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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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

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Recently Laurie Beasley, President of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., and also President of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California, was interviewed by Sky Cassidy of MountainTop Data to ask her about new trends in B2B marketing. In this episode she describes a new type of campaign that is becoming very popular, often labeled “Meeting Maker Campaigns.” These are campaigns targeted at key accounts and are comprised of multiple touches that often include a dimensional direct mail campaign, email campaign and detailed tele-prospecting effort. The goal of the campaign is to schedule a 30 minute meeting or demonstration. The prospect is rewarded with a nice gift as a thank you for attending. Ms. Beasley describes a campaign she ran for a cloud services technology company last year that resulted in 230 demo appointments being scheduled from a list of 1,300 target accounts.

Listen to this podcast here to learn more.

Read a case study about executing a successful Meeting Maker Campaign here.

The post How to Create Successful Meeting Maker Campaigns — Podcast appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

A company which makes Product Management software asked us to help them re-design their email template. Their old template felt to them like it wasn’t organized well with several separate, disparate sections. It also didn’t follow mobile aware and mobile responsive email marketing best practices. We wanted to modify the template to do the following.

1. Show off their clean brand identity.
2. Make sure the imagery would appeal to their target audience.
3. Re-design the template to be more compatible with desktop and mobile viewing.
4. And, simplify the design to bring the reader down through the email.

Making the New Template Compatible with Multiple Email Browsers

Designing an email is much more complicated than designing a web page if you’re trying to make it effective on as many email browsers as possible. With a web page you only need to worry about five major internet browsers. For emails you have to worry about the display on over 13 email browsers.

This is the first thing we wanted our client to remember

In the desire to have a mobile aware and mobile responsive email, you should not forget about optimizing for desktop browsers. Especially if you’re mailing to B2B prospects like they were. Emails viewed on smartphones experience significantly less conversions than emails viewed on the desktop. We theorize that folks skim emails on mobile and actually read the emails on desktop. Therefore, they may be induced to click or buy when they read the value proposition more thoroughly.

Here’s the second thing to remember

Some desktop browsers block images by default. Including Outlook, web viewers such as Yahoo!, and mobile viewers such as Android. So if your email has multiple images in it and the recipient hasn’t manually downloaded them, they will not be seen. There will be white boxes with alt tags replacing images, just like the email example below. We don’t feel an email can be effective if the offer is obscured mostly in white boxes. Further, after optimizing client email for all browsers, including Outlook, removing and/or repositioning images, they’ve consistently seen a 1-3% increase in click through.

Should I Optimize for Outlook?

Some may wonder if Outlook is that prevalent any more. It has certainly seen a falloff in the percentage of email viewers since the introduction of smartphones. However, Outlook still has around 8% of all email views and a significant percentage of B2B viewers reading their emails on their desktops at work.

According to Litmus, the list below shows the top ten email clients. Apple iPhone, Gmail, and Apple iPad hold the top three spots. However, Outlook, Outlook.com, Yahoo!, and Android devices (all which block images by default) is 21.3% of all email readership . You certainly should want to optimize your emails for that high a percentage of email viewers!

1. Apple iPhone: 33.0%
2. Gmail: 15.8%
3. Apple iPad: 11.6%
4. Android: 10.3%
5. Apple Mail: 7.6%
6. Outlook: 6.7%
7. Yahoo! Mail: 3.0%
8. Outlook.com: 2.1%
9. Windows Live Mail: 1.3%
10. Thunderbird: 0.7%

Making the New Mobile Aware and Mobile Responsive Email Template

Our client was concerned about making their emails look good on mobile. The reason: the high percentage of emails viewed on smartphones today, per the chart above. There are two methods for making emails mobile optimized: Mobile Aware and Responsive Design.

Mobile Aware is when you make simple improvements in the design to make sure it renders well on mobile. This means starting off with a narrower email, larger text, and larger buttons so that when they shrink down to a smartphone, the screen still looks good.

Mobile Responsive Email Design is when you deliver a customized mobile experience with special design and code using media queries. Beware, not all mobile email browsers support media queries, as the chart below shows.

Source: Loren McDonald, “Email is Your Largest Mobile Channel”, IBM Marketing Cloud 

Mobile Aware and Mobile Responsive Email Design for Pardot

For our Product Management client, we wanted to make the email template as easy for multiple worldwide marketing managers to use in their Pardot system (part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud) as possible. This meant weighing the tradeoffs of the simplicity of Mobile Aware design versus the complexity of Responsive design. We didn’t anticipate the need for re-stacking of columns or eliminating elements that a typical eCommerce email might require.

This template is an event invitation, so the design didn’t need to support complex content areas. So we chose to make the new design Mobile Aware with a single column layout, making editing and testing as easy as possible. In Mobile Aware the email tends to start off narrower (about 600 pixels, vs. a 900- to 1200-pixel wide standard email design). And, it has large enough fonts and buttons so that when it scales down to a smartphone it is still very readable.

Mobile Aware Design on Devices

On desktop or laptop computers, Mobile Aware emails still fill the majority of the viewing pane and are easy to read. On tablet and mobile devices, the 600-pixel wide Mobile-scales down slightly. This is because the design anticipates the need for larger buttons and fonts. The elements are still readable and the design provides a comfortable user experience.

We also wanted to make sure that the headline was readable whether images were blocked or not, and so we moved the headline to the top. You’ll see that we made the image take up less vertical space than their original email template This allowed room for more information on the event. By using a thoughtful approach to image selection and cropping, the new size saved space while supporting the message to the audience.

The Call-to-Action (CTA)

We also made sure there were Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons in several locations in the email as someone would scroll down. We’ve observed that mobile email readers tend to click on links at the top and bottom of emails more than the middle ones. You need to be sure that actions are possible all through the email.

How to Present the Company Overview

We created a section in a box at the base of the body area to support and set apart a brief overview about the company. This allowed a reader to easily learn more without interrupting the main email message.

The Winning Results

In conclusion, by implementing mobile aware and mobile responsive email best practices we were able to create a new template worldwide marketing managers could easily use. As a result, they saved time in the creation of new email programs. By making sure all copy is scaled to be readable and images are sized appropriately for the mobile environment, we were able to improve the prospect reader’s experience. Thus, making it easier for them to register for the event.

Read more about leveraging email campaigns with direct mail here.

 

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This is a successful meeting maker campaign that includes an appeal to emotions, multiple touches, and a carefully designed offer. The call to action was to set up an appointment for Sales. We were marketing to engineers — always a tough sell because of their skepticism. We sought to persuade them to consider replacing a tried-and-true instrument with something they may not even have heard of. Our team did this not by leading with product features. Instead, we pulled on their heartstrings — reliving a recent event in which engineers were heroes because of the quality of their instruments and their work.

Background:

Anritsu’s VectorStar Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) is used to measure microwave and mm-wave frequencies in design, testing and manufacture of electronic components where extreme accuracy is required. A new model leapfrogged the competition in features and performance, providing the opportunity to generate sales leads through a multi-channel marketing campaign.

Electrical engineers (EE) are the primary audience for this campaign. They think in a methodical way and demand proof of product claims. Engineers require detailed specs and technical information to make a buying decision. They are not at all impressed by marketing copy and claims unsubstantiated by statistics.

The Challenge: Marketing to Engineers

Anritsu’s predecessor company, Wiltron, invented the modern VNA tester in the late 1950s. While Anritsu continued to improve VNA high-performance technology, several well-funded companies have entered the market and developed similar versions of Anritsu’s products, taking the lead in sheer sales order volume. We needed to get Anritsu back on our buyer’s “short list”.

Electrical engineers are process-oriented. Consequently, if they are comfortable with a tool and that tool satisfies their requirements, it’s difficult to get them to switch. VNA testers start at $100K and have a long sales cycle because they are considered a capital equipment investment.

Campaign Objective:

Our goal with the campaign was to bring Anritsu to the table with new customers that the sales force had not yet penetrated, creating awareness of the Anritsu VectorStar solution and ultimately generating face-to-face consultation meetings with qualified firms. A consultation requester who met key budget, purchase authority, need and timeframe-to-purchase criteria was considered an “A” category sales lead. In addition, the “B”-rated leads are prospect contacts with proven interest that opted in to future communications, but were not yet qualified.

Creative and Marketing Strategy:

The creative focused on the Mars Curiosity Rover, which had made a spectacularly successful landing on Mars about the time this project began. Engineers are inherently interested in the accomplishments of other engineers and how they solved tough problems. The Mars Curiosity Rover landing was one of the toughest, with thousands of measurements and calculations that had to be coded into the landing and could not be altered during the “seven minutes of terror” during which the Curiosity Rover descended to the planet’s surface. To quote from our letter to prospects:

Marketing creative focused on the Mars Curiosity Rover.

As it descended through the atmosphere of Mars, the spacecraft carrying the Curiosity Rover fired its rockets 79 times, went through five configuration changes, and slowed from 13,000 mph to a standstill. In the final operation, a “sky crane” was used to gently deposit the Curiosity on the surface since retro rockets would stir up too much dust.

We pointed out the extreme precision this required, and then made the transition to the reader: we think of the NASA and JPL engineers as heroes, but you are required to make equally exacting measurements every day. That’s why you deserve an instrument like the VectorStar.

The Campaign’s Focus

The centerpiece of the campaign was a direct mailing in a transparent tube containing a poster. An artist’s rendering as a constant reminder of the Curiosity Rover’s descent sequence was on one side (NASA has done renderings but the client did not want to violate any potential copyrights so we commissioned our own) with Anritsu product specs at the bottom. Our hopes were that engineers would mount these in their cubicles, thus providing a constant reminder of the VectorStar, complete with a call-to-action. In addition, we followed this up with an email on the same theme, and then began the telemarketing campaign.

Personalized direct mail envelope with Mars Curiosity Rover.

Twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the email delivery, the calling team began to engage email and direct mail recipients. As a result, this multi-touch process had the effect of increasing the number of contact presentations and shortening the lead generation cycle. And, most contacts recalled receiving the direct mail piece or email. Many were familiar with the offering and willing to engage. Program metrics are indicative of the effectiveness of this process with the high volume of completed call scripts as partial evidence.

Call-to-Action

The call-to-action was a free gift when a prospect completed a VectorStar sales presentation. We tested two offers: an Anritsu-branded backpack (appealing because our target likes to carry lots of gadgets around) versus a VNA technical manual valued at $50. Because of concerns about accepting gifts, government and government contractors were offered only the book.

Additionally, all prospects that registered their contact information were immediately provided a free download link for a relevant white paper.

Because the price of the VectorStar VNA is $51,000 and up, we knew that repeated contacts—and often multiple contacts—within the same company would be necessary to close the sale. The goal of the multi-touch approach was to start the process by gathering as much information as possible. At the same time we gained initial commitment to enter the lead pipeline.

Results:

Overall, the campaign was highly successful. Based on the sales CRM reports, the program generated over $2.8 million dollars in the sales pipeline during the three-month campaign window. Furthermore, many high sales potential leads are still being nurtured.

The campaign had a specific goal of developing 69 “A” leads that were considered opportunities in the CRM system. Through direct response and follow-up calling we developed 115 leads, which put us at 167% of the goal. In addition, the Calling Team gathered 426 opt-in contacts for continued nurturing and development.

Personalized email for Anritsu VectorStar with Mars Curiosity Rover.

In conclusion, the VectorStar campaign shows best practices for an effective multi-part B-to-B nurturing campaign: start with a memorable contact sequence, then follow up with multiple touches that develop the prospect into a sales-ready lead. Because so many recipients remembered and engaged with the mailing and follow-up email, it was easier to get them on the phone and easier to complete an initial sales conversation. Because of this effective warm up approach, calls were completed faster, allowing more contacts to be made within the allotted time and budget. The result: more leads and sales opportunities.

Marketing collateral for Anritsu VectorStar campaign.

Laurie B. Beasley

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. Beasley Direct is a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for nearly 100 companies. Ms. Beasley serves as President of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Laurie manages the eMarketing Roundtable for the BMA Northern California. She is also an instructor of online marketing at UC Berkeley Extension and teaches for the Online Marketing Institute. Ms. Beasley frequently speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, AMA, Tech Council, and the Online Marketing Summit.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. The company provides services in email marketing, search engine optimization, social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning, 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. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb, Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com or call Laurie Beasley, President, at 408-782-0046 x21 or email lbeasley@beasleydirect.com.

The post How We Helped Anritsu Exceed Lead Goals 167% With a Meeting Maker Campaign appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Anritsu is a leader in electronic instruments used by the wireless industry. The instruments are used to test and troubleshoot cellular tower transmission lines and base station transmitters. However, BTS Master Base Station Analyzer market penetration lagged other Anritsu products. And, Anritsu had been unable to penetrate the executive suite at top cell phone companies because competitors were strongly entrenched.

We had to convince decision makers our instrument was so much faster, more accurate and more compact that they would buy it the next time they needed a base station analyzer. But, before we could do this, we had to get their undivided attention with a multi touch marketing door-opener campaign.

The First Touch: life-size box, letter, brochure and response card with invitation to a custom microsite for an in-person demo and iPod shuffle.

The First Touch:

The life-size box showed off how compact the new instrument is in comparison to competitor’s large and heavy products. Inside were a letter, brochure and response card. We invited prospects to come to a custom microsite where they could sign up for an in-person demo. Additionally, demo participants would receive an iPod Shuffle preloaded with BTS Master technical material. All components were personalized. Not only with the recipient’s name but also with technical benefits which differ from carrier to carrier.

As a second touch point, we executed an email to the same lists with the same offer including personalization. Finally, in the third touch point, we followed up with outbound telemarketing setting up appointments with responders. And, to increase conversion from prospects who had not responded we contacted them.

The Second Touch: an email to the same lists with the same offer including personalization.

Goals:

We had two goals for this multi touch marketing campaign:

• Firstly, meet or exceed a projected initial response rate of 2-5% (people who received the mail or email and went to the landing page).
• Secondly, of these, prequalify 10% to meet the internal criteria of “sales ready leads”—i.e., a prospect who is ready to sign a purchase order if the product meets their needs. (This goal equates to 0.2%-0.5% of the initial mail/email quantity.)

Actual Results:

• 7% of total target contacts visited the landing page.
• 4% of total targets filled out the contact form.
• Of these, 49% were qualified as “sales ready leads” during the follow-up call to set up their in-person demo appointment.
• Through additional telemarketing, a total of 8% of ALL contacts were qualified as “sales ready leads”— a result 1,000%-4,000% better than the original projection.
• Over $3,000,000 of potential sales have been added to the pipeline and more are anticipated as the leads were being followed up.

Best of all, we won an International ECHO^TM Award for this campaign.

We won an ECHO Award!

The ECHO Awards honor the world’s best marketing campaigns, that have raised the bar in terms of strategy, creativity and results.

Laurie B. Beasley

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. Beasley Direct is a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for nearly 100 companies. Ms. Beasley serves as President of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Laurie manages the eMarketing Roundtable for the BMA Northern California. She is also an instructor of online marketing at UC Berkeley Extension and teaches for the Online Marketing Institute. Ms. Beasley frequently speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, AMA, Tech Council, and the Online Marketing Summit.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. The company provides services in email marketing, search engine optimization, social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning, 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. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb, Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com or call Laurie Beasley, President, at 408-782-0046 x21 or email lbeasley@beasleydirect.com.

The post How We Beat Goals by 1,000% and Won an Award for Anritsu with a Meeting Maker Campaign appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

IT decision makers are a wily bunch. They tend to ignore most marketing efforts. They’re usually engineers and thus highly skeptical of advertising claims. And they’re so busy that even if you do connect, it’s difficult to keep their attention for more than a microsecond.

Our campaign for a Fortune 500 network storage company was designed to leap over all these hurdles. We needed to reach the executives in charge of backup solutions. Then tell them, in a nice way, that the tape systems they used and trusted were unsafe and obsolete. Our success would be measured by our ability to set up appointments for Sales to present a live product demo.

Fortunately, Beasley had worked with our immediate client at a previous company on a successful strategy to generate sales appointments. This was through a multi-touch campaign built around a high-impact direct mail effort. Such a campaign is not inexpensive. But the rewards are great because of the prospect of a high value sale (in this case in excess of $40K) at the end of the process. We estimated that if we could generate 42 demos the campaign would pay for itself. Our client was able to sell it internally, and we were on our way.

Direct Mail Design

The first step was to design an engaging, memorable, viral direct mail package. We didn’t want to offend their loyalty to existing backup-to-tape systems and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. We needed to convince prospects that backup-to-cloud might be a superior solution and they could learn about it risk-free.

Our direct mail package was built around a “pocket survival tool” mounted on a shelf with verbal call-outs to situations where engineers might need it in their daily job.

Our approach was to talk about “surviving backup to tape” and focus on all the challenges that might make life difficult for the manager using that solution. A dimensional box teased “Pocket Survival Kit Enclosed” with the subhead: “Are you still using tape for backup? Then you’ll need this.” Inside, the prospect found a credit card-size pocket tool with screwdriver, bottle opener and similar capabilities. The gadget was mounted on a shelf with callouts to the functions that tied them to the hazards of tape backup—like weekends lost in the data center fixing problems (use our can opener to enjoy a can of beans).

A letter countered with a presentation of the benefits of our client’s solution, and made the offer of an “even better toolkit” as a reward for a phone demo. Additional flyers spotlighted our client’s backup to cloud technology and the “IT Geek’s Dream Toolkit” which they could get with a demo.

Building a Contact List

While the creative was in development, our teleservices partner built the contact list. We wanted to be sure everybody who entered our contact stream was a prospective buyer. Therefore, we merged several list sources then called storage departments to verify name, contact information and buying authority. As a result, this process had an unexpected benefit: when they were exposed to our message and creative platform, six prospects set demos on the spot, putting us on the path to achieving our goal before we even went in the mail.

Strategizing Your Distribution

The direct mail went out with a staggered distribution so we could control the lead flow. We followed up with two email touches. Even with the high-impact format we didn’t anticipate a large initial response. The reason, because of the many distractions faced by our target audience of overworked engineers. We expected 10-15% of our demos to come from response to the direct mail and a follow-up email contact. Instead, 28% of demos would be generated through these channels: 48 mail responses plus 18 email responses. (If you’re keeping track, you’ll notice we were already ahead of plan.) Six of the inbound responses were from prospects not in the original database. This meant the recipient had taken the trouble to pass along the offer to someone else in their company—a rare phenomenon in tech marketing.

An email followed up our direct mail with the same offer. Once a prospect filled out the registration form, they were called to schedule a demo appointment.

Follow-Up Calls and Closing the Sales Appointment

A few days later, a series of follow-up calls began with the objective of completing a sales prospecting script through one or multiple calls. Telesales reps reported that the executives they spoke with were highly engaged. They remembered the direct mail and offer, and were eager to talk about it. They found the “Ultimate IT Geek’s Toolkit” an appealing reward for their time sales appointment to get the demo. Recipients appreciated the research we had made to match the premium (a set of jewelers-quality tools used for tinkering with electronics) to their interests. As a result, 65% of completed scripts were converted to demo appointments, vs an anticipated 10%.

At the five-month mark, two hundred and thirty demos had been scheduled vs plan of 42—a 5x improvement over our goal. Based on conservative estimates and extensive previous experience with similar campaigns, we project that the sales-to-cost ratio to be $4.62 in revenue for every dollar invested.

Lessons Learned

The lesson: even the most elusive tech target can be found and engaged in a sales demo. If you are willing to make the investment to build an appealing message with offer and gain their attention through a high-impact first effort, then spend the time to follow up.

Laurie B. Beasley

Laurie B. Beasley is co-founder and president of Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. Beasley Direct is a Silicon Valley direct marketing agency that has managed search, email, online, and demand generation campaigns for nearly 100 companies. Ms. Beasley serves as President of the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California. Laurie manages the eMarketing Roundtable for the BMA Northern California. She is also an instructor of online marketing at UC Berkeley Extension and teaches for the Online Marketing Institute. Ms. Beasley frequently speaks on online marketing and demand generation topics for marketing organizations, including the DMA, BMA, AMA, Tech Council, and the Online Marketing Summit.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. The company provides services in email marketing, search engine optimization, social media, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning, 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. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb, Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com or call Laurie Beasley, President, at 408-782-0046 x21 or email lbeasley@beasleydirect.com.

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