Seamlessly Switch from Mailchimp to SalesNexus in Just 5 Minutes
For many businesses, managing and nurturing email subscribers is a critical aspect of marketing. If you’ve been using Mailchimp for this purpose but are considering a switch to SalesNexus, you’re in luck. Transitioning from Mailchimp to SalesNexus has never been easier, thanks to our streamlined process that allows you to transfer your entire subscriber list in less than five minutes. Best of all, you can keep your Mailchimp list intact and start using SalesNexus right away with a 30-day free trial.
A Smooth Transition with No Data Loss
Switching platforms can often be a daunting task, especially when it involves transferring valuable subscriber data. The last thing you want is to lose subscribers or encounter complications during the transfer process. That’s why SalesNexus has made it incredibly easy for Mailchimp users to import their subscriber list, ensuring a smooth transition with no data loss.
Our platform is designed with user-friendliness in mind, so you don’t need to be a tech expert to make the switch. In just a few simple steps, you can download your Mailchimp list, upload it into SalesNexus, and start sending emails to your audience in minutes. This ease of transition means you can continue your marketing efforts without missing a beat.
Step-by-Step Guidance with a Helpful Video Tutorial
To make the process even simpler, SalesNexus provides a helpful video tutorial that walks you through each step. This video shows you exactly how to export your subscriber list from Mailchimp, how to import that list into SalesNexus, and how to launch an email campaign—all in just a few minutes.
Here’s a quick overview of the steps:
1. Download Your Mailchimp Subscriber List:
The first step is to export your subscriber list from Mailchimp. The video tutorial will guide you through the process, ensuring that you capture all the necessary data.
2. Upload to SalesNexus:
Once your list is downloaded, uploading it to SalesNexus is as simple as a few clicks. The platform’s intuitive interface makes it easy to map your data fields and ensure everything is in place.
3. Send Your First Email Campaign:
With your list successfully imported, you can immediately start crafting and sending email campaigns using SalesNexus. The video tutorial will show you how to set up your campaign, customize your emails, and track your results.
This video tutorial is a valuable resource, especially for those who may be new to SalesNexus. It provides the confidence and clarity you need to make the transition smoothly, without any frustration or confusion.
Why Make the Switch to SalesNexus?
You might be wondering, why should you switch from Mailchimp to SalesNexus? While Mailchimp is a popular platform, SalesNexus offers unique advantages that can enhance your email marketing efforts.
Advanced CRM Integration:
SalesNexus is more than just an email marketing tool; it’s a complete CRM solution that allows you to manage your customer relationships, sales pipelines, and marketing efforts all in one place. This integration ensures that your email campaigns are aligned with your overall sales strategy.
Personalized Email Campaigns:
With SalesNexus, you can create highly personalized email campaigns that resonate with your audience. The platform’s AI-driven tools help you craft compelling messages that are tailored to each subscriber’s preferences and behavior.
Comprehensive Reporting:
Track the performance of your email campaigns with SalesNexus’s robust reporting tools. Gain insights into open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and more, allowing you to fine-tune your strategies for maximum impact.
Try SalesNexus Free for 30 Days
To make your transition even more enticing, SalesNexus offers a 30-day free trial. This gives you ample time to explore the platform, test its features, and see the impact it can have on your marketing efforts. During the trial period, you can fully experience how SalesNexus enhances your email marketing strategy and integrates seamlessly with your existing processes.
Switching from Mailchimp to SalesNexus is not only easy but also highly beneficial. With our streamlined transfer process, helpful video tutorial, and the power of a comprehensive CRM platform at your fingertips, you’ll wonder why you didn’t make the switch sooner.
Don’t wait—sign up for your free trial today and discover how SalesNexus can take your email marketing to the next level.
Revolutionize Your Email Marketing with SalesNexus AI
In today’s fast-paced business world, time is one of the most valuable resources you can have. As a sales or marketing professional, you know that crafting the perfect email can take hours of brainstorming. Not to mention drafting, and editing. You need to strike the right tone. Make sure you convey your message clearly, and ensure that your emails resonate with your audience. But what if you could achieve all of that in just a few seconds? With SalesNexus email AI, you can.
The Power of AI-Driven Email Creation
SalesNexus AI is the latest feature designed to revolutionize your email marketing strategy. Imagine having the ability to generate engaging, personalized emails that hit the mark every time, without the hassle of starting from scratch. Whether you’re reaching out to new leads or maintaining relationships with existing customers, SalesNexus AI takes the guesswork out of email creation and delivers content that resonates.
How does it work? First SalesNexus AI leverages advanced artificial intelligence to analyze your target audience. Additionally, AI understands your messaging needs which enables it to craft emails that are tailored to your specific goals. Whether you’re launching a new product, nurturing a lead, or simply staying in touch, the AI takes care of the writing. All you need to do is review and send.
Save Time and Boost Productivity
One of the most significant benefits of using SalesNexus AI is the time it saves. In the time it would take to write just one email, you could generate dozens. Furthermore, all of these are tailored to different segments of your audience. This means you can focus on other important aspects of your business. Meanwhile you will still be able to maintain a high level of engagement with your audience.
Think about the energy and creativity that go into crafting each email campaign. Now, imagine redirecting that energy into strategizing, analyzing performance metrics, or brainstorming new ways to engage your audience. With SalesNexus AI, the time-consuming task of writing emails is streamlined. Therefore, you are free to do more of what you do best.
Personalized Emails That Resonate
In the world of email marketing, personalization is key. Generic, one-size-fits-all emails are a thing of the past. Your audience expects content that speaks directly to them. Thus, addressing their unique needs and challenges. SalesNexus AI takes this into account. Not only does it create emails that are well-written, they are also deeply personalized.
Moreover, the AI can tailor your messages based on various factors. These include past interactions, customer preferences, and purchasing behavior. This level of personalization ensures that your emails are more likely to be opened, read, and acted upon. Your audience will feel understood and valued which is crucial for building long-term relationships.
Try SalesNexus AI for Free
If you’re curious about how SalesNexus AI can transform your email marketing, now is the perfect time to try it out. With the SalesNexus free trial, you can experience firsthand how AI can take the reins and deliver compelling emails that resonate with your audience. There’s no risk involved—just the opportunity to see how much time and energy you can save while enhancing the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Imagine the impact of reaching your entire audience with ease, knowing that each email you send is optimized to achieve your desired outcomes. Whether it’s boosting open rates, driving conversions, or simply keeping your brand top of mind, SalesNexus AI can help you achieve your goals.
The Future of Email Marketing Is Here
Email marketing is evolving, and SalesNexus AI is at the forefront of this change. By automating the creation of high-quality emails, you can stay ahead of the competition and ensure that your messages always stand out. Plus, your leads and customers will thank you for the thoughtful, personalized content they receive. Additionally, you’ll enjoy the benefits of a more efficient and effective marketing strategy.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to revolutionize your email marketing. Sign up for your SalesNexus free trial today and let AI do the writing for you. Watch as your email campaigns soar to new heights, powered by the innovation of SalesNexus AI. Get started now and experience the future of email marketing!
New to Campaigns! Along with emails, calls, and text messages, you can now add a Webhook to your campaigns.
Using the built in, ready to use PrintGenie Webhook allows users to add direct mail (postcards, letters, holiday cards and more) to their campaigns in SalesNexus.
Simply add this new option to your campaign, and fill in the details to create or edit your brand.
Create Group Lookups
New in groups: you can create groups with specific criteria and make these your group lookup.
To create group lookups, go to “Create Group Lookup” under “Groups”, add in your search criteria, and when you click the search button, the list of items that matches the criteria will show up.
You can then proceed to “Make This My Lookup” and select specific fields for that Group Lookup.
We have been working hard to improve your customer experience, prompting us to resolve issues in the onboarding experience for our new users. We put everything you need to navigate SalesNexus in a welcome page that has a brand new look.
Quicker Searches
Looking for something?
We have made it easier for you to navigate through SalesNexus.
“Our search tools have been amped up to ensure you would be able to quickly get what you need.
Save Columns with Lookups
Save time doing the same searches over and over again by saving columns with lookups.
Now you can go to contacts, create a lookup, and create and change the criteria for your fields.
Once you have made this your lookup and saved your search, you are given the option to either make it your default search, or save the current selected contact columns.
This way, when you search your lookups under your selected description, you will only see the columns that you have selected that are relevant to that list.
Do you need a way to automate cold outreach, and take a list of potential customers, and start reaching out to them to turn them into customers? I mean without cold calling!
Get all that done in an easy, automatic, and efficient system with SalesNexus. Here’s how:
Go to RampedUp and do a search for any kind of industry.
Narrow down your search criteria.
You’ll come up with names, titles, companies, contact numbers, emails, and other pertinent information.
Download that list and load it onto SalesNexus.
From there you can call, email, or message all those people individually.
Add these people onto a lead nurturing campaign.
Manage how many automatic emails get sent out for a certain period of time.
Have each email personalized for each individual on that campaign.
Get Click Notifications straight to your phone or email. These let you know who actually clicked any of the automated emails sent.
Your reps can easily call the INTERESTED prospects. All your sales reps have to do is open the profiles of those who have shown interest and give them a call.
If you don’t want to call those who showed interest in your email, you have the option to send out a follow-up email. Again, this can be done automatically, and you can add information that would allow the system to set appointments for you.
Today, SalesNexus announced the release of the latest updates to its CRM and Marketing Automation Suite.
This is scheduled to be available on Wednesday, October 20, 2022, at 8:30 pm ET / 11:30 pm Pacific.
Here’s what’s new
Enhancements:
DKIM Setup
Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) allows senders to associate a domain name with an email message, thus vouching for its authenticity. It’s a security protocol through which you can give authorization/permission to another service or platform to send out emails using your email address, on your behalf.
By default, SalesNexus Sales Opportunities allow you to track one product in each sale, with a unique Quantity and Price.
Some providers sell more than one product or service to each customer. For this, you may want to use Line Items feature that has been recently developed in the SalesNexus platform.
Automatically set the Probability of Sales Opps based on Sales Stage and use Forecasted Amount to forecast revenue easily, consistently and accurately.
Enable and customize your sales stages in an opportunity and match it with a corresponding percentage here.
Schedule Campaigns over a Series of Dates
Fed up trying to divide a list into subsets so you can schedule them to go out day by day?
Now you can manage your email list to maximize delivery easily!
Use Opened Date and Clicked Date to see which contacts are engaging with emails and which are not. Stop sending to unengaged and your delivery rates improve.
Are you looking for some email marketing tips to send out successful email marketing campaigns?
In this Email Marketing Mastery Webinar, we share with you what you need to know to improve your email campaign performance, keep your emails out of the SPAM folder, and how to optimize your email campaigns, among other things.
In terms of designing your email, less is more. That’s the number one mistake we see people making: there’s just too much in your email. You don’t need to write an entire blog post. It doesn’t need to be 500 words. In fact, even 100 words is too long. Keep it short, short, short.
Think about when you read your own email. You don’t have a lot of time for marketing emails. You’re going to look at it. And in one or two seconds, it’s either delete or click on it. People are in a hurry, so keep it short.
Keep the images small
Any images you have in your email have to load on your mobile device most importantly. If you don’t have a great internet connection like when you’re on the road, that delayed loading time degrades the experience of the reader. Make sure you don’t upload a two megabyte file. It might look great, but it’s not going to be a great experience for the reader.
Use videos
Videos get twice the clicks that images or links get. So if you’ve got a video, use it. It’s well worth investing in creating videos and optimizing them for mobile. Over 50% of your emails will be read on a mobile device.
Look at your email on a mobile phone
You definitely need to be looking at what your email looks like on a phone. Don’t just craft it on your desktop computer and go “Oh, it looks great!” and send it out before you look at how it looks on a phone. Make sure to double check it by sending to yourself and seeing how one of your customers will receive it.
Focus on the customer
For the email subject line, you need to speak to the customers’ needs. Don’t talk about yourself. That’s the number two mistake that we see people making. The language in the email and the subject line are too focused on the company.
For example: “We have this great product” or “Save 20% on our great stuff.” The customer doesn’t care. He/she doesn’t need to save 20%, they don’t need to spend any money. That’s the way you should think about it. Make the customer want to spend some money. Make them need what you have to offer. Speak to the customers’ problems, and make sure you’re dealing with the customers’ pains.
Avoid SPAM words and phrases
Avoid using SPAM trigger words in your subject line. These words and phrases may land your email in the SPAM folder before it’s even read.
Words and phrases like: free, cheap, money, cash, easy, no hidden costs, and get paid are just huge triggers for the junk folders.
Give them a reason to click your Call to Action
The third major mistake we see people doing in email marketing is immediately selling to their customers on the very first email. Take this scenario. You’ve got a well written email that is designed right, but at the end it says something like: “If you’d like to learn more, let me know a good time to call you”. For an email like that, you’re expecting them to hit reply right away with an email that reads “Hey, I’d love to learn more. Please call me at 3 o’clock.” The reality is, not very many people are going to do that. What they are more likely to do is go to your website, check you out a little bit, see if you’re not a scam, weigh out their options, things like that.
You’ve got to give them a reason to do that. Direct them to where you want them to go on your website. Put a button in there. Make sure all of the links throughout the email are all pointing to that same place. Don’t give them 10 different links that send them in 10 different places. That doesn’t help you really get results from your campaign.
Make the messaging customer-centric
Here’s a typical marketing email:
If you’re offering a discount, say it differently:
Now, you’re making ME think of MY vacation. Now I’m interested.
Take a look at the analytics
There are benchmarks in email marketing that you should be aware of. Every day millions of emails are being sent out. We know that statistically, 10% to 20% of your marketing emails get opened. That means about 80% to 90% don’t ever get clicked. The recipient of that email never even looked at it before it ended up in their online trash can. What’s more, only 1% to 2% of those emails that do get looked at actually gets a click to your website or a push to your call to action.
You also need to keep an eye on the bounce rate – that’s something that’s increasingly becoming more important. You want to keep your bounce rate at less than a half of a percent.
Evaluate your email lists
You want to make sure to clean the bad emails off of your list.
When you send out your marketing email blast with tools like SalesNexus, they have the capacity of identifying bad emails. When that incorrect email bounces, they’re going to keep note of that. They’ll make sure that you don’t send an email to that email address next time.
However, the damage is done. You’ve already damaged your reputation by sending out emails to those bad email addresses in the first place.
What’s happening is these junk folders are seeing your activity and are going “Well clearly these guys are sending emails to a list of people they don’t even know. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have such a high percentage of incorrect email addresses and emails bouncing back.”
Avoiding spam filters
Spam filters have really been changing and evolving every day now. At the moment, most marketing emails are being read on either Gmail or Outlook. So you really need to keep up to date with the way their algorithms work in determining what gets sent to the junk folder.
If you’re really serious about email marketing, one tip is to make sure you have a Gmail and Outlook account. That way you can test out your emails and see for yourself the way each of these platforms work. When you’re putting together your email marketing campaigns, send yourself a test email. It’s your chance to have a look at what it actually looks like in the inbox. That’s one way you can check if it’s being received correctly and that it’s not going straight into the junk folder.
There are a number of spam filters available today, with SpamAssassin being one of the more popular ones. It’s a default that comes along with one of the most popular corporate mail server programs. There are ways to monitor and find out if these spam filters are putting your emails to junk, and services that can take care of that for you.
Keep in mind that when it comes to spam filters, there are a multitude that your customers could be using, and each one works differently. That’s going to affect your individual customers and the way each of them receives your emails. You’re going to expect to have varying results all over the place.
Setting up a structure for success
Getting around these spam filters requires you knowing what it is they are looking for. Technically, they are evaluating you based on DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Email), DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework). These are all things that your mail service provider should help you with. That’s something you should look into when you sign up for a new service. When you set up your account, make sure you check out if they have an option for that. Don’t skip it. That’s really important.
How it works essentially is that you as the brand/marketer, saying to all these junk filters: “These emails are being sent by this other mail service (like SalesNexus or any other mail sender).” You’re basically telling these spam filters that these emails are being sent on your behalf. Therefore, they are “blessed” by you and safe to receive.
This tells the spam filters that your mail service is not spoofing or scamming them. It signals to them that even if you have your own email as a company, you are legitimately using another service for your marketing emails. These probably matter more than anything else in terms of getting into the inbox.
Domain Alignment
Another element that can have an impact on your email marketing campaign’s success is domain alignment. What this means is within the email itself, there are several places that these spam filters can look at your domain:
One thing that we see people do wrong is have all these different domains in the same email. They’ll have an email address with a gmail domain. Then have multiple links that point to several websites with different domains. That inconsistency looks a little suspect to these spam filters who may read it as scammy. It’s another strike against you that can increase the chances of your emails going to the junk folder.
Take care of your Domain Reputation
There are two separate reputations you have to keep an eye on: the reputation of your domain itself, and the reputation of the IP address of the mail server sending the emails.
There are a lot of different ways to keep track of your reputation, with a number of tools available to help you do that. If you want to see how your domain is doing, we would highly recommend checking out Google Postmaster. You can search your domain on their platform, and it will tell you what they think of your domain.
Here’s an insider email marketing tip. Sometimes customers would come to us and say, “We were sending marketing emails through an email delivery service, and something went wrong. Now all my emails, including the regular emails we use for correspondence are going into the junk folder.” That right there indicates that you have a reputation problem with your domain. It could possibly be a problem with the IP Address reputation as well. If that’s the case, you need to start working on your reputation. Unfortunately, fixing your reputation is not easy.
The real key is prevention. Follow these best practices, and be aware of the things that would tarnish your reputation so you wouldn’t have to deal with these issues.
Familiarize yourself with the system
Today Google and other systems read emails in real time though AI. They are using AI to monitor how people are interacting with your emails. As your emails are being sent out and at those moments they’re being clicked, opened, or sent to the trash, Google and Outlook are tracking the percentage of opens, clicks, bounces, opt-outs, and all of that. Those numbers will affect the delivery of all of your emails.
Your open rate, click rate, bounce rate, and your engagement are all important as they are read by these systems and affect your delivery.
The actions of your recipients also affects your sender reputation. If someone marks you as spam, that will definitely affect your reputation. However, it will only affect your reputation in that system. So if I get your email in Gmail, and I mark it as spam in Gmail, then Gmail is using that information. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean it’s going to affect how I get delivered in Outlook, for instance.
Secure a static IP Address
Then there’s the IP, that’s the numeric address of the server on the internet. Some email providers have static IPs and others have dynamic IPs. A static IP means that your emails always come from the same single IP address. That means that one reputation is what matters to you. Some have dynamic IPs. That means you might send an email today with one IP address, then send another email tomorrow with a different IP address. So those reputations are going to change. Ideally if you’re a really high volume sender, what you want is a dedicated IP address.
That means your email comes from one static IP, and only your emails come from that IP. In other words, other customers are not sending from that same IP. That ensures that the reputation of that IP is essentially your reputation. See to it that your reputation or your email delivery is not suffering as a result of other company’s behavior because of a shared IP address.
Manually check the status of your emails
SalesNexus and other email delivery providers have services that can set you up with a dedicated IP. These ensure that your emails are going into the right folder. However, if you want to look into what’s happening to your emails yourself, here are some email marketing pointers.
In Gmail, you can open up an email and click on the settings (the 3 dots to the upper right-hand corner of the email.) Click on “show original” and that’s where you’ll see a message header. This is where you can read what’s happening with your email. These codes here indicate the path the email has taken and it can pinpoint why exactly your email had gone into the junk folder.
Cleanse your email lists
As mentioned earlier, sending emails to a list of bad email addresses is the fastest way to get into trouble. What you want to do is cleanse the bad emails off your list BEFORE you start sending emails.
Some people think that the simplest way to do this is to load up their list first, send out their email campaign, and whatever emails bounce back – those are emails they’ll remove and will no longer send emails to. Well, that’s not great email marketing advice because you would have already damaged your reputation by sending out that first campaign. What you need to do is cleanse first, otherwise, you’ll be doing more damage than good.
Who and what to leave off your list
There are services out there that will take your list, and they’ll ping every single mail server and email on there to verify if it is indeed a valid email address. Additionally, they have services that maintain a list of things like spam traps, bots, and complainers.
A spam trap is an email address that a spam filter is using to find spammers. They might put an address out on an internet page. People that scrape the internet for email addresses to build their list will then start emailing that address. There’s no legitimate reason for someone to be emailing that address. Therefore, once you email that address, you are automatically placed on their spammer list.
A complainer is somebody who frequently marks emails as spam. Obviously, you want to avoid those guys.
A bot or a web robot is an automated software application. It’s not a human, so you don’t want to be sending emails to them either.
Finally, there are undeliverable email addresses. Simply put, those are bad emails that you don’t want to be sending to.
Sending emails to these kinds of email addresses affects your spam score, so to speak.
A simple solution to all this is to hire a mail delivery system to handle all this for you. It’s fairly simple to do, and at the end of it you’ll be able to send out thousands of marketing emails without having to worry about damaging your reputation. You can cleanse your email list using the SalesNexus system for only 2 cents per email through January.
List Building
We at SalesNexus have a different perspective on the concept of emailing cold lists than most people in the email marketing business. And that’s because we’ve traditionally focused on sales teams. One very common scenario in a B2B sales world is when a company has just hired a new sales guy that used to work for their competitor. Now this new guy has all these customers in a list, and we want him to email everyone on that list telling them that he is now with a new company. That makes sense, these are real people that he’s built relationships with.
Some email services won’t let you do that. They won’t let you load in a list without first opting them in. To be clear, legally speaking, there’s no issue with doing this. The law in the United States (it’s a little different in Canada and in Europe) says all you’re required to do is identify yourself clearly. Don’t pretend to be somebody you’re not and give them an easy way to opt out. That’s all. Again, there are mail delivery services that will take care of that for you.
There are different ways to build up your list. You can adopt lists from new employees coming in. Another thing you could try is joining your local trade association in your industry and get their membership list and load it into the system. Just make sure to cleanse it first because you can not be certain. Just because your local association is using it as their membership list, you can’t be sure that all those email addresses are accurate.
Use Data Cleansing and List Building Tools
Another way to build up your list is by using tools like RampedUp. You can do so much more than just buying a list, these tools have the capabilities to find look-alike customers, and infill data so you don’t have to spend so much time looking for missing information.
With look-alike customers, you can upload a list of your best customers and have the system find look-alike contacts for you. These are people who in the same or similar industry, have the same titles, are in the same area, same number of employees, same revenue, anything you’re looking for.
Another powerful thing this tool is capable of is finding missing information for you. Sometimes you get a list, but it doesn’t have complete details. You may only have a name and a number, but no email address. Other times, you may only have an email address. What RampedUp can do for you is find you all that missing information – company email addresses, personal email addresses, LinkedIn profile information, company titles, positions..etc. When you use a tool like this, you get a targeted list of potential customers complete with their contact and company information that fits in with criteria of your ideal customers. This allows you to focus on connecting with the right customers.
What’s more, RampedUp does an excellent job in updating and validating the data they collect. They are proactively keeping their database up to date so that when someone changes their information on LinkedIn, the information on their database that they provide you changes as well.
Once you’ve got your list, it’s just a matter of exporting it into your email delivery service. Make sure you cleanse it so you know all the emails there are validated. Afterwards, send out your email campaigns.
Keep an eye on engagement
Engagement is one of the newest things that Google, Outlook and the other spam filters really use to put your email either in the inbox or in the junk folder. It’s one of the email marketing tips that’s kind of obscure because it’s new, but it’s definitely something you need to keep an eye on. What’s happening is that they are looking at the open and click rate for each individual recipient.
So what happens if you keep sending emails to someone who has not once clicked any of them open? Well, your emails are going to start automatically heading to the junk folder, that person is just not going to be seeing your emails in their inbox.
If these spam filters and email platforms determine that you keep sending emails to people who aren’t engaging with your emails at all, they start to see you as a marketer or what they would consider a spammer and send your emails straight to the spam folder.
Track your data
So you need to keep track of your data. Take note of who you are sending to, and if these people are actually engaging with your emails. If you have consistently been sending emails to people on your list for a year or more, yet they have not opened any of them, then it’s time to stop sending emails to them. You’ll see that once you do that, it will improve your results with everyone else. If they haven’t engaged with you for over a year, then it’s also time to take these people off your list. We know it’s nice to have a long list, but by continuing to send to these people, you are actually damaging your reputation.
Now, that may seem tough. You might be thinking that if you have a list of 30,000 and you have to take 20,000 off the list because they aren’t engaging or are bad emails – that’s a big loss. Although that may be the case, what you’ll have left are the 10,000 people who are actually clicking, opening, reading, and responding to your emails – those are the ones you want to focus on. And again, you can then use tools like RampedUp to build up your list with a more targeted list of potential ideal customers.
Explore email marketing automation
One of the challenges of email marketing is that someone has to execute all the campaigns you set up all the time – it can become overwhelming and takes a lot of work. One email marketing tip we can offer you is to automate it.
Here’s one of the mistakes we see all the time. People start off great by offering a white paper, video overview, e-book, or any resource. Let’s say you’re sending to a cold list of unengaged prospects at the top of your funnel. Sending them useful content they can use and benefit from whether or not they do business with you is a good idea. You’re branding yourself and you’re becoming a trusted resource. That’s really the key in your first email engagements with people.
However, don’t just switch to a product demo unless they’ve told you something. Unless they’ve done something that indicates they want a demo, don’t offer it to them outright. Keep the conversation on the customer and wait for them to tell you that they’re ready to learn about you. That’s the name of the game in terms of not wearing out your list and having your opt-out rate go too high.
Automatically guide nurture your customers down the Marketing Funnel
You want campaigns for each of the layers in your funnel. However, they are not all one campaign. The way to do it is by sending automated email campaigns that is specific to each layer. At the top of the funnel you have your cold emails, white papers, case studies, case studies, DIY tips, webinar invites, and other useful content. You’re not asking them to make any commitment to you or your company. They’re just staying in that loop where you’re introducing them to helpful resources and relatable content. Then, when they actually click on your email and perhaps click a link within it – that’s a strong sign that they are interested.
Once they click on one of your emails, and especially when they engage with the content, that is when you can switch them over to the next layer in the funnel. That’s when you might consider sending them automated emails with your promo video, your demo video, or even your calendly link to set up an appointment. Then once they click on one of those emails and engage with the content, you can move them along to the next layer in your funnel.
This next layer could include a combination of calls along with your emails. This way you are nurturing your customers down the funnel. However, you’re making sure they are telling you they’re ready to go down through each layer. On systems like SalesNexus, you can set it up so that once someone on the top layer of the funnel clicks on one of the emails, they’ll automatically be switched over to another campaign (which is the next layer in your funnel). With this, the system is automatically moving them down the system.
Connect with us
If you need help with email marketing on the topics we’ve discussed from domain reputation to coming up with a solid campaign strategy, we have consulting along those lines. You can set up a personalized demo with us here.
If you’re interested in checking out RampedUp and building your list, doing the lookalikes or just appending phone numbers and emails to lists you already have, we have a special promo for you.
If you’re not a SalesNexus customer, go start a free trial of SalesNexus now, and we’re going to set you up with a RampedUp free trial. We’re also going to automatically put 500 credits in there for you to go and download a list of leads that you want, that you select with their email addresses and their phone numbers and their LinkedIn profiles.
If you’re already a SalesNexus customer, you can take advantage of the same thing. Just send an email to support@sn9.fifoma.com and say “Start my RampedUp free trial” and we’ll get it started for you.
According to the Harvard Business Review, cold emailing can work well.
Cold emailing is when you reach out to someone for the first time via email. When you conduct cold outreach, you have yet to establish a relationship with the receiver. You also have no real-time interaction with your audience and are reliant on verbal feedback to move forward.
Cold emailing can seem a little sketchy to some. It’s garnered a bad reputation because there’s a lot of ways to mess it up. It’s also got people questioning its legitimacy.
You may wonder, Can I send out an email to someone I’ve never communicated with before? The short answer is yes, you can. People have used cold emails in email marketing, lead generation, and sales, among others. However, you need to be careful. The last thing you want is for your cold email to be dismissed as spam.
Although cold emailing does have its challenges, it’s still a practice widely used as it can be highly effective.
When done right, cold emailing can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.
It’s a great way to expand your network, reach out to your prospects, and gain traction for your business. Product Hunt, Timehop, and Storefront are just some examples of businesses that have taken advantage of cold emailing to successfully scale their products.
It is important to stress that the success of cold emailing relies on creating a connection with your audience. The reason many cold emails flop is essentially that people don’t know how to approach it. Fortunately, Tucker Max has created A Guide to Cold Calling that was featured on the Harvard Business Review.
Below are some of the key points he made to send out a cold email that garners a positive response.
Personalize your cold email
Know who it is you are writing to. Do your research and personalize the email. When conducting personal cold outreach, that means more than just placing their name at the top of the email. Indicate why you specifically chose to email them, and how their expertise is valuable to you.
“Personalization means that you’ve thought about who this person is, how they see the world, what interests them, and what they want — you’ve developed a “theory of mind” about the recipient. This shows them you have put work into understanding them.”
-Tucker Max
Make a Connection
Remember, this is the first time you’re reaching out to this person. Although you may have done your research to find out about them, they may not know that much about you. Start off with a good impression and show them that you are credible so that they could trust you.
Begin with some common ground, or establish your ties. Let them know who you are and why you are reaching out. Find the connection that will move you from being a stranger to a contact.
Focus on what you can do for them
As your reader is scanning through your email, they are likely looking for one thing: What does this have to do with me?
Give your reader a reason to continue the communication with you by emphasizing what you can do for them. Identify a pain or problem they could have, and offer a solution or a means to help. Your email should highlight how a connection would be beneficial for them, not just how it could help you.
Keep it brief and concise
People are bombarded with marketing messages on the daily. Make sure your email stands out and has value to your audience. Think of your own practices when opening emails. We don’t devote too much time reading through long emails, and we scan for important information before deciding to trash the email or not.
To keep your email from ending up in the trash, try to establish that connection with your reader. Speak to them as if you were having an actual conversation. Be clear about your intentions and show some appreciation and vulnerability. If you are asking for something from your reader, expressing your gratitude could encourage your reader to want to help you. Ultimately, you want your reader to be comfortable enough with you to respond and build on this initial communication.
Cold Emailing Effectivity
Cold emailing can be incredibly effective, but it has to be done right. Those who have mastered the cold email have seen a response rate of 1 in 5 cold emails. Many businesses have used cold emails successfully to build connections in their network, obtain traction for their products, and even make sales. Although cold outreach through email can be tricky to do, a correctly worded cold email is well worth the effort once you start receiving those warm email responses.
You can find Tucker Max’s “Guide to Cold Calling” here.
What are the advantages of strategically using email in marketing your business?
In this podcast, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein continues the conversation with MarTech Podcast host Benjamin Shapiro about the advantages of email marketing. Here they delve into the different ways businesses can integrate email in their marketing strategy. In particular, they look into how you can use email as your sandbox for marketing strategies.
How can an email marketing strategy influence the stuff you’re doing outside the inbox?
CK: We work with a lot of B2B sales teams. So that can be sometimes startups. But it sometimes can be longtime established businesses that are really sales-driven for a long time. But now they’re trying to move into the digital marketing world, and finding their footing there. I see them really spin their wheels for a while because just like anything there’s a lot to learn before you really get to be an expert. What we’ve found is that, for instance, you could go and your digital marketing guy might say, “We can start a pay-per-click campaign and we can spend $5,000 for a few months. We can gather quite a lot of data. Then, we’ll start to get things tuned in and figure out what works. Maybe in six months, we’ll really start to see some ROI on that investment.” That’s a reasonable strategy.
For a B2B company, there’s so much variability in what’s going to happen after that lead converts from a Google point of view. Now they’ve got to convert as a sale for the sales team, as a customer for the business. Trying to get those two things working right, that’s the hard part. So that’s where I see an email marketing strategy being so valuable. It’s such an easy and affordable sandbox for you to play around in.
What are the advantages of an email marketing strategy?
If you’re a long-established business, and you’ve got an email list of past customers, past sales leads, and existing customers. You can take all those lists and start testing some campaigns. And it might take you a few days to put together the campaigns and the emails and orchestrate all that. However, you’re going to get data immediately. First, you’re going to look at the opens and clicks and all that and see if the email performed. Then you’re going to watch what happens with the salespeople.
Do they close any of those deals?
Once you start to get that feedback, you can go back and make some changes to the campaign. And then do it again. There’s almost zero incremental thoughts other than a little bit of time. Whereas in an Ad Words campaign (or really any digital platform), you’re going to have to rerun those ads and spend the same amount of money you spent the first time.
BS: So the idea here is that, A – for email you’re not paying on a per-impression basis like you would for your advertising. B – with an email marketing strategy you’re going to be able to collect your data faster than you would in a performance marketing campaign?
CK: Right. And it’s more directly connected to your sales data as well. Especially on our platform, it’s all in one place. So that makes it easy. But it’s just easier to marry those two data sets.
What are the challenges of an email marketing strategy?
BS: There’s a challenge with an email marketing strategy, which is you actually have to do the email collection. Think of your performance marketing efforts. You’re going to be able to go reach out and discover and find net new sales leads. Or you can do things like retargeting people that have already shown an interest in your products or services. Retarget the people that are on your website. But you don’t have to go through the process of capturing PII, somebody’s email address.
When you think about testing and figuring out what marketing strategies work, it seems like you’re in the camp of saying you should be testing with email because you know who those people are. Moreover, an email marketing strategy doesn’t cost you anything. As opposed to testing on people that don’t know, that you have to pay for.
What determines the success of an email marketing campaign?
CK: Of course for different businesses the former is not really an option. Or at least it’s not the strategy that they’re really focused on. In other words, you may be trying to break into a new market or expand into new territories or something like that. And there you may not have a lot of existing email addresses. That’s an issue you’ve got to address. You can acquire lists and if you do it right, and you do it in a careful way, it can be a great way to test your messaging. You can also run digital campaigns for the Ad words for the express purpose of building an email list. And then do further testing. It depends on the business.
The other thing that I’ve seen work really well is, if you have a list that you think represents sort of your ideal customers, like your best customers. There are services that can do look-alikes on those lists for you. They’ll help you start identifying them so that you can reach out to them via email, phone, LinkedIn, whatever.
How powerful is an email marketing strategy?
BS: That’s one of the powers of an email marketing strategy. One of the ways where you can use an email to drive efficiencies and test with your marketing is by running marketing activities to people that you know look like your customers. Often we’re thinking about email as an opportunity to directly sell to somebody that has shown an interest in the products or services.
But really what you can do is take the email addresses of your customers, of your target profile. The people that you have a high degree of certainty are going to convert. Go use the power of artificial intelligence through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, every performance marketing platform. Then say, go discover more people that look like this, that follow this profile.
There are several different ways to do that. And it’s super valuable.
CK: In fact, just going through that exercise gives you insights into who your best customer really is. You might be sitting in conference rooms with your marketing team. Maybe you’re drawing that persona on the whiteboard and making some assumptions. And then you perform this look-alike analysis, and you realize there are common themes there that you had never picked up on that are more easily identified.
For instance, it’s great to say “I always want to talk to the VP of production at the customers that I deal with”. But the problem is people don’t always have the same kind of titles. They always have different ways of stating those titles. It might be easier to identify things that you would never have guessed. Like 50% of our customers have an advanced degree, a master’s degree, or something like that. We can use that now to better target and really get our message to the right people who are going to have the highest ROI.
How else can you use an email marketing strategy to support your business?
BS: I think that there’s one last way that you can think about using email to support your marketing efforts and understand what’s working. We talked about how an email marketing strategy is cheap and easy. You can reach out to the people that have shown an interest. You can create lookalike audiences based on your email list. And you’re talking about enriching your data and figuring out what are some of the common threads amongst your most high-profile customers. Email is an easy channel to use to gather that data.
And you know what the trick to doing it is? You take the email address of your 10 best customers. Next, you compose unique emails and you schedule a meeting with those people. You ask them questions about the products or services that they’re interested in. Email is not only a form for marketing. You can also do your qualitative customer research by just reaching out to your customers.
This is not rocket science. Email is powerful because it gives you access to communicate, to talk about things outside of selling. You can actually ask your customers questions and they will give you the answers to what is important to them. You aggregate that data. Now you have a picture of who your customers are and what their interests are and how you can help solve their problems. Email’s a great way to actually reach your customers and ask them for their feedback.
At the end of the day, an email marketing strategy sort of sits in a unique place between marketing and selling.
CK: It’s more of a relationship tool than a lot of other marketing media. An email marketing strategy is also just so much more affordable in the long run that you’re crazy not to use it to experiment and learn.
BS: I absolutely agree with you. It’s one of the things that we’re focused on this year at the MarTech Podcast. We’re blowing out our website. We’re focusing more on building and relaunching our newsletters. And part of the reason is so we can capture some emails and better understand who our customers are. We want to better understand what their needs are and also have the ability to reach them. And that’s why email is such a powerful tool. Not only for direct communications, but for all of your marketing efforts.
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In this world where customer communications is growing increasingly complex, we are getting more and more requests for our attention. What do you need to do to separate your B2B email campaigns from the rest of the crowd, and to stand out amidst all the sales noise? How do you create B2B email campaigns that actually get results?
Over on MarTech Podcast, SalesNexus CEO Craig Klein (CK) speaks with host Benjamin Shapiro (BS) about crafting B2B email campaigns that actually drive revenue.
How do you make your B2B email campaigns stand out?
What we’ve seen over the years, working with thousands of B2B brands, is that typically there’s somebody on the marketing side of the house that’s developing the email marketing campaigns. Then you got your sales guys on the other side of the house who are actually building relationships with customers.
What works is marrying those things together so that the email isn’t just the top of the funnel. But it’s more helping to nurture that relationship and build that relationship. Or if you want to think about it from a funnel perspective, using emails to bring people down through your funnel, in conjunction with what’s happening with the salesperson.
BS: Going back to the fundamentals sounds simple, but actually executing it ends up being very challenging. You mentioned a couple of different things. One, who’s writing the emails and understanding who they’re writing them for. Two, the different stages of a customer’s life cycle, which dictates how you should be writing your emails. When you’re trying to figure out whether your B2B email campaigns are successful or not, knowing that some of the emails are about relationship building, some of them are about nurture, some of them are about direct response, and some actually getting to the sale.
How do you evaluate the success of your B2B email campaigns or all of your outreach, knowing that the outcome is different for multiple stages in the funnel?
CK: That’s a huge challenge. Fundamentally what most people struggle with is that you have separate tools that you’re doing all these things in. You’ve got your website analytics. Then you’ve got your email marketing services, and it gives you analytics. Next, you’ve got your CRM software where you can track sales results and things like that. And then trying to marry all that together and get an actual realistic analysis – that’s a week-long project for somebody.
That’s where our platform is unique in that we’ve combined all that into one place. So that you just don’t have that challenge of integrating data all the time.
But at the end of the day, that’s the name of the game. I don’t just want to know how many people opened or clicked on my email. I want to know how many of the people that clicked on my email ended up talking to a salesperson, not just coming to my website. Or ended up purchasing something. And that’s what you got to measure.
BS: Not every email is necessarily “book a demo.” Sometimes it’s “Hey, thanks for giving us your business card, just wanted to follow up with a link to our website so you could research the platform.” The success for that email is: Was there a click to the website? As opposed to an email that says, “Hey, thanks for downloading the white paper. If you have questions, we’re happy to walk you through our platform. Click here to schedule a meeting with a salesperson.”
The goal is obviously different from that second email than the first.
Now, when your B2B email campaigns are intending to do a couple of different things, how are you figuring out success when you have multiple calls to action or different calls to action for each type of communication?
CK: You have to measure those separately. Right? But the way I think about it is that the funnel has a lot of layers. So that first email that you’re talking about, that’s at the top of the funnel. We’re just trying to get them to the website. And then the second email you’re talking about, that’s more in the middle of the funnel. This is where we’re trying to get them engaged with a sales rep. So we’re going to evaluate that first email with how many people actually went to the website.
But here’s the tricky detail. We also want to look at those people that did respond to that first email and came to the website. How many of them ended up receiving that second email and responding to that, too? Because now if we can link those two things together, now we’re getting some really valuable intelligence that tells us maybe at the top of the funnel we are, or possibly are not, even targeting the right people at all.
Because what I’ve seen happen a lot of times is at a marketing level you can target an audience and you can generate a lot of activity for your sales team on your website or for your sales team, but they don’t close any business. And it’s all because either we chose the wrong audience in the first place, or maybe the messaging is just pulling in the wrong people. So we have to link those two layers together in order to really optimize the whole funnel.
BS: That’s what I call the Glen Gary – Glen Ross phenomenon between sales and marketing.
Where the marketing team creates activity and says, “Here are the sales leads, go close them.” And the sales team says, “These leads aren’t any good. Go find new leads.” And everybody points at each other and says, “You’re not doing your job.” And the answer is probably “We should be working together and all be on the same page in terms of who we’re targeting and how we’re trying to close them.”
CK: So you want to be able to run a sales report, for instance, a closed rate that started with this campaign versus that campaign.
BS: And this gets into the conversation about lead scoring. Where when you’re evaluating a prospect, you have to understand what data points they’ve touched. How many emails have they touched? What were the activities they had taken? And that helps figure out whether the sales team should be engaging with them.
I understand how lead scoring is a mechanism to evaluate whether sales should be engaging with a specific sales lead. But do you recommend, or do you advise people to actually take those lead scores and then look back and see which emails help drive the activity that raised the lead score? Can you look at that data and then go back and figure out how effective your communications are?
CK: For sure. And the other thing that you want to add in there is the frequency and quality of the engagement. In other words, especially in B2B, a lot of things are timing. If you’re a sales lead, we might have a great conversation and you might really be interested in what I’m selling you, but it’s just not time for your company to buy that right now. So your lead score might jump up because you’ve checked off all the right boxes. But you’re not really a hot lead. Because of timing that doesn’t have anything to do with me, it has to do with you.
So one of the things that we did a long time ago in our platform is built the ability to archive email correspondence.
And just kind of track the history of all interactions with the customer – phone call, email, text messages. So that, that score can also be a function of the fact that I’ve talked to them 10 times in the last two weeks versus once this month.
And what are those conversations about? Are they clicking on my holiday emails? Or did they click on the link to download the white paper? Those are all different signals that should affect that lead score better. But at the end of the day, it all just has to come down to dollars and cents. What do they end up buying? And how long do they stay as a customer? What’s their lifetime value? Those kinds of things.
When you’re rolling out B2B email campaigns, how do you figure out which ones are effective?
BS: You run the B2B email campaigns, you get some data you’re looking at open rates. Click rates. You’re going to see how many of those emails were opened and interacted with by people that ended up being your customers. What’s the way to look back at some point and figure out what to modify, and what’s been successful that you need to amplify when it comes to your email outreach?
CK: First of all, the email itself has to get adequate engagement. Was it opened? Is your title good? Did it drive engagement? Did the people click on the CTA? Then the question is, did that become a good customer? I can end up with salespeople on the phone with people that have engaged with my email all day. But if they don’t close a lot of those leads, then that B2B email campaign was not successful, even though it had a great click rate. That’s what ultimately you have to tie it back to.
It is complex. If the click rate and the close rate are in two different systems and you’ve got to figure out how to reconcile those things. Most people just are never gonna do that.
BS: Most people say, all right, I’m not marrying my email data to my CRM data because those are in two separate systems. So I’m just going to look at email data to figure out if my emails are successful. Well, people opened and people clicked. So this must be a great email. It must be helping contribute to revenue. And that’s not necessarily the case. The question is tying it to what actually drove the best possible customers.
What’s the right cadence to go back and start thinking about trying to tie your revenue data, your conversion data, back to the original emails to evaluate if they were successful?
CK: That’s really a function of your sales cycle, right? So if you’re in a business where you start a relationship and close the deal, typically in 30 days, then give it 45 days and go and perform that analysis. You want to do it as often as you can, depending on how difficult it is for you. If you’re in a business that you’re selling half a million-dollar deals, it takes six months or a year. Then trying to measure that kind of thing every month might not be that meaningful. It’s a waste of effort. Basically, what I would say is: Whatever your sales cycle is, do it that often.
BS: I think that’s a great tip is as you’re thinking about evaluating your B2B email marketing campaigns. You need to try to marry your revenue data and understand what emails not only are getting good email performance but are also impacting what drives the bottom line. And the cadence for doing that is dependent on what your sales cycle is.
CK: What’s exciting is it almost always illuminates really counterintuitive insights. Like we were talking about before either the sales team or the marketing team. One of them’s going to be sitting there looking at that kind of analysis going really, is that actually right?
And that’s the kind of insight that you want because that’s going to help you make things better next time.
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