Email marketing
Essential email journeys for B2B
There’s a million and one blogs out there with essential lead gen email nurtures, but they all kind of say the same thing;
collect email addresses, send newsletters
use gated content to collect more info, turning subscribers into warm leads
turn leads into MQLs and pass them off to sales
badabing badaboom you’ve got yourself a closed won opportunity
But we all know there’s just so much more to it in B2B and SaaS marketing. For one, your definition of an MQL might involve a lot more than a little bit of contact info gathered through a content form, you might have an SDR team, who knows.
Some additional measures B2B marketers can take include;
non-traditional point scoring
measuring ‘intention’
focusing on email nurtures that give genuine value
Point scoring
Ok yeah point scoring might be in your MQL definition, but there’s so many ways you can assign points. The most common ways to score things are like opening emails and clicking links… boring and not very meaningful.
B2B buyers generally have a longer sales cycle, so sending emails to rush them into a sale isn’t going to work. You have a lot of time on your hands, so use that wisely.
Your nurtures should have a mixture of both thought leadership and product focused topics. Thought leadership stuff doesn’t earn you points, it is there purely to keep your open rates high throughout the whole journey.
Ebooks and the like should just be there to collect personal information and do not indicate that someone is ready to buy. Reserve your points for only the creme de la creme of CTAs and content.
Measuring intention
Intention here means that the leads you’re nurturing aren’t just reading blogs to look busy or learn something new. They’re actively pushing themselves further down the funnel.
Once your subscribers are nice and settled in, open your emails regularly, and have built a bit of a relationship with you, you can start introducing product content with a heavier sales focus. You can do this by having staggered nurtures.
The first nurture is 100% (genuinely) interesting, useful, and actionable thought leadership content. (More on this later)
Once they’ve clicked X links out to blogs, videos, and ebooks, move them into nurture 2. Nurture 2 is say 50-75% thought leadership and 25-50% product content. If they continue to only click thought leadership links and don’t engage with your product content, they stay here.
If they click product content, move them onto nurture 3, which is 25% thought leadership and 75% product content.
Here you really want to focus on whatever your number one CTA is - whether that’s book a demo or start a free trial.
If they don’t engage with this, either just let them go until they run out of emails in the nurture or put them into a newsletter-only bucket. They’re just here for your content and not your product, and that’s fine but you need to acknowledge it and deal with them accordingly.
Emails that actually give value
There’s nothing worse than an email that says “here’s a blog for the sake of sending you a blog so I can measure your clicks” and then the blog being a self-serving one that doesn’t teach me anything new.
Emails are so much more than a way to push someone to buy something.
Think of your email nurtures in more creative ways. What can you give away for free, in every single email you send, that ties back to your product?
One of my best examples of this is, you guessed it, my own work at Perkbox. Later in the nurture when we were pushing people to book a demo, I started putting a “try this:” at the end of every email. It would be a small action that they could take straight away that didn’t cost anything, and it would prompt them to evaluate themselves, their team, or their organisation.
Here’s an example: Perkbox had a product called Recognition, which is basically sending congrats/thank yous/well dones to your teammates, and it is a genuinely warm-and-fuzzy type product. When you send a colleague a recognition it makes you feel good too. So I put in things like “Try this: send a thank you email to 3 people who went above and beyond recently. Take note of how it feels after you’ve sent them.”
On multiple occasions leads would reference these sections of the emails while talking to the sales team and said they actually did the actions and it lead them to book a demo.
Not everything is as fun a product as that though, so other ways to give something valuable away for free is mini-courses to learn about a particular topic (example: The WSJ has a six-week money/personal finance management email course). You can also teach how to do a manual process version of your product - this will help leads see the value in yours when they see how easy it is in comparison.
There’s really endless opportunity here so give it a serious think and remember the key points are
focusing on something people can actually use or do
tying it back to your product
giving it away for free
The holy commandments of email
Remember that each part of an email has a very specific purpose, and it doesn’t really need to do much more than that. You don’t need to create a magnum opus for every email, but in order to have outstanding metrics, you should focus on the purpose of each of these sections:
A subject line should make you open an email (ask yourself: would I open this?)
A pre-header should tell you what to expect (ask yourself: is this related to the content of the email?)
Body text should introduce the topic and prime for the CTA (ask yourself: does this CTA come out of nowhere?)
A CTA should make you take action (ask yourself: would I want to click this?)
Drumroll… my new job!
I actually don’t have any links this week, and I’ve been putting off making this announcement because at first I wanted to actually start the job… and then I just got really busy.
I’m now Product Marketing Manager at Willow! I don’t think I would have updated my LinkedIn when this email goes out, but feel free to add me if we aren’t already connections.
Willow is… a lot more complex than Perkbox so it is a big, new challenge, but one that I’m really excited to push myself on. It will also hopefully start making appearances in this newsletter more regularly, once I have finished onboarding and am producing work.
I have considered doing a Mehdeeka issue on getting hired, resume advice for marketers, and the career progression options open to us, so if you’re interested in that please click this link - if it gets enough clicks I’ll make it into a future issue!
No links this week!
Sorry, as I said above I’ve been super busy since starting at Willow so I haven’t been reading as much online content as I usually would, however if you’d like a book recommendation I’ve been reading:
It’s non-fiction about Kim Jong Un and the North Korean Kim regime/dynasty. It’s pretty insane to read and realise it’s all still currently happening and there’s a lot of detail in it on what North Korea is actually like, as well as interviews with escapees (both regular people and ex-inner circle elites).
If that’s not your thing, I also recently read The Year of Living Biblically, in which an athiest lives as literally by the bible as he can for a year. Really entertaining, he’s quite a good writer so it’s a nice, light read but still thought provoking and entertaining.