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This high employee turnover is not only a headache for employers, but also a big concern for B2B marketers trying to reach decision makers in companies who aren’t there anymore!  Some may have dismissed the “Great Resignation” as only a problem in entry level positions in retail or entertainment, but it is reaching far into high tech, healthcare, and manufacturing and squarely at middle management and above, where the majority of B2B demand generation campaigns are targeted.

How the Great Resignation Could Have a Devastating Effect on Your Demand Generation Campaigns—But You Can Start to Fix this Now

This will begin to negatively affect your B2B demand generation campaigns in several ways:

1. With increasingly poor email deliverability, from bounced (undeliverable email addresses).
2. Wasted sales team efforts in trying to follow up on leads that are no longer at the company.
3. Disrupted decision making teams in companies. You could have been close to a sale in an account and voila 2 of the 5 key decision makers have left. You will need to navigate into the company all over again in a few months to find out who the new decision makers are.

All of the issues above are reflections of B2B data quality issues created by this unprecedented employee turnover.  These data quality issues will begin to negatively affect the number of marketing and sales qualified leads you have in your marketing automation system, and maybe even the open opportunities in your CRM.  It could have a devastating effect on your sales pipeline for the next two quarters if efforts are not taken to stop the data hemorrhage now.

How to Fix the B2B Demand Generation Problems Caused by the Great Resignation

The first step in addressing the problem is to acknowledge there are significant financial risks to not addressing it immediately.  The second step is to recognize it will take marketing budget to fix it.  In my experience, marketing data cleansing has been the most underfunded aspect of marketing. There always seems to be lots of shinier marketing tech stack things to spend marketing budget on, rather than good quality data.

I recommend several steps be taken immediately:

1. Analyze the data deprecation rate (ie the rate at which you are getting email hard bounces, etc). This will give you a sense of how fast your company database is aging and help you to talk to vendors about how much data cleansing you need on a monthly basis.
2. Get help. Bring vendors on board who can interface with your CRM and continually cleanse your marketing data.
3. Get more help. Cleansing your current data isn’t enough to keep up and probably not enough to keep ahead of your demand generation goals.  Your database will fall behind if all you do is try to correct your current data.  People are moving jobs at too quick of a pace.  You are going to need to identify, profile, and target key accounts more aggressively than ever before.
4. Have a strategy to reach remote workers. 74 percent of workers say that having a remote work opportunity would make them less likely to leave a company, and 64 percent of recruiters report that being able to pitch a work-from-home policy helps them find high-quality talent.⁽²⁾ They are an elusive bunch that are hard for data companies to find their email addresses and even harder to find their phone numbers. You need to get them to come to you with very good content programs. Use content networks to your best advantage, test using social media advertising on networks such as LinkedIn, and by all means optimize your SEO so that when they’re looking for a solution on their own, they’ll find you.

We predict you’ll need to spend a higher proportion of your marketing budget on data cleansing, content programs and SEO than you ever have in past years to keep up with your target’s job changes and lure them to find you. Hopefully what you’ll find on the prospect’s side is happier employees who will stay at their next job for a while, but maybe not, so keep the data cleansing going!

Need help with your b2b list or SEO? Contact us!

Written by Laurie Beasley

¹ “19 Employee Retention Statistics That Will Surprise you (2021)”; Apollo Technical; July 30, 2021; https://apollotechnical.com/employee-retention-statistics/

² Steward, Jack; “The Ultimate List Of Remote Work Statistics for 2021”; Findstack; September 21, 2021; https://findstack.com/remote-work-statistics/

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About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is a full service direct and online marketing agency serving both B2B and B2C clients. Our goal is to help clients measure their campaigns and achieve the lowest cost per lead or sale through relentless analysis and optimization. Inbound marketing services include search engine optimization (SE0), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, and website design. Outbound marketing services include email marketing and marketing automation, direct mail, list rental, and tele-prospecting services.

About Bindex

Bindex is the new gold standard for first-level osteoporosis diagnostics. In seconds, this small, portable, hand-held scanner uses safe pulse-echo ultrasound to deliver bone density results to any laptop, with 90% accuracy comparable to DXA. This revolutionary device has already screened over 2.5 million patients in the U.S. and 19 patents in the U.S., China, Japan and major EU countries.

Written by Laurie Beasley

Are you launching a new medical device? Our experienced medical device marketing team can help you reach your branding and lead generation goals. Contact us now.

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Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is a full service direct and online marketing agency serving both B2B and B2C clients. Our goal is to help clients measure their campaigns and achieve the lowest cost per lead or sale through relentless analysis and optimization. Inbound marketing services include search engine optimization (SE0), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, and website design. Outbound marketing services include email marketing and marketing automation, direct mail, and tele-prospecting services.

About Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is the Silicon Valley version of the American City Business Journals (ACBJ), which is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 44 websites and 64 business publications across the country reaching more than 10 million readers each week. They also offer specialty publications for sports fans, sports business readers and classic car enthusiasts.

Written by Laurie Beasley

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About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is a full service direct and online marketing agency serving both B2B and B2C clients. Our goal is to help clients measure their campaigns and achieve the lowest cost per lead or sale through relentless analysis and optimization. Inbound marketing services include search engine optimization (SE0), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, and website design. Outbound marketing services include email marketing and marketing automation, direct mail, list rental, and tele-prospecting services.

About Cornes Technologies USA/Microwave Factory

Cornes Technologies’ Microwave Factory Company is excited to announce the introduction of their RTS series of Radar Target Simulators to North American markets. Radar target simulation for testing autonomous vehicle navigation and other ADAS applications is not new. The Microwave Factory Company, with headquarters in Yokohama Japan, has been providing the RTS platform to leading Japanese automobile manufacturers for some time. According to Microwave Factory Company Vice President of Marketing, Masanori Sakurai, “our RTS platform has been well received within the Japanese markets. Given the global nature of today’s automotive technology markets, we have received strong demand from our Japanese customers’ foreign R&D teams in the US to offer and support the platform outside Japan.”

The RTS technology developed within Microwave Factory Company’s R&D center on the campus of Takushoku University is broadly applicable to meet the needs of automotive radar testing globally and offers a unique performance/price point for customers’ integrating their own multi-sensor test systems and software. Evaluation systems are now available out of the Northern California office. To learn more about the RTS Target Simulator from Cornes Technologies’ Microwave Factory Company, http://cornestech.com/microwave-factory-test-systems/#RTS or email them at Cornes Technologies USA for a demonstration of the RTS platform.

Written by Laurie Beasley

Are you launching a new high-technology product? We have experienced high-tech marketing specialists who can meet your lead generation goals. Request a free consultation now.

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As a small business owner, I receive ten to twenty prospect emails a day from salespeople trying to schedule a meeting. I ignore most of them—or worse—despise the lack of effort most salespeople put into them. They bore me with uninspiring subject lines, meeting requests with no reason for why I should want to meet with them; and they send the same email over and over, week after week. When was the last time any of them wowed me? Or made me think their solution could really make my job easier? Hardly ever!

That’s because very few substantiate what they could do for me or what they’ve done for others in a quick and easy read. It’s time to re-think sales emails from merely a “reach out to schedule a meeting” effort to a fight for the right to be heard. How do you earn that right? By validating what you can do for me, and by backing up that claim with a verifiable source or case study. Then writing an email presenting that information in a succinct and convincing manner.

Fighting for the right to be heard starts with hard data and a verifiable source

Before you start work on your sales email flow, take inventory of the stor(ies) you have to tell and the proof data from them that you have to present. Did your company do work for clients that can become a good case study? Create a blog, recorded webinar, or video testimonial that brings out the data points you’d like others to know about how your product works and makes companies successful. Those content assets become the foundation for your next sales email series. Remember it’s one thing to say something about yourself and your company, but it’s a whole lot more believable when someone else says it about you.

The next step is to map the proof points to your audience and make sure you are talking about things that matter to them. For instance, a CIO and CFO may be interested in the same product, but for different reasons, but they both sign off on the budget for the purchase. So be sure you’re presenting data and proof points in emails to them that have information relevant to their priorities.

The final step is writing the sales email. Three factors affect email results and in this order 1) quality of the list 2) offer 3) copy/creative. We discussed the content offer and the target audience above and so now we’re down to the actual copywriting. Let me put it kindly. You can’t be boring, and you can’t be long about it.

Good sales emails start with a subject line that helps the prospect know what you can do for them, usually by alluding to what you’ve done for others. This brings a validated proof point right to the forefront of the discussion and gets them interested in learning more.

You can help them get even more interested in reading or viewing the case study by bringing up more data points of money/time/cycles you saved a client in bullet points in the copy, while blending in subtle messaging about your product as the solution. And by engendering that level of credibility and interest you might even get some replies back asking for a meeting. We recently re-wrote a series of emails for a technology client for their IT titles in financial services target. By focusing on financial client case studies and proof points we got on average a 42% open rate, 11% click to open, and .8% asked for a meeting or a free trial.

Beyond the convincing, proof driven, content we have the following advice to offer you in writing sales emails:

• Personalization is a key priority in text emails.
• Subject lines should be as brief as possible—ideally 50 characters or less.
• The first three lines of an email need to reflect subject line content.
• The email should always include a content asset (case study, guide, report, etc.) as an incentive to respond. Note: “asset” is often referred to as “fulfillment piece.” This asset should be substantive and provide validating proof points for you to use as subject matter in your emails.
• The asset is always Hero. Subject line and subsequent email content should focus on the benefits that the responder or their business will enjoy by acquiring it. This requires careful consideration of an asset’s content or services—then reflecting the most important of them in the email.
• Tie in your company’s value in terms of the benefits noted in the asset.
• The less you tell the more you sell. Email content should be kept to a minimum; and content formatted for easy skimming. A couple of options:
  • Avoid exclusive use of full paragraphs of information; try using hyphens to create short, easy-to-read bulleted lists.
  • Use multiple line breaks between sections to create white space and break up content so it isn’t difficult to read.
• Calls-to-action should be prominent, as compelling as possible and kept to a minimum in terms of offerings. Giving readers multiple fulfillment options can depress response.

A Template for Putting It All into Practice

The following is copy featured in one of our client’s text sales email targeted to IT decision makers in financial firms. We changed the client name to XYZ Company for the purpose of this blog article. It follows all the above best practices noted above. Part of a campaign focusing on Payments and Fraud Prevention, the email’s content and formatting can serve as a basic template for your use:

Written by Laurie Beasley

Need help with your email content writing, lists or email marketing? Contact us.

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It is estimated that 30% of email lists turnover (become inactive) per year. Simply divide 30% by 12 months, and you will realize that upwards of 3% of your list could be deprecating each month. Sadly, a list generated from an event last week will already have some invalid email addresses. That means you need to update your email lists before you enter them into your marketing automation or email sending platform—so that you don’t negatively affect your email deliverability rate and compromise your sender reputation.

So how do you clean up lists before you load them? The best way is use an email validation service. They are easy and inexpensive (usually between .005 and .008 cents per email), and the best way to maintain the quality of the lists going into your email systems—or to validate a list you haven’t emailed in awhile (it happens!).

How to Interpret the Results of Email Validation Services

About nine different email validation services are available, and they all do approximately the same thing. They vary in their ease of loading data and understanding their reports. Here’s the ones we’re aware of in no particular order:

• Kickbox
• Snov.io
• ZeroBounce
• NeverBounce
• FindThatLead
• BriteVerify (by Validity)
• Bounceless
• Voila Norbert
• Hunter.io

The two we’re most familiar with and like a lot are NeverBounce and BritevBerify (by Validity). Once you load your list into either of these tools, you’ll almost instantly get a report showing the quality of the list. The report shows in a dashboard that gives you an idea of the list overall health, and then each email address is given a value. NeverBounce and BriteVerify have slightly different values, so we’ll talk about them separately:

NeverBounce

The dashboard report for NeverBounce looks like the image below (Figure 1). It gives you an overall report of how many emails were Valid, Accept All (Unverifiable), Unknown, Disposable, and Invalid. We explain what those values mean below.

Figure 1.

NeverBounce report dashboard.

BriteVerify (by Validity):

The dashboard report for BriteVerify looks like the image below (Figure 2). It gives you an overall report of how many emails were Valid, Invalid, Unknown or Accept All. The values are very similar but a bit simpler than NeverBounce, which we like because quite frankly the extra detail in NeverBounce results isn’t that useful. We will explain what those values mean below.

Figure 2.

Briteverify report dashboard.

What the Deliverability Values Mean for Both NeverBounce and BriteVerify

When you get your list back from either of these services an “email status” column will be added to the list giving each email a deliverability value. When we first starting using the tools, the values seemed a little confusing to us and frankly hard to get clarity from their websites, so we’ll put a definition for the values for you below to save you time and aggravation. This will guide you on which emails to keep and which ones to think about not sending … or sending very carefully.

• Valid
• A valid email address has been verified as a real email that is currently accepting mail.
• SAFE—These emails exist and have been verified for safe sending.

• Invalid
• An invalid email address has been verified as a bad recipient address that does not exist or is not accepting mail. Invalid emails will result in a bounce.
• DON’T SEND—These emails do not exist and are not safe for sending.

• Disposable
• Disposable emails are temporary accounts used to avoid using a real personal account during a sign-up process. Common providers of disposable emails include Mailinator, Guerilla Mail, AirMail, and 10 Minute Mail.
• DON’T SEND—These emails are fake or temporary emails and are not safe for sending.

• Accept All (Unverifiable)
• This is also known as a “catch all”. This is a domain-wide setting where all emails on this domain will be reported as an “accept all”. There is no definitive way to determine whether this email is valid or invalid.
• An accept all address is commonly used in small businesses to ensure a company receives any email that has been sent to them, regardless of typos. Additionally, these are also found in larger government, medical and educational organizations. Oftentimes these are in fact valid emails. However some organizations may utilize this setting as a security feature to prevent unsolicited emails.
• SAFE—If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, accept all emails may be safe for sending dependent on the overall health of your list.
• DON’T SEND—If you use a third party email provider that requires a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.

• Unknown
• We are unable to definitively determine this email’s status. This email appears to be OK, however the domain and/or server is not responding to our requests. This may be due to an issue with their internal network or expired domain names. Unknown addresses are checked up to 75 times before this result code is given.
• SAFE—If you have a dedicated email server with your own IPs, unknown emails are normally safe for sending.
• DON’T SEND—If you use a third party email provider that requires a bounce rate below 4%, these emails are not safe for sending.

The “accept all” and “unknown” emails are the two grey areas marketers struggle with the most because they can make up 10 to 15% of any given database validation effort. We’re often asked our opinion on what to do with those. The easy answer is don’t send them. The nuanced answer is you can try sending them little by little by breaking them into small bits such that if they all bounced your undeliverability rate for that email campaign would not exceed 10%. That takes some reverse math to figure out how big of an overall good deliverable email list to mix your questionable emails into. You have to decide whether it’s worth the effort and risk.

With email list verification tools like we’ve discussed here you can overcome email list churn and improve your deliverability. You might even be able to revive some lists that may have laid dormant during the pandemic and start emailing like a champ again. The tools are out there. Go for it!

by Laurie Beasley

Need help with your email lists or email marketing? Contact us.

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Crises like our current situation with COVID 19 provide the perfect cover for you to do hardline negotiation with your ESP contract renewal — or to switch to a new one. Some might say that COVID isn’t just providing cover, it’s creating NECESSITY to negotiate. There are three advantageous negotiating positions to consider: Re-assessing your needs; Fiscal tightening; Competitive bidding.

Re-assessing Your Needs Should Always Be Your First Step

Before embarking on any renewal or migration project, take a hard look at your existing email marketing programs for possible economies. Usually in email marketing, the more stuff you use, the more money you spend:

• Check to see if there are contacts you can sunset due to lack of engagement (ie haven’t engaged in last 12-18 months)
• Look at email creatives or templates that are not performing
• See if there are landing pages or templates not converting leads or sales
• Delve into deliverability problems (ask vendor what is needed to mitigate); they may suggest dedicated IP or other things that will add and not take away cost, but may be needed
• Are you paying for reporting or analytics features you are not using?
• Are you paying for segmentation, personalization or nurturing features you’re not using?

If you can remove contacts that are non-performing, creative that is not working and stop paying for features you are not using, you’ll instantly save on your next renewal or migration. But do not stop there. Negotiate hard from a position of buyer strength during the economic downturn.
 

Negotiate from a Position of Buyer Strength During the COVID Economic Downturn

Start your negotiations knowing you sit in a position of strength. The ESPs are seeing dozens if not hundreds of customers drop their service or service levels; most of them are laying off employees and are hating it; and they definitely DO NOT want to lose you.

But it is up to you to tell them you are not rolling over on the renewal, and that you want them to show you their best numbers. And even when they show you their best numbers, be skeptical and hard pressing. Tell them you want them to work harder, and that your company is facing a hard quarter (it likely is); and that the boss is looking over your shoulder (they are). Also, a little hint: keep inching your negotiations closer to the end of the month, and even better to the end of the quarter. Sales organizations live and die by their monthly and quarterly sales numbers, and they will fall on even sharper swords at those crucial times to make a deal. Take full advantage of that.

Make sure you are bidding apples to apples. Not bananas to gorillas. One technique that is very sneaky among ESPs is how they package their pricing into bundles, so that it is hard to find bidding equivalency among them. Do not let them do it. Make them tell you their pricing in your terms. Give them your bidding criteria, ie X # annual email sends, X # of email creatives, X # of landing pages, X # of contacts hosted, segmentation criteria, etc. Then create a spreadsheet or a grid and then cost comparisons become easy.

TIP: If you’re a non-profit, ask for their non-profit rate. Some offer a 10-15% discount. Others will honor that if they know the other guy is offering it.

They Expect Competitive Bidding, So Do Not Disappoint Them

Once they have provided their pricing, pit them against each other. Don’t show them your grid, but tell them the price you want them to meet. If the sales rep is having trouble getting his boss to swallow it, then you can forward the bid from the competitor to them. That will usually do it. And when you have one or two vendors of equivalent capabilities and pricing narrowed down, tell them you are having trouble making a decision and a further 10% discount would tip the scale.

What to Do When Your ESP Contract Is Settled and You’ve Moved In?

In our experience, once you have your ESP in place and deliverability is acceptable, the one thing that makes the biggest impact on improving email performance is the list, offer and the copy, in that order. The list is a foundational issue of instituting a good opt-in system, welcome email and a plan for engaging emails throughout the lifecycle of a subscriber. The offer is the product or the content … is it what people want? But very importantly are you describing them in a way that motivates people to read and act? We have worked on email marketing campaigns for more than 100 companies. Re-writing their sales, prospect and nurture campaigns made the biggest material difference in improving their campaign’s performance. Invest in good copy. Do not make it the last item in the production line that isn’t given enough time to do it or your customer justice. Negotiate hard with yourself on that one, and it will pay out spades in the future.

By Laurie Beasley
Co-Founder and President
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Need help with your next email marketing campaign? Contact Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., for an assessment of your campaigns and how we can help.

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Jan believes no matter the budget, startups and seasoned corporations alike need to set themselves up for marketing success. The book starts with marketing goal setting and planning, moves onto the creation of a solid foundation of online and offline sites and materials and then addresses content generation to engage a target audience with built-in campaign management and measurement functionalities.

The upshot is an undertaking that progresses from marketing efforts that are free (or nearly free) through channels that are gradually more expensive. The chapter sequence matches the stages of a new eCommerce company by covering marketing channels that cost nothing, then moving to phases attractive to bootstrapping businesses with some, but minimal funds, and finally to methods that, while they cost more, can be managed to continue to drive ROI.

If you are planning on launching or re-launching an eCommerce company, we highly recommend Jan’s book. You can purchase it now on Amazon.

By Laurie B. Beasley
Co-Founder and President
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Need help with your marketing campaigns? Contact Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. We have experience with helping small and large eCommerce businesses manage email and search marketing.

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