B2B email marketing Archives

How to Write Engaging B2B Email Sequences

March 14, 2022November 19, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

As email marketing has become the most effective way to initiate contact with leads today, thoughtfully coordinated and targeted email sequences can drive curiosity and engagement in prospects — which will prepare them to eventually schedule an appointment with a Sales rep. Understanding your audience when crafting email marketing campaigns is vital to sending out content that will engage leads. As the bridge between Sales and Marketing, Sales Enablement can play a functional role in managing and automating these emails.

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Email Sequences and the Pandemic

During the pandemic, as the push towards virtual business incentivized Business Development Reps (BDRs) to transition their work online, email marketing became the new strategy for contacting leads before calling them. Though email marketing is certainly a wise choice for this, many BDRs were not adequately trained to write compelling emails to connect with leads, especially given how sudden the urge was to shift to virtual engagement.

Many resorted to sending out overused (and, as a result, ineffective) template emails from their prospecting tools that garnered little attention. The result was a series of unpromising emails that didn’t reflect the full selling potential of the company. Worse, they lacked the compelling content needed in emails to spark interest in leads.

Centrally approved messaging and email sequencing are now the most effective ways to help BDRs meaningfully connect with leads through email marketing. These strategies save the BDR from having to create their own messaging and content and instead will equip them with a library of targeted messaging crafted by Marketing and Sales Enablement.

Email Sequencing That Makes an Impact

To craft impactful email marketing campaigns, the customer must come first. Sales Enablement should use an intimate understanding of the target audience (e.g., busy executives) to craft compelling emails that will stand out from the rest. High-level decision makers budget their time and read emails on the go; hence, email content should be highly scannable, focused, and bring unique value to the recipient.

Each email should also use numbers, easily scanned bullet points, and short-form content (e.g., checklists, infographics) to share meaningful information. Each email should be connected to 6-9 emails that altogether educate and inspire trust in the recipient gradually.

Prospect engagement content should also be distributed with these email sequences, resulting in a streamlined catalog of messaging for BDRs that supports approved positioning. The end goal for any communication should be to educate the recipient enough on the product to encourage them to call or meet with a Sales rep.

Sales Enablement’s Role in Email Sequencing

As a liaison between Sales and Marketing, Sales Enablement’s primary role in email sequencing should be to ensure that the right content is created and is targeting the right persona profiles. There should be a robust and continuously updated library of content available to BDRs, and Sales Enablement should ensure that BDRs are comfortable accessing key content to share with leads.

To build on this training, Sales Enablement should also educate BDRs on the various persona profiles they’ll be contacting in order to help them locate which emails and email sequences they should use when initiating contact.

On the technological side, Sales Enablement should oversee that these emails are collected into thoughtfully arranged sequences with specific personas in mind, as well as including differentiation between inbound and outbound audiences to deliver specific and on-point messaging.

Operational support in Sales Enablement will also play a large part in automating the sending of each email a sequence. This will give BDRs more time to focus on what matters most in their role: connecting with leads.

Recapping

Email sequencing is an important part of email marketing in today’s world. Writing engaging emails and making sure they get sent in the right order and to the right people are both roles that Sales Enablement teams can adopt. To read more about how Sales Enablement can drive sales through email sequencing, click here.
You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

Email Marketing: How BDRs Connect With Leads Today

March 14, 2022October 27, 2021 by Eskinder Assefa

The primary role of Business Development Representatives (BDRs) has always been to be ‘tele-prospectors,’ using the phone to find, qualify, and set appointments. Until recently, BDRs have always used cold calling to initiate contact with prospects, but various shifts in buyer behavior have made the phone call a much less effective medium for connecting with leads. Nowadays, BDRs will find the most success by connecting initially through email marketing and nurturing interest in leads before engaging over the phone.

In the following sections, we’ll discuss why this transition has occurred and how BDRs can use email marketing to connect with leads more meaningfully in the modern selling environment.

Business Development Representative Email Marketing

Why Cold Calling Isn’t as Effective Today

As you’ve probably noticed, the influx of robocalls over the past couple of years has led most people to stop answering the phone to unknown numbers — and this includes the people BDRs are trying to connect with. A recent study found that 90% of high-level executives report never responding to cold calls. Unfortunately, most people simply filter out sales calls or reject any calls they weren’t expecting, meaning that connecting with leads over the phone is now much harder than it ever was before.

Another major reason for the switch has to do with broader generational shifts in the workplace. Millennials now make up most of the workforce, and they’re no longer working entry-level positions — reports now show that they have accumulated about 73% of all the decision-making power in business. What this means is that what they want goes, and millennials are known to dislike talking over the phone, favoring more efficient forms of communication. BDRs will need to adapt how they connect with their millennial leads if they’re going to thrive in today’s market.

Connecting with Leads Through Email Marketing

In response to these changes, BDRs are initiating connections with leads through email marketing first, using engaging content to nurture a relationship before reaching out over the phone.

This has proven especially effective because the modern buyer is now used to doing most of their product research before meeting with a Sales rep, meaning that guiding them with information during their buyer journey can feed into their natural buying preferences.

Successful email marketing turns otherwise unaware leads into curious prospects, engaging them with content that’ll come to them in thoughtfully prepared sequences. They should be persona-oriented and highly targeted, with the end goal always being to foster a willingness in the lead to speak with a Sales rep. If done right, email marketing can be one of the most powerful ways for BDRs to connect with leads, but unfortunately, many BDRs have struggled to adapt to this new mode of communication.

With the sudden push to email marketing, especially during the pandemic, many BDRs were not adequately trained to write compelling emails to connect with leads. Many resorted to sending out overused (and, by result, ineffective) template emails from their prospecting tools that garnered little attention. The result was a series of unpromising emails that didn’t reflect the full selling potential of the company. Worse, they lacked the compelling content needed in emails to spark interest in leads.

Thoughtful, professionally crafted email sequencing is now the most effective way to help BDRs meaningfully connect with leads through email marketing.

Email Sequencing to Connect with Leads

Email sequences are internally regulated chains of nurture emails that make sure messaging being sent out is effective and planned out. Thoughtful email sequencing empowers BDRs to make better connections with leads by providing them with approved messaging and related content to send out. It gives them the right templates to send for specific personas and the coordinated messaging that will drive curiosity and engagement to increase appointment setting. Click here for more information on how Sales Enablement can boost BDR success through email sequencing.

You can find more resources like this on the SOMAmetrics website under resources. Or click here to schedule a call if you would like to speak with one of our associates.

Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing

November 2, 2022December 17, 2020 by Eskinder Assefa

By implementing best practices in B2B email marketing, marketers can establish trust with senior executives and increase email engagement.

What Do Senior Executives Look For in B2B Marketing Emails?

The main goal of B2B email marketing is to reach senior executives and establish credibility with them—but this is easier said than done. When it comes to email marketing, there are several different approaches marketers can take—and some approaches are better than others. Below, we will discuss the best practices in B2B email marketing.

To fully understand why some approaches are better than others, we have to first understand how senior executives read emails.

One key thing to remember about senior executives is that they have a vested interest in staying on top of trends in their given field. They need to know what their competitors are doing, what trends are emerging, and how these factors impact the status quo in a given industry. When it comes time to make important decisions, the most successful executives will draw on a wide range of sources to substantiate their decisions.

Crucially, executives report that they are willing to consider information provided by external sources, especially if it’s information that their team is not providing internally. Plus, according to a 2018 Quartz survey of executives, 78% of respondents are willing to read brand content, if it provides useful and relevant information.

In addition, executives receive a lot of emails, and they have to stay on top of their inboxes to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. For this reason, most CEOs read every email they receive. Different executives may have different approaches to inbox management. According to Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, his approach is to read every email and choose to either “read, act, file, or delete”. This means that a B2B marketing email is likely to reach a CEO—but it must be relevant and informative to be of any use to an executive.

In sum, B2B email marketing can be an effective way to reach senior executives—especially considering the increasing engagement with emails in the past year—but it has to be done right in order to stand out amongst the deluge of emails executives receive every day. For this reason, marketers should stay up-to-date on the best practices in B2B email marketing.

What Are the Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing?

Having established the potential for email marketing to be highly effective in reaching executives, the next step is to implement best practices in B2B email marketing to ensure that these emails will be read and considered useful.

One of the most important practices in B2B email marketing is establishing credibility. As we discussed briefly, the business hoping to establish a relationship with C-suite executives must show that they are a knowledgeable source. One method of establishing credibility is to create and publish practical primary research. Executives and other decision-makers will return to a source if they believe it will address gaps in their knowledge and bring them fresh information.

Plus, trust has become more important than ever in B2B marketing. According to IBM’s 2018 study of 13,000 C-suite executives worldwide, there has been an “ongoing and widespread erosion of customer trust, including B2B buyers… Where data alone was once an organization’s unparalleled asset, it must now factor in trust.” The top 9% of companies identified by this IBM study are able to maintain customer trust, which demonstrates its increasing importance in the best practices in B2B email marketing.

To establish trust, B2B marketers must provide concise, engaging, and highly-relevant information in their emails to executives. Senior executives are busy people—while they want to stay informed, they simply don’t have time to wade through a lengthy newsletter, especially if it’s crowded with irrelevant information. The most effective B2B emails are specific to the executive in question and pack a lot of information into a short email, with a clean and easy-to-read layout.

Beyond content, the timing of B2B email marketing also matters. At different times of day, executives prefer to consume different types of content. The best time to send an email is in the morning: according to a Quartz survey, 50% of executives read an email newsletter upon waking up. This trend is increasing over time—in 2014, only 42% of respondents to Quartz’s executive survey named email newsletters as their primary form of morning news, while in 2018 this increased to 50%.

In addition, best practices in B2B email marketing should also include a well-thought-out approach to the way emails are sent. Marketers should regularly clean out unresponsive emails from their lists in order to avoid being blacklisted as spam. Using a permission pass email is a highly effective way to do this. By sending an email asking the user to confirm whether or not they’d like to continue receiving emails, click rate and open rate will rise and marketers can confirm they are only marketing to engaged users.

Altogether, by implementing these best practices in B2B email marketing, marketers can increase their email engagement and reach senior executives more effectively than ever before.

Next Steps

SOMAmetrics designs and executes its proven 4-step high-quality lead generation programs to deliver more leads that close faster and at a higher rate for 20% of what it costs clients to produce in-house.

As a next step, download this white paper that describes the most effective way for B2B companies to generate high quality leads for their sales organization.

Then, let’s schedule a quick call to discuss how we may be able to help you build your high-quality lead generation programs.