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.

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.

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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.

I’ve been teaching email marketing to professionals for more than 15 years and have been an email marketer for over 20 years.   We’ve seen email marketing go through many trends over the years; email sending platforms have come and gone.  We’ve seen emphases on improving deliverability, building subscriber lists, generating personalized content, and now marketing automation.  Through all of the trends, one thing has remained constant though; the need to communicate well and to incentivize the customer to respond.  That requires good, if not great, copy.

However I feel copy is the one area marketers seem to compromise on the most in the “cram it out,” busy marketing calendar. It’s often left to a product manager to direct the copy, and the focus will be on product features…not necessarily on benefits. Then the marketing department slams it into an email template, and it’s gone.  With little pause to think about whether the copy really answered the prospect’s questions, or told them something in a way that would soothe their buying anxieties.

Are Marketing Automation Templates Tempting Marketers to Go Too Fast?

To make the situation even worse, email marketing templates make it too easy to mindlessly copy and paste copy to fit the template.  The email marketer thinks they’ve done their job if they have the headline fit the banner just right, and there are just the right number of sentences and bullet points to fit the template copy area.  But did anyone stop to think if the headline made the prospect feel better about choosing your product over the competition? Or if the bullet points answered their need for time savings and convenience?  Probably not, because the emphasis is on the template and the schedule, not on the need to write copy that gives the prospect motivation to buy your product.

Stop….And Think about What Your Recipient Needs to Know about Your Product

The best book I’ve read on advertising is the timeless tome, “Ogilvy on Advertising”, by David Ogilvy. In the book he says, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”  And he was right.  You need to give a consumer a real reason to consider to buy your product and not the competition.  Mere slogans and soundbites won’t do it.

Ann Handley said in her book, “Everybody Writes,” “To me, the thing that’s most important in marketing today is the idea of empathy. I would even go so far as to call it pathological empathy. You’ve really got to focus relentlessly on the recipient.”

Good writing requires us to have empathy for our audience, their situation, their needs, their goals. That means you have to meet people where they are, with an attitude of benevolence and largesse, to help them find answers to their problems. This starts with understanding the Six Universal Buying Motives. Then write customer-centric copy that addresses their problems.

The Six Universal Buying Motives

Listing product features may convey information, but it may not persuade the consumer to buy. Why?  The feature may not help them relate the product to their problem or fear. You need to do that for them by turning the feature into a benefit that fits into their motive for buying.

People have six universal buying motives:

1. Desire for gain (usually financial)
2. Fear of loss (again, usually financial)
3. Comfort and convenience
4. Security and protection
5. Pride of ownership
6. Satisfaction of emotion

Every feature of every product or service you sell should be communicated to answer one of the six universal buying motives. And if it doesn’t, then you should reconsider the product or the feature.

How does that translate to B2B products?

1. Desire for gain (usually financial)
   =career advancement, better performance reviews
2. Fear of loss (again, usually financial)
   =job security, avoidance of unpleasant surprises
3. Comfort and convenience
   =less late hours, fewer angry users/bosses
4. Security and protection
   =systems work as they are supposed to do
5. Pride of ownership
   =taking credit for a new and better solution
6. Satisfaction of emotion
   =elegant systems that make the enterprise work better

How does that translate to B2C products?

1. Desire for gain (usually financial)
   =more money, financial security
2. Fear of loss (again, usually financial)
   =accidents & disasters, health problems, job security
3. Comfort and convenience
   =quick delivery, easy assembly
4. Security and protection
   =safe travel, secure home
5. Pride of ownership
   =newest solution, fashionable, trendy
6. Satisfaction of emotion
   =family is happy with your choices/decisions

How Much Affect Does More Effective Email Copy Have on Response Rates?

Using the six universal buying motives as your guide, take your list of features and relate them to a benefit that answers a buying motive.  That becomes the building blocks of the most persuasive and effective email copy possible.  You may wonder how much impact this approach may have on email response rates?  We have been hired to re-write many sets of nurture emails where we could test our re-written, buying-motive-optimized copy against older, control copy and clients have reported results ranging in 25% – 100% improvement in open and click-to-open (CTO) rates.  Why?  We answered the prospects’ most pressing fears and buying anxieties very quickly in the copy, and made them feel confident in the choice of our client’s product.

Let’s review a few examples of emails that were written with the buyer’s motives in mind.  The first two  are from the Beasley Direct and Online Marketing portfolio, and the last one I found searching Google for email examples and thought it was clever.

Examples of Buying-Motive-Optimized Copy

Heat Software: This email was sent to IT directors who are usually given limited budget and headcount, and yet have a lot of constituents at their company to keep happy.  So when the internet or computers go down, they need a fast way to resolve problems.  This email focuses the headline copy on the needs of the busy, overworked IT director by helping them see how Heat Software helps them get fast incident resolution, eliminate roadblocks, and clear their desk without adding headcount. The supporting bullets focus on lower cost, clearing backlogs, faster resolution and user satisfaction…all buying motives for the harried IT director who needs to solve problems fast and cost-effectively.

Netcash: This email was sent to consumers who were profiled to be pre-approved via their credit score for a cash loan. If they are in a situation to need a loan, they usually need it fast, with no hassle. The headline copy emphasizes that cash is instantly available. The body copy tells them how quick and easy it is to get the money. Copy in the sidebar emphasizes their status is APPROVED and the cash is available IMMEDIATELY, all satisfying the buying motives of a consumer who might be in need of a fast loan.

JCrew: I found this email sample searching on Google for email examples and I’m putting this email example in just for fun. No, people really don’t “need” candy bars. But they do want candy bars…and they’d rather have a full size than a half size. This headline does a fun job of answering a human need for more value and does it in a fun way. It also peaks the curiosity on what other treats might be waiting for them, because let’s face it, we like treats, not tricks. I love the whole concept of this email and the way they communicate a sale in way that makes folks feel like they’ll get twice the value.

All of these examples show copy that was thoughtfully written to communicate product features or concepts that presented value, and answered human buying motives at every moment throughout the email presentation. The email showed empathy toward their needs and situations and brought the reader over to the product or company’s side, and inspired them to act because they were convinced the marketer had something of real value for them. The reward for this thoughtful approach to email copywriting can be significant with increases in open and click-through rates of 25% to 100%. So the next time you’re tempted to slap copy into the email template and call it a day, take a step back and ask yourself: Does my copy answer the universal buying motives of my audience? If it doesn’t, take an extra day to re-write the copy to answer your prospects’ questions and motives in your copy. Your prospects will reward you with paying more attention to you with more opens, clicks, and conversions…isn’t that what email marketing is really all about?

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

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 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

• EMAIL MARKETING SERVICES
• CUSTOM EMAIL TEMPLATE DESIGN
• EMAIL CAMPAIGN DESIGN
• EMAIL COPYWRITING
• EMAIL DELIVERABILITY SERVICES
• MARKETING AUTOMATION SERVICES
• MARKETING AUTOMATION AUDIT
• MOBILE OPTIMIZED EMAIL

Email Campaign Design

Today’s email campaign design professional must also be a skilled problem-solver—specifically, dealing with the problem of hybrid viewership. Your audience moves seamlessly from desktop/laptop to mobile devices; according to IDC, 49% of emails are now opened on a smartphone. This means as an email design agency we must apply best practices to make sure your email is effective no matter where it is viewed.

Whenever possible, Beasley will recommend a mobile aware or responsive email design (in which the elements of your email shift to adapt to the platform) to optimize response from both desktop and mobile viewers. We also optimize the use of HTML text (which is always rendered) and make sure that images which might be blocked by Outlook or Android devices are placed so they don’t interfere with the legibility of the message.

These technical design strategies are in addition to traditional direct response design skills which present a powerful and visually appealing message in a way that involves the audience. Even with shifting design elements, we are able to guide eye flow so your prospect is never confused about your message or offer. We do this while honoring your design or brand conventions as well. Contact a Beasley email designer today; we are your professional email design agency.

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Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching a live online email marketing workshop for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California.

Improving Email Marketing Response Rates: Winning email marketing strategies for acquiring and retaining customers

(Friday, November 30, 2018. 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

Email marketing requires immense effort to make it work effectively these days. Small (or large) creative and strategic missteps can cost you dearly in your response rate. You need to have all of your bases covered in terms of creative, list and engagement strategies.

This class presents winning email marketing strategies for acquiring and retaining customers in a world of crowded email inboxes and mobile viewers. We’ll talk about best practices for email copy, design, and implementation. We’ll cover offer strategies, writing winning subject lines, which day of the week to send and frequency, and how to design emails for mobile using responsive design. The class lays out a complete strategy on how to build your engagement score by implementing onboarding and engagement playbooks. We’ll also discuss strategies to improve your deliverability and how to avoid spam filters. Learn more.

About the DMAnc (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

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. We provide 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. We help clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and are privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go here.

Get a Free Reverse Sales Funnel Audit! Learn more here.

The post Join Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., in a Live Online “Improving Email Marketing Response Rates” Workshop appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The dissatisfaction came in three major areas:

1. Lack of customer/technical support.
2. Complexity of the product for new team members to learn.
3. And, a lack of adaptation to mobile/responsive email templates.

I’d like to explore all three of these complaint areas for a few minutes. But first a disclaimer that I will compare the complaints I’ve catalogued across all email sending platforms whether they be an ESP or an MA platform. I will not get into the differences between using an ESP vs. MA. That’s for another time.

Lack of customer/technical support was the major complaint of 2017

Many email sending platforms, like IBM Watson and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which contains both ExactTarget and Pardot), have removed the option to call in to talk to a live customer or technical support person when you have a problem. You are asked to either fill out a support ticket or interact with a community. That puts the onus on you to frame your question just right, or you’ll get a bogus answer from either. The community usually responds within 24 hours, however you could be left hanging with a big problem for several hours until someone does answer. I predict that email sending platforms that do offer live, 24/7 customer/technical support, like the relative newcomer, Adestra, will begin to steal market share from the other ESPs.

The inability to quickly onboard new email marketing team members was the second major complaint of 2017

I noticed my clients taking a critical eye to the time/complexity it takes to train new email marketing automation team members. Training time is a real cost to the company and affects the ability to quickly replace or expand staff. Some Marketing Automation platforms are so sophisticated and complex, like Oracle Responsys, that you’re almost forced to outsource the usage of it, or at least recruit very specifically for talent with experience using it — which is a limited talent pool. I see clients opting for less complex marketing automation tools, such as Pardot or Hubspot, which have reasonably good training and on-boarding programs and seem to be easier for newbies to learn. They are also more economical for those who don’t need all of the Oracle-like sophisticated features, and who need more basic campaign setup, scoring and nurturing.

I also envision more outsourcing of email marketing operations to agencies, like Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., because the labor market will become increasingly more constrained and finding talent (even worldwide) will become more difficult.

You’d think all email sending and marketing automation platforms would support mobile/responsive design. They don’t.

The third major complaint we heard was with platforms not supporting responsive design very well. We’ve re-designed most of our client’s emails to be mobile/responsive, however not all of their email systems have adapted perfectly well to the demands this places on the email sending platform. For instance for one client, their Constant Contact email system would not allow us to drop in a new two-column email template that would re-stack into one column on mobile. Constant Contact does have hard-coded templates that do re-stack, but the client didn’t like any of them. The inability to use your own email creative is very frustrating. We wound up moving the email template over to Vertical Response to test it, just to make sure it wasn’t our code. It worked perfectly there.

With 2018 there will be big changes to market share for email sending and marketing automation platforms. We envision Adestra will steal market share from IBM Watson and ExactTarget (part of IBM Marketing Cloud) because of their live 24/7 support. We project Pardot and Hubspot to supplant Marketo and Oracle for their easier training and staffing. And, tools like Constant Contact will need to up their game or be replaced by upper tier tools who fully support responsive design.

If you need helping choosing or running your Email Sending or Marketing Automation platforms, we can help. Contact us today.

Read about creating email templates here.

The post Why we are Predicting a Major Shake-up in Email Sending and Marketing Automation Platforms for 2018 appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Laurie Beasley and David Beasley, Owners of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., will be teaching two live online Email Marketing Classes for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California (DMAnc.org). The courses will run on Friday mornings, September 8 and 15, 2017 10:00AM-12:00PM Pacific. These courses can be taken ala carte or as part of an online marketing certification offered by the DMAnc. For more info on certification, go here.

Laurie Beasley’s course on September 8, 2017 is titled: Email Marketing Fundamentals: Copy, design, and list strategies for success. For more information, or to register go here.

David Beasley’s course on September 15, 2017 is titled Advanced Email Marketing: Making your email deliverable and how to use email sending platforms and Marketing Automation to your best advantage. For more information, or to register go here.

About us:

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. (www.BeasleyDirect.com) 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, 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.

About DMAnc (DMAnc.org): The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

For More Information, Contact:

Laurie Beasley
President
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
408-782-0046 x21
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

The post Live Online Email Marketing Classes to be Taught by Laurie and David Beasley, Owners of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.