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/

The post How the Great Resignation is Damaging Your B2B Demand Generation Campaigns—and What to Do About It appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

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.

The post Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is Selected by Cornes Technologies USA to Provide Digital Marketing Services for the Launch of their Target Simulators to North American Markets. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

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.

The post Re-thinking Sales Emails: How to Get 30 to 50% Open Rates by Wowing Your Prospects with What You Can do for Them appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

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.

The post How to Use Email Validation Services—and Understand their Results appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

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.

The post Negotiating Your Way to a Less Expensive Email Sending Platform (or other Martech tool) — Thanks to COVID 19 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com .

About Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is the local version of the American City Business Journals (ACBJ), which is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 43 business publications across the country reaching more than 3.6 million readers each week. They also offer specialty publications for sports fans, sports business readers and classic car enthusiasts.

Is your Digital Marketing initiative failing? Beasley’s professional marketing team can help. Start with a free SEO audit of your company’s website. Sign up here.

By Laurie B. Beasley

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A marketing automation audit is an objective third-party evaluation of your Marketo and/or Pardot (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) instance. The purpose is to know how well they are working with your salesforce automation software to achieve your lead and sales pipeline goals. Marketing automation audits can reveal many aspects of underutilization or lack of staff training that, when fixed, can make a radical improvement in your company sales pipeline and measurement. Remember, marketing automation audits aren’t just for the marketing department’s benefit. It’s for the sales department too. It’s your best first line of defense to diagnose and troubleshoot lead quality, and fix scoring and reporting issues.

We recently completed audits for two companies and found two completely different sets of results and issues. Surprisingly, a major tech company using Marketo for six years was using fewer features and functions than most companies that have used it for only 12 months. We began to train their staff on new features to organize, segment and track campaigns. And with further analysis of the data, we found we could save them $60,000 per year on their Marketo contract renewal through some pretty simple data cleanup. Wow!

And for the other audit—a smaller healthcare device company that was using Pardot for three years—we found a surprisingly organized set up. However it was paired with an inexperienced demand generation specialist in desperate need of training. The result was management’s unfulfilled desire to score and nurture new leads. We set out to fix these things immediately.

Changes that can precipitate a marketing automation audit

Many company changes can precipitate the need for a marketing automation audit. The following are five of the most common we come across.

Five good reasons to initiate a marketing automation audit:

• 3-6 months prior to renewal of your Pardot or Marketo instance (and for major MarTech tools)—to review structure and costs
• A top admin leaves (or high turnover in demand gen staff)—to smooth out transition period
• New CMO and/or Director of Demand Gen – to give a good analysis of the current install and what needs to change
• Need to benchmark progress (i.e. have follow-up audits every 6-12 months)
• Need an objective way to separate operational issues from sales & marketing issues

The value of an objective 3rd party audit can be in several areas and often pays for itself in cost savings with renewals:

• Helps budgeting and planning for:
• MarTech stack
• Demand gen staff & vendors
• Training and organizational alignment
• Helps uncover hidden issues such as:
• Missing MarTech tools
• Underutilized or incorrectly utilized features
• Lead leakage / loss and bottlenecks
• Data that can be eliminated (and thus not included in renewal)
• Helps analyze the meaning of the findings
• View data with fresh eyes to point out obvious patterns
• Share relevant “lessons learned” from other orgs

The four major areas marketing automation audits cover

A marketing automation audit typically covers four critical areas of analysis: contact management, data health, governance and campaign management. We will explore each of these areas below.

1. Contact Management

Goals

• To troubleshoot known issues in Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation transfer of leads or values
• To identify inconsistencies or gaps in current lead management
• To define standards and rules for form creation and back end processing
• To document Pardot/Marketo to salesforce automation sync (current state and post-fix)
• Document any 3rd party connection synch processes

Focus

• Use of forms (type, consistency)
• Form field capture, and back end form processing (hidden fields, UTMs etc)
• Lead routing workflows and salesforce integration
• Lead statuses triggered or converting as expected
• Lead scoring (document profile / behavior score system)
• Review Prospect, Account, and Opportunity field mapping
• Review use of progressive profiling
• Review Pardot tagging strategy

2. Data Health and Gap Analysis

Goals

• To capture current state and provide a benchmark for judging data health e.g.
• Active database
• Marketable database
• To define standards and rules for field mapping
• Make initial recommendations for data normalization (e.g. US, United States, USA should all be US)
• Make initial recommendation for list segmentation

Focus

• Database size
• Marketable %
• Unresponsive data / junk data / duplication
• # and % of unsubscribed
• # and % of opted in contacts (with opt in date)
• # of fields, default / custom fields, field values, and field type
• Audit lists (document, size, last used)
• % of duplicate records
• CANSPAM, GDPR, etc. validation and recommendation
• Create list of top 20 values in each field to support normalization

3. Usage and Governance

Goals

• To recommend new standards if necessary
• To ensure compliance with data privacy rules&emdash;as appropriate by region/country, etc…
• To apply more controls as to Pardot/Marketo usage
• Verify email deliverability

Focus

• Review Naming convention and folder hierarchy
• Check for Explicit opt in management
• Review Current users and permission levels
• Review and recommend tag normalization
• Document and recommend archiving of lists, templates, forms, campaigns, etc…
• Test deliverability to ensure the domain is not identified by Spam blockers
• Inventory and review all email and landing page assets

4. Campaign and Nurture

Goals

• To identify what ‘clean out’ efforts are needed
• To make it easier to see what’s active or not
• To support better practices around template use

Focus

• Document a full list of all Pardot/Marketo assets: forms, landing pages, templates, campaigns, and engagement streams
• Current status of all assets (archived, draft, active, not in use)
• % of duplicate records
• Troubleshoot email and landing page templates

An audit will result in a report on each of these areas and a set of observations for good findings and areas that need fixing.

Small changes often yield big results. Big changes yield even bigger results

Every marketing automation audit we’ve conducted has yielded a different set of issues and the fixes needed. We often rank the fixes needed in order of priority and help the client to determine the tradeoffs or benefits gained for investing in them. Even small data cleanups can yield big cost savings, and significantly improve lead quality. Bigger investments in fixing nurture streams and lead scoring can yield big results in ushering better leads filling the pipeline – something that will surely warm the heart of marketing and sales alike. Because the marketing automation audit isn’t just for marketing, it’s for sales too. They have a vested in interest in what is being pushed over to the salesforce automation system, and a marketing automation audit is your best first defense to ensure better quality leads get there.

Need a marketing automation audit? Contact us for a free consultation.

By Laurie B. Beasley

The post Five Good Reasons to Get an Objective Third Party Audit of Your Marketing Automation System appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Laurie Beasley, president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be an opening speaker at B2B Expo in Los Angeles, October 2, 2019.  The topic will be “Meeting Maker Marketing Campaigns: How to Connect Sales with Anyone”.  In this session, Ms. Beasley is going to discuss an approach to Account Based Marketing (ABM) that can land your sales team appointments with virtually any key decision maker. She’ll share how to incentivize prospects into WANTING to get on the phone for a demo or sales appointment. And walk you through a marketing campaign that integrates dimensional direct mail, tele-prospecting, email, and social touches to deliver record numbers of demo appointments for a major software company.  Her session will be right after the first keynotes at 10:15 on Wednesday, October 2, 2019.

For free tickets and event info for B2B Marketing Expo go here.

About Laurie Beasley

LAURIE B. BEASLEY is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., which provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, marketing automation management, and database management for both B2B and B2C companies. Ms. Beasley serves as president and online marketing certification instructor for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. She also speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for several marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, and AMA.

Is your email marketing nurture campaign failing? Our email marketing team can help. Contact us now.

The post Laurie Beasley, President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., Will be an Opening Speaker at B2B Marketing Expo in Los Angeles, October 2, 2019 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

I remember the first time as a young marketing manager at a software company in the 1980’s we were given an email account to communicate with our co-workers. It was text only, kludgey, and the very foundation of email inbox systems we use today. The first email sending platforms in the 1990s only allowed text emails, and in those days email marketing often had 50-75% click-through rates. That seemed like the golden age of email marketing from a response and simplicity standpoint. Emails were easy to set up. Copy was clean and clear. We’ve come a long way since then by adding images, personalization, and dynamic content to emails. But, with the complexity we may have taken away from clean design and clarity of message. However, we may be coming “full circle,” returning to a simpler, cleaner and more text oriented design for email nurture. We’ll explore the reasons why in this article.

Simpler may be better…for a lot of reasons

The trend back to a more text-oriented design for emails started a couple of years ago, but I’ve noticed it gain huge momentum in the past six months. There a number of possible reasons for this. Text emails are:

• Mobile compatible (not a lot of big images taking up viewport area)
• Fast to execute
• Feel authentic (like a real person is writing/sending them)
• Easy for a busy person to get through

Huge proponents of these types of emails are Ann Handley, of Marketing Profs, Ryan Deiss of Digital Marketer, and even LinkedIn and Marketo have gotten into the swing. Check out the latest nurture email I just received from LinkedIn this week. Very simple text explaining new company page features. It has a text link with no button! They leave the images and video out of the email and put them on a very well done landing page.

Example text email nurture from LinkedIn. All text, no logo, and no buttons.

The biggest motivation might be mobile

Designing emails for mobile compatibility can be a huge struggle to get everything you want to say in the first view/scroll area. Big images, or any images for that matter, can push your main message too far down and get in the way of what you’re trying to accomplish with nurture messaging. That’s why I think many brands are moving away from images, big logos and big buttons on their nurtures and moving to a more text-oriented, clean approach to email design. That approach looks great on desktop and mobile.

Less to program means faster to execute

A text oriented email means you have less to program. You don’t have to over-engineer the email with responsive design and @media commands. It can be a single-column, albeit narrower mobile aware design done in simple HTML or a template that almost anyone in the marketing department can manage.

Text feels more authentic

There is a big push in marketing for brands to feel more authentic to their customers. There’s nothing more authentic than a personal note or letter. Many marketers are having their email nurtures signed by assigned account reps and if their name is going on it, it better feel like it’s coming from them with a more personal note rather than a splashy promotional email.

Text emails are easy for the reader to get through

The competition for eyes and readership in the inbox is huge. You’re better off if you’re known as the brand that “gets to the point fast.” Or at least fast and in an interesting way. Ann Handley of Marketing Profs writes very entertaining emails, but more than that she gets her point across fast without a lot of visual hoopla. So if you’re cruising through your inbox and want to see the latest course details or find out what’s on Ann’s ever curious mind, boom you can usually get through her emails in 5 to 10 seconds.

MarketingProfs emails are clean, simple and easy to get through.

Even the big boys, like Marketo, are thinking that simple text is better. Check out this email nurture example. It’s an invite to a webinar on artificial intelligence and personalization. They chose good old, simple text to get this invite out the door. Not much foo-foo in this email. And honestly, I didn’t need more than what they put in that one sentence to know whether I wanted to attend the webinar. We were both served well by the simplicity and brevity.

Marketo chose a very simple text email note to promote an upcoming webinar.

Less is more…response

The return to text email style is supported by the fact that even outside of marketing, workers are struggling to simplify communications with popular productivity tools like Slack that are simple text-oriented communications. Going back to our email roots may also revive our response rates. If our email readers know that they can get the stuff they need quickly and easily from our emails, then they may be more likely to open them. This is being tested by many, and I believe will bear out meaningful results in increasing open and click-through rates. And in the words of the poet Robert Browning, “less is more.”

Is your email marketing nurture campaign failing? Our email marketing team can help. Contact us now.

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

The post How Using Good Old Fashioned Plain Text Emails May Become the “New” Email Nurture Tactic appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Listen to the Podcast now:

Most email programs are failing, dismal, weak and ineffective says Laurie Beasley. Failure is usually the result of poor copy writing (subject line and body) that leads to low opening rates and truncated sales.

The B2B buyer and consumer are not stupid, she says (quoting David Ogilvy).

In this podcast Laurie reminds us of the Six Universal Buying Motives which, when used religiously will lead to higher opening rates and more qualified prospects.

Managing email marketing technology has its daily challenges she believes, which take up a lot of the creative effort for email programs. We must return, she says to the benefits of product features and the reasons why people buy. She implores copywriters to think about what the prospect’s perspective is and not what the product managers and engineers have surmised.

These six universal buying motives are also covered in her blog: Improving Email Copy and Response Rates by Incorporating the Six Universal Buying Motives (SLMA).

About Laurie Beasley

LAURIE B. BEASLEY is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., which provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, marketing automation management, and database management for both B2B and B2C companies. Ms. Beasley serves as president and online marketing certification instructor for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. She also speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for several marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, and AMA.

Need help with your email marketing? Review our email marketing and marketing automation service offerings here.

Find more case studies and white papers at https://beasleydirect.com/resources/white-papers

The post Incorporating the Six Universal Buying Motives to Improve Email Copy and Response Rates SLMA Podcast With Laurie Beasley appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.