Marketers have never liked email. I think we’ve mentally conflated email with those post office mass mailings of the old days—send a thousand mailers to get a 1-2% response rate. Those flyers always looked cheap and pushy, and nobody liked creating them.
But email is different. Not only is it more flexible and personal than mass mailers, but it can be more profitable. Here are five reasons why you should respect and prioritize your newsletter, short sales cadences, and full-on marketing funnel series.
1. You’re in like Flynn. These prospects have already made their first transaction with you by trading their email address for something of value you offered. They’ve invited you into their home. One client I worked with was overt about that transaction, with a “thank you” email saying the company respected the prospect’s time and inbox, and promised not to abuse either one.
2. Email is SO easy to personalize. But using a prospect’s name is so obvious now that it’s almost insulting. Instead, try segmented lists using fresh form fields. For example, I’ve sent successful mass emails using personalized tokens for industry, region or other location, and previously downloaded content. Pretty much any field you have in Salesforce can be leveraged to segment and personalize.
3. You control the platform. There’s no algorithm change to keep up with, and no fancy programming or specialist required to monitor trends. I’ve been on marketing teams where a Google shift had us all scrambling for weeks on how to re-optimize website content. Meanwhile, our newsletter calmly plugged away with unaffected open and click rates.
4. It’s mostly free. You’ve probably already noticed that the socials suppress your “free” posts until you start investing in paid. At the minimum, they limit your ability to target and segment since those are paid features. In terms of labor, you’re already paying marketing folks, so it’s a sunk cost to ask someone to slap together an email series or newsletter template. Creation cost is low because email is perfect for repurposing existing content from blogs, landing pages, website, and webinars.
5. Near-instant A/B testing. Got an idea? Before you invest in making it come to life, pop it into a newsletter with an A/B test and get a response metric a week later. I’ve used newsletters to successfully A/B test website CTA buttons, blog ideas, research report ideas, webinar ideas, and even brand colors.
So, bring your emails out of that corner closet. Take the newsletter away from your intern and challenge your top marketing brain to breathe life into it. If your BDRs or SDRs are creating sales cadences, hook them up with someone in marketing to review and tweak them – I’ve seen big improvements just from having a marketing person update subject lines. And set up a few segmented email funnels using some creative personalization tokens. You’ll be amazed at the results.