox notification saying, “You've Got Mail!”

What changed?

The biggest difference is that many (if not most) of the emails we get today have one goal: to sell us something. Some of that is subtle, like email lists we have signed up for, while others are just blatant phishing, which is a random solution (or at least they say so) in search of a problem.

There are only two kinds of email that I find helpful. Some teach me something, while others come from actual clients, vendors, and power partners who have relevance and an actual function to our businesses. Some sales emails are useful, but only when I need them, like a 10% off coupon or a sale on something I am actually ready to buy. Even the vast majority of those are still just a solution in search of a problem.

Emails Hierarchy in Marketing

There are two distinctive phases in getting people to pay attention to your marketing messages.

First, you have to create the messages. Depending on how you plan to share them, they can take many forms: text, audio, video, graphics, or a mixture of the above (e.g., a web page with text, graphics, and video).

The second phase is distributing your content to places where your perfect audiences and prospects hang out. One philosophy is to try to dominate a platform. You will find experts who claim you can “Grow Through Google,” “Tik-Tok Takeover,” “Instagram Income Strategies,” “Put the YOU into YouTube,” and more.

Although they are not wrong, spending all your energies on just one platform is a big mistake. It becomes a bright, shiny object that takes time and resources to form a balanced and pliable strategy. There is a mix of delivery methodologies to learn and implement based on who you are trying to reach, where they are hanging out, and how they respond to the content you are presenting.

Here is a list of the five main delivery methodologies ranked in what I feel is the amount of human resources needed to deliver content and measure results effectively:

• Advertising
• Social Media
• Email
• Phone Calls
• In-Person Meetings

At the top are advertising and social media. These can be scheduled for weeks or months and tend to have a set-it-and-forget-it attitude. At the bottom are phone calls and in-person meetings. They are by far the most human and time-intensive activities. As a Relationship Marketing specialist, I find a blend of both is needed for business-to-business marketing success.

Stuck in the middle of that list is email. Email can be scheduled like social media posts but, also requires more human creation and interaction.

I want to explore how this form of content distribution is most often used, misused, and underutilized by most business-to-business organizations.

Compartmentalize

It's hard to have the time and resources to optimize data, but that is one of the single activities that can impact email marketing success.

All too often, we import names and emails into email programs and lists because it's easy. What's a bit harder is collecting more detailed information and tagging contacts along their lifecycle on your email list. I can give you an example.

I work with and for a non-profit that has members. Members come and go (why this happens is meant for another blog). We know who is a new member and who has let their membership lapse. We can easily welcome new members with targeted emails. We can also ask the lapsed members why they left and encourage them to rejoin.

The data we import is part of the problem. If someone joined in 2010, we only know what company they worked for then. The company, address, and other data are never updated at the source. If they joined with a Gmail or personal email, that info won't change while their employment and positions evolve.

We also assume their status has never changed if they joined as an entry-level employee. Over the years, they could have changed jobs five times and now are the CMO of a major corporation.

The bottom line is that you can research them on LinkedIn and update their information or send them an email encouraging them to update their main profile (annually or quarterly).

Content

I hate to break it to you, but people don't want your newsletter. Newsletters are about you, and they are interested in what benefits them. Yet companies create emails with five or twenty stories (some or all with links).

The most successful emails have one topic and a link to your website if the reader wants to learn more about the subject. They also include a clear call to action like “Click Here” or “Read More” to get people to take action. Don't worry if they don't. The average email has a 20-30% open rate (they read it) and a 5-10% click rate.

The best open rates happen when the email is hyper-focused on the individual. Yes, adding their name at the top helps, but sending a C-level-focused email will have a higher open rate with C-level executives, as will a basic email that will appeal to entry-level employees.

Segmenting (as mentioned above) will allow you to send more targeted emails to the right person and increase the effectiveness of your overall marketing.

Consistency

A regular email cadence yields much better results (20-30% open rates) than a random (15-25% open rates) email approach. Although email fatigue factors to frequency, we have found that companies that send 1-2 emails per week have lower unsubscribe rates than those sent 1-2 times monthly.

Even if your open rates suffer, people stay connected and act on emails they find interesting or relevant when they get them. Keeping people engaged means keeping them subscribed.

Don't feel hurt or disappointed when people unsubscribe. Work hard to add clients and prospects who find your information and emails of value.

Consciousness

Right now, the trick I tell my clients is to add the words “Artificial intelligence” or “AI” to any email. In the short term, this will increase open rates. Once everyone starts doing that, it will have the reverse effect.

The real challenge is finding and creating content relative to your audience when you send it. It is so important to create fresh, specific, and timely content.

If you can take the pulse of what's essential to your audience(s), do that regularly and create content that speaks to where your audience is at this moment in time as much as possible.

Closing Thought

In the future, AI will help make all of this easier. The key to making AI work in any form is to know how to prompt (ask questions or help it respond) to the mindset of a segment or segments of your audience.

AI or not, keeping your data and segmenting up to date will be an essential success metric. It will help you today and act as a springboard when AI email segmenting becomes the norm, affordable, and a mainstay in marketing communications. You will still have that data to use for person-to-person communication and, if social media ever catches up, it will let you better target your audience without relying on platform algorithms.

The best way to prime your business for this revolution is to learn how it works for you and your company in the current business environment and then adapt as the tools become smarter and more accessible (and affordable).

Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about business-to-business sales and marketing today! Do you have a sales or marketing communications strategy that works for you? What tips or techniques can you share that work for you and your business?

To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at?The Bacon Podcast.