John Hodge — July 3, 2018 — July 3, 2018
Email is a great way to market to contacts and to stay top of mind. Segmentation can further assist the ability to market relevant information to interested contacts.
We’re probably all familiar with the different kinds of email, but what we might not know is that they actually have secret lives. Spooky.
Sure, email is a great medium to educate and nurture, but what else is going on here? Let’s find out, here’s a look at some of the most common forms of email and what’s going on below the surface.
Newsletters
geralt / Pixabay
I love newsletters. They’re great for sending emails with a lot of links that are broken up into sections. This broken up structure allows us to do some cool things:
- Include a bunch of content in one email that might be relevant to several different personas.
- Feature a bunch of links without causing decision paralysis.
Being as we’re able to send this email out to a bunch of people with a ton of links we can monitor several email engagement analytics:
- Opens
- Clicks
- Unsubscribes
Only the beginning, people! Due to the (potentially) persona agnostic nature of newsletters we can send this one email to the entire database. With tools like HubSpot, we can change the subject line based on the persona of the recipient with smart content. So, this should give us reliable open metrics, great.
But, what’s even more important is the ability to send this one email to everyone in our database. If you haven’t sent one email to everyone in your database in a couple months or more this is for you.
Sending one email to everyone is a great way to clean up your database. Chances are some of your contacts have changed their email at some point, and if you’re B2B this is even more relevant. You really want those dead email addresses out of your database because they’re costing you money. The more contacts you have, or the more emails you send, the more you have to pay.
Soooo, you probably only want to pay for live emails, right? And, how do you monitor dead email addresses? Newsletters!
Quick takeaway
Newsletters secretly keep your database clean by identifying dead email addresses.
Form Submission Follow Up
Another crazy important email is the form submission follow up.
Let’s suppose you start sending monthly newsletters, you’re capturing dead emails, adding them to a list, and removing that list every month or so.
At this point, submission follow up emails will keep your database clean through regular, real-time maintenance.
If someone gives you a fake email you’ll find out immediately. No need to wait for the monthly newsletter. Understandably, this leads to a clean database, and a clean database is a financially smart database.
In addition to the technical side of email database maintenance, follow up emails also “introduce” your company to someone’s inbox. They’re more likely to remember you if you email them right after they fill out a form because they’re thinking about you. Aww.
This should reduce the chances of them marking any of your future emails as SPAM. Which is good for domain reputation.
Quick takeaway
Form submission follows up secretly keep your database clean and improve domain reputation.
Nurturing or Automation Emails
Enrolling contacts in a workflow is a pretty obvious next step for marketers. We want to nurture those new leads into MQLs that we can pass over to sales.
Sure, that’s true, but there are two sides to this coin. While we’re qualifying some contacts, we’re also disqualifying other contacts.
Staying in regular contact with people lets us see how engaged they are with our brand. If someone fills out one form and never opens any of the ten emails that follow, then we might have a contact who isn’t interested in moving forward.
Depending on how long someone is likely to stay in the buyer’s journey, we might want to send a re-opt-in email at the end of the workflow if they don’t seem engaged.
Just like with the secret lives of some other email types, we can use these emails to keep our database clean. If someone’s not going to move forward let’s get them out of the database and keep our marketing costs in check.
Congruently, if someone is engaging with our automated emails, then we should be able to pass them over to sales. We can achieve this by having a goal for the workflow, and as I always say “if there’s no goal, then we don’t need a workflow”.
Let’s make a bottom of funnel form submission that goal and pass over contacts to sales in the form of MQLs once the goal is met.
Quick takeaway
Nurture or automation emails secretly keep your database clean by disqualifying contacts who aren’t interested in moving forward. They also support a scalable process to pass qualified leads over to sales.
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