Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Want your emails opened and responded to? Want a lower bounce rate on your website and a higher response rate? Obviously, one of the most important ways to achieve these goals is to have attractive, professionally designed templates for both your emails and your website’s landing pages. Sloppy, unattractive emails and web pages are a surefire way to tell prospects “I’m clueless” and send them directly to the loving arms of your competitors – especially those competitors that have the budget to create a beautiful website and design custom email templates.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” may be true for books – it may even be true for websites – but in our modern reality, it just doesn’t work this way. You need a professional presentation – or you lose customers.

The problem is, professional designs come with a painful price tag, and this puts smaller companies at a clear disadvantage compared to big companies with larger budgets.

Fortunately, eTrigue has come to the rescue (again). It’s what we do, after all – we keep thinking about lower-budget organizations, or what we like to call “The Rest of Us”, trying to come up with ways to streamline their marketing while keeping costs down.

That’s why we were so excited (we still are, actually) when it occurred to us to create a comprehensive set of email and landing page templates for use in outbound email marketing. These easy-to-use tools are part of eTrigue DemandCenter® marketing automation and enable professional results without the expense and time one would normally invest when creating custom templates.

Available immediately to existing and new users of eTrigue DemandCenter marketing automation, the collection features 100 pre-designed and formatted landing page templates, 80 email templates, 550 images and banners and 600 additional images for use as response buttons within the templates. All are designed to work together to help you in structuring effective email communications and website landing pages, with a minimal amount of effort, and without resorting to hiring an outrageously expensive outside design firm.

So go ahead – leverage the advantages of expert design without incurring the cost! As the leader in ease-of-use for marketing automation SaaS, we have created these templates to make it easy for you to quickly create professional-looking marketing automation campaigns – right out of the box.

“Dear Jim, First, we’d like to take this opportunity to express how much we sincerely appreciate your business.”

If I could send a reply to this “no-reply” email, I would tell the company that had sent it, “Dear Company, your opening sentence sucks. It’s so bad in fact, that it caused me not just to immediately lose interest in your email, but to also send all future correspondence from you to my spam folder.”

Really, it’s not surprising (although it is admittedly depressing to a marketer) to read about the recent study that found that marketing email accounts for 70% of spam complaints. It seems as though the moment a company gets your email, it adds you to regular batch-and-blast campaigns that take no notice of who you are, what your needs are, and how often you’d like to hear from that company. No wonder that most of us find it easy to just hit the “report spam” button – it’s faster than unsubscribing.

As a consumer, I am fed up with unwanted emails. As a marketer, I keep reminding myself to treat my customers as I would like to be treated, and tread very carefully when it comes to email campaigns. Here’s what I try to do when I send business emails:

1. Immediately answer the question, “What’s in this for me?” Skip the introductions, and yes this includes thanking them for being a great customer. Instead, use your opening line to get right to the point, and state that point clearly and simply.

2. Focus on the benefits. No one cares about how fabulous your product is. But they might care about how your fabulous product might benefit them.

3. Keep it simple. Big words are great for academic papers. In most business contexts, big words are a turnoff. Use short sentences and simple language. This is especially important in your opening line, but applies to the entire email as well.

4. Keep it short. A lengthy email shows the recipient that you don’t respect their time. A long email is a lot like a super-long novel – you glance at it and immediately know there’s no chance you’re going to read this thing. Keep your email short – just a few sentences – and manageable, and you’ll increase the chances that people will actually read it.

5. Make it readable. Remember that most people read emails on their mobile devices, so the plainer the better. Even when using a desktop computer, formatting is important. Research shows that people don’t read online –they scan. So write emails that are easy to read and quick to scan. Keep paragraphs short, and use bullet points and numbered lists.

6. State the action needed. If you seek an action from the recipient, state it clearly, right at the start of your email. Don’t allow the person to finish reading the email and wonder, “Huh? What did they want from me?”

7. Personalize your email. Use the recipient’s name, sign with your own name, and make sure you send your email only to those recipients who might find it interesting. A good tool for tailoring the right content to the right recipients is a marketing automation platform with an email marketing component that allows you to engage at exactly the right time with personalized emails that are on-message.

Batch and blast emails are risky. They can lead to a massive unsubscribe, or worse – as the study above shows, more and more recipients find it easy to just mark unwanted emails as spam, even if they were sent by a legitimate business. Make sure the emails you send are welcome and useful, or don’t send them at all.

Really, there are no more excuses. Why would we marketers ever spam prospects in the era of marketing automation? In the past, we had to be extremely careful with our email lists. You can’t write a white paper, then blast your entire email list with that paper. Yes, even if it’s groundbreaking and truly amazing. So the right thing to do was to write it, post it on one’s website, and hope that prospects would download it. Because the last thing you need is to send out something that a prospect would see as spam.

Now, with marketing automation, marketers don’t have to lose sleep anymore over whether to send their content to prospects. When you have the intimate knowledge of a prospect that only marketing automation can give you, you KNOW if they are interested in a certain type of content and whether they would find it useful, or bothersome. Even better: you know if the timing is right to send them that content.

Let’s go back to our white paper. We invested a lot in writing it, in making it truly useful. But not all our leads would be interested in reading it right now. As you monitor your marketing automation dashboard, you can easily see those leads that are cold (for now), and those that are getting warmer. It is especially easy to spot leads that have become quite active on your web site over the past few weeks, visiting often, downloading material, registering for webinars.

These are the leads that would welcome new material from you. Now is a good time to contact them, and timing truly is everything. Of course, the material needs to be high-quality, and it needs to relate to their specific pain point. But figuring out their pain is also fairly easy to do with marketing automation. Armed with knowledge about a prospect’s pain and about the fact that they are warming up to you, getting in touch is completely legitimate. You won’t be spamming them or annoying them – on the contrary, your input would be welcome. I can’t think of a better place to be for a marketer.

Tweet “The vendor keeps communicating with me even though I don’t want their emails anymore.”

Completely unrelated to B2B marketing, it would seem at first glance, but in fact, the tweet above is very, very relevant.

This short tweet really captures the essence of the art of email marketing: Are you sure your emails are still relevant to the particular recipient and her current situation? Are they welcome? Or have they become an annoyance, something you delete right away (best case scenario) or unsubscribe from?

The woman who tweeted this basically says, “The vendor keeps communicating with me even though I don’t want their emails anymore. They are not relevant. The vendor should have realized that its emails are not welcome anymore.”

But how can the vendor know, unless they use some sort of marketing automation? In this case, it’s fairly obvious that this particular store has an email list, which she uses to send the occasional email blast. We all get these emails – and this is the reason why most of us have a separate email account, a “junk” account that we use when we place online orders or perform any other activity that, we suspect, will generate future unwanted emails.

The result: these email blasts, that are sent month after month, with no tracking whatsoever and with no regards to whether the recipient is receptive to them or not, get lost. No one reads them anyway, heck no one even gets them into their inbox, and the few that do get them, often become annoyed to the point of unsubscribing.

As annoyed as the consumer sounds in her tweet, what are the chances that when she finally does need to buy another baby gift, she will buy it from that store? My guess is, despite the store’s “success” at staying top of mind (hey, she’s tweeting about them!), it’s not going to be the consumer’s first choice when it’s time to buy a baby shower gift.

What should the vendor do in this case? They should monitor response to their emails. Lower the frequency for those that are not responding. And drop off the list anyone who hasn’t responded at all in, say, a year. Better to have a trim, tight, responsive email list than to have a huge email list that’s cluttered with very cold, uninterested, annoyed prospects.

I’ve been using my email filter a lot lately. Not to combat spam – my email system is fairly competent when it comes to filtering out spam. But for some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of unwanted email communication from legitimate sources, including companies, websites and blogs that I’ve had brief contact with and have now decided to email me regularly with offers and requests.

Maybe it’s the prolonged recession.

I usually just delete the first few unwanted emails from each source, but if they persist, I eventually become frustrated enough that I use my email filter and get rid of them for good. What this means for the company is that a few weeks of overzealous, inattentive email marketing result in them being banned from my inbox forever.

They would have done much better paying attention to my reactions and realizing that I am not interested in receiving their emails – for now, and keeping their options open for the future.

Some of these emails are surprising. There’s this blog, for example, that I have read and commented on ONCE. Now, the owner of the blog has my email address, and he abuses it. For several weeks now, each time he publishes a new blog post, I’m getting the exciting (NOT!) message in my inbox “I have published a new blog post! Come read it!”

Even if that person is a blog owner and not a professional marketer, one has to wonder, HOW CAN ANYONE ACT SO LAME WHEN IT COMES TO PROMOTING ONE’S CONTENT. Is there anything in that subject line that would possibly entice me to open that email and click on the link embedded in it? is there any system in place to recognize the people – like me – who are obviously not interested, and stop harassing them?

Every time you send an unwanted email to a prospect, without tailoring your message to their individual needs and without monitoring their response to your email (or lack thereof), you risk being added to their “automatically discard” filter. Avoid this sad outcome by making sure your emails are actually welcome. A good marketing automation system can help you do that.

Ask any B2B marketer and they’ll tell you that being able to create great content is one of their top priorities.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the term “viral” and believe that especially in the B2B space it’s not so much about creating VIRAL content as it is about creating high-quality, USEFUL content. But regardless of how you call it, we all want our content to be welcomed by our prospects. We never ever want them to view one of our emails as nagging, intrusive, unnecessary, or as spam.

So how do you do it? How do you create content that your prospects will actually see as useful? The short answer is: LISTEN FIRST. it’s the secret to any successful communication, and marketing – especially in the social media era – is essentially communicating with prospects.

When you listen first, you get a good idea of what your prospects are looking for. You can better identify their exact pain points. Your ultimate goal is to create a message that answers a specific issue, and lands in a prospect’s inbox just as she is ready to do some research and find a solution, or maybe even when she’s ready to make a buying decision.

Listening to a large number of prospects, remembering their issues and responding to them in your emails can be challenging. It’s not a coincidence that marketing automation systems have been so successful in recent years. Manually updating spreadsheets can only take you so far when it comes to effectively communicating with the right prospect, at the right time, and with the message that they’re looking for.

The first step to creating great content is listening to your prospects and identifying their pain points. A good marketing automation system will then help you keep track of all these conversations, and stay on top of any changes in the prospect’s needs or in their buying readiness, so that you can keep the conversation going, stay on topic, and of course identify when the prospect is ready to be contacted by your sales team.

We all know that “spray and pray” email marketing doesn’t work, and that one of your biggest risks is getting your prospects so tired of your emails that they unsubscribe. But what CAN you do to make sure your email communication is effective?

1. Don’t email too often. While you obviously want to stay top of mind with prospects, emailing too often is probably one of the quickest ways to make them unsubscribe.

2. Listen first. What type of information does the particular prospect need right now? Where are they in the buying cycle? Taylor your email to their specific needs.

3. Make your subject line catchy. A great subject line makes a big difference in terms of open rates.

4. Keep your subject line short. Email messages with short subject lines tend to outperform emails with longer subject lines.

5. Make it high quality. each and every email you send out needs to include high-quality, useful material. There’s no need to write each email from scratch – utilize existing content, including your company’s PPD and white papers, to create short, high quality emails.

6. Keep it short. We’re all busy. No one has the time to read through a long email. If ever in doubt, err on the side of “too short” rather than “too long” and split long messages into two separate emails.

7. Personalize your email. Include the recipient’s name in the subject line or in the greeting, and – if possible – address a specific concern of theirs in the opening paragraph.

8. Be sensitive to the recipient’s response to your previous email. A prospect that has opened your previous email and has clicked on the link embedded in it is ready for more frequent communication. A prospect that doesn’t open your emails or that glances at them without clicking on the links should be contacted infrequently, but regularly.

9. Don’t be spammy. Mentioning your product or solution and including a link to your site are fine of course, but make sure the bulk of your email contains truly useful information, even if not directly related to what you have to sell.

10. Automate. Use a sales enablement tool or a full marketing automation system to keep rack of your email marketing. Doing all of the above manually is nearly impossible.