Email Marketing Strategies

How to build a predictable revenue model for your business through email

marketing

Who am I?

● CEO of SUSO Digital

- SEO Specialists- Content marketing- Traffic Generation- Agency Incubator - Clients/Partners include Sainsburys, Sotheby’s, UCL

● Background in developed in marketing and sales ● Law Graduate from Bristol University turned entrepreneur

SUSO Story- SEO agency working with ecommerce brands

- Moved from startup to lucrative agency over a period of 18 months

- Average client is worth £3k per month

- 2014 - just under £500k in revenue

- 2015 goal - £1 million revenue

- Agency Incubator model established

SUSO Story

- We relied on SEO for leads

- PPC was too expensive

- Too dependant on referrals from current client

- Leads were too sporadic and quality wasn’t the best

- We needed to develop our “cold” outbound strategies

- Establish a predictable revenue model to reach our 2015 £1million target

Why Email? ✓ Inexpensive

✓ Targeted

✓ Easily scalable

✓ Trackable

✓ Testable

✓ Predictable

- You can’t just cold call nowadays in the traditional form and expect to make sales.

“Cold Calling (Emailing) 2.0” - Concept developed by Aaron Ross

- Goal of every cold email should be to:

1) Find who is the best person to contact i.e. the decision maker

or

2) To establish best time to call

Think Research Emails, NOT Cold Emails

How will it help?

- Versatile: Both B2B & B2C

- Direct Sales

- Partnership Development

- Connecting with influencers

- Search Engine Optimisation

- Blog Content Promotion

✓ Develop a process that can turn your business in to a “Sales Machine”

We learned:- E-commerce companies were much more open to an SEO offering

than any other market

- They were by far the best clients, paid the most & least time spent on client management

- Companies already spending on PPC had budgets to use on SEO

- In-house teams were often in need of outsourcing elements of the SEO process to an agency like us

- 50 - 100 employees

- Partnerships with SEO bloggers, web development companies, were very lucrative

Volume:- For every 500 emails we would get on average 50 responses (10%

response rate)

- 10 of these 50 responses would be positive

- Calls set up with 5 of the 10 companies to assess “fit”

- Face-to-face meetings arranged with 3 of the 5 companies

- 1 deal done with average £3k month, £36k per year

- Based on figures need to send out 13,889 emails to reach £1million target

Automation:- Might seem a lot but, we’re in an extremely competitive space

- We’re refining process continuously to improve conversion rate

- Our list is 20k companies and growing

- We send out on average 500 emails a week

- Within 27 weeks, we will have sent out 13,889 emails

- Most of the “bulk” emailing can be automated using tools like Quickmail

- Once contact made can then import list in to CRM like Close.io

Define & refine your ideal customer

- Find ideal customer profile - spend time doing this

- Define which companies are your top 5-10% of customers - those most likely to purchase your product/service for the most revenue

- Develop focused lists based on tight criteria

eg. No. of employees in co.? Industries receptive? Marketing budget? Solution in place?

Build your List of prospects 1. Interns

2. Elancers/Odesk ($0.20 per contact)

3. Contact Databases - One Source, Jigsaw, Inside View, Zoom Info, Data Salad

4. Scraper Software - establish footprint

5. Linkedin + plug in such as Reportive, Salesloft, Sell Hack

Building Partnerships - Finding companies that have the exact same customer profile

as you but are not in direct competition

- Offer kickbacks

- White-labelling options

- Give them your marketing material

- Ask for a link on their website

- eg. For us E-commerce development companies, PPC , Web design agencies, SEO bloggers

Initial Email Out - A & B test which copy works best. It will differ depending on

industry.

- Sometimes, mass emailing works best, sometimes smaller volumes of ultra personalised

- In a nutshell: send a short snappy email to high ranking people asking ‘who is the right person to speak to about X’?

- Core goal: Set up a meeting with your sales prospect.

Follow up emails - Importantly, don’t stop at one email. Follow up with 2 or 3 more

‘just checking you got my last email’ messages. This legitimises you as a real person.

- Automate with tech: SalesBeach.com and QuickMail.io

- Don’t ‘burn’ your list too fast with this method.

- Make sure that follow up emails promote content pieces and webinars and encourage engagement (cornerstone for relationship development)

- Track visitors and retarget advertise to them (relatively inexpensive) using Adwords

Lead Out Period

Email copy techniques - Don’t start selling yet, the aim is to find out about the company & whether they’re a potential fit - keep emails short and sweet and be specific

- Text based and not fancy html

- State simply and clearly why you’re reaching out

- Make email easy to read on smart phone

- Offer credibility - examples of people you work with

- Ask for one simple call to action

- Avoid common spam trigger words like “free”, “opportunity”, “click here”

Hello Tom,

I am writing in the hopes of finding the appropriate person who is responsible for X marketing? I also wrote to Y and Z in that pursuit.

We noticed that your site has received a big drop in traffic for the keyword “X”. I’ve looked at the reasons why and it looks like your website isn’t optimised properly for Google.

We can help you with this and have worked on similar problems for companies such as Big Co 1 and Big Co 2.

If you are the appropriate person to speak with, what does your calendar look like this week?

If not, who do you recommend I talk to?

Thanks.

Example EmailSubject Line: Appropriate Person

Refining The Process Use CRM/Analytics to track success (Yesware, Salesforce, Close.io)

1) Email response rates

2) Emails companies respond to & why

3) Who is responding

4) Who became qualified opportunity & why

5) Constantly Refine - A/B test

Eventually - you can automate areas of the process

Tracking Success- Aim for 50-100 emails a day, 5-10 responses - including positive, negative, & neutral

- Send messages before 9am or after 5pm and avoid Mondays & Fridays(schedule using Boomerang)

- Assess open rate, click through rates, unsubscribe rates & bounce rates

- Average reply rate is 7-9% - averages vary by industryhttp://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/

- Don’t give up on an initial “No” - find out why

Yesware Dashboard

Can-Spam Compliance - Allowed to send unsolicited emails so long as:

1) Subject Header not misleading

2) Have valid physical address in email

3) Include “opt-out” for future communications

Try a phone-call

Anyone who you’ve tracked as visiting the website on multiple occasions using software like Lead Forensics

Solution Design Workshop- After “best practice briefing” call, 2nd meeting is much more granular & specific

- Discuss exactly what you will do for them

- Go to their office, go and meet them, perform a tutorial or webinar - make it a unique experience where they learn a lot

- Create a professional document, mentioning everything discussed - a formal proposal (only send proposals to prospects ready to receive them)

- Show how you will execute the solution

Develop Process

1) Standard Procedure for generating sales

2) Standard Procedure for Processing

3) Sales Machine that will lead to Predictable Revenue for your business

Online PR, SEO and Email- Techniques outlined will help you with your online PR work and SEO

- How?

- Connect with influential bloggers and journalists who have “reach”

- Build a relationship and nurture it - they will become ambassadors for your company and promote you to their wider audience

- Apply good-copy email procedures for acquiring “back-links” from authority websites - directly impacting on search engine positions

- Offer to “guest-post” - provide content for their blog which links back to you

Blogger relationships- These relationships can be extremely lucrative

- Bloggers are heavy influencer to your target audience and have great reach

- They will be valuable allies for promoting your business

- eg. Matthew Woodward SEO Agency

- First email must be very conversational - no sales chat

- Build trust, ask them questions about the blog, offer to guest post for them, ask for feedback on your product

Blogger Prospecting- Build a list of influential bloggers in your

industry

- Use Google to find eg. “SEO blog”, “SEO news”

- Search engine operators to find ‘resource’ pages via search string - inurl:resources “Tech”

- Find guest posts via search string - “tech” intitle:”write for us”

- Use SEO plug-ins to find those with good domain metrics

Reverse engineer your competition

Use Ahrefs to look at all of your competitors backlinks and find where on the web they are being promoted.

Email Outreach- Start manually reaching out to bloggers via email, using Buzzstream

- Each email must be completely personalised, bloggers don’t react well to bulk emails

“Hi Matt

I’ve been checking out your blog and its awesome! The tutorials on conversion optimisation have really helped my company.

We’ve just created a really interesting infographic about how to improve Click Through Rates with ads. You can check it out here….

It would be great if you could offer us some feedback and if you like it pleasefeel free to reference it with a link from one of your own up-coming blog articles.

ThanksWill”

Content/Blogging Strategy

- This doesn’t have to be expensive

- Find up and coming bloggers who will create content pieces for free

- Turn industry research statistics into infographics, use people per hour

- Ask bloggers/journalists what kind of content they’d be interested to link to then go away and create it

Content Ideas- Base content pieces on what is most likely to achieve links, engagement

and traffic

- Goal here is get content positioned at the top of Google for high traffic search query

- Process:1. Use Ubersuggest to find Google suggestions for associated keywords

2. Import to Google Adwords keyword planner to find keyword volumes

3. Check Google Trends data

4. Search terms in Buzzsumo - will serve up associated sucessful content that can be reverse engineered and developed upon

Content Ideas

Ubersuggest

Adwords Planner Google Trends

Buzzsumo

Converting a visitor - A visitor that finds your content piece should be encouraged to opt-in to

an email form, like/share the page or tweet

- Email notify them with future blog articles

- Funnel the visitor to a paid area

- Track their cookie and retarget to them

SEMRush Software Reverse Engineer your competitors keyword performance, see what content offers them traffic, assess their PPC keyword targets

Google no longergives info on keywordsearches for organicclick-throughs

By looking at what keywords your competitors pay for, get insight in to best performers

Optimise SEO campaigns for these keywords

Thanks