Whether you are in B2B or B2C the corporate email system that you sign into every day is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal as a marketer, but is also seen as a nuisance. For years it has been predicted that this platform will be dead by 2020, but long lives the age-old email. Every year we see new platforms arrive that have the potential to take out the employee inbox, but what we’ve seen is that these turn into either complements of the inbox or take on a completely different use altogether. So while it’s still the largest communication platform, why don’t we harness the power and leverage already owned white space.
HubSpot notes that 93% of B2B marketers use email, and you are probably one of them. The transition from newspaper to newsletters was a sure sign of where content distribution was headed. Outside of email being the largest communication platform used today, it’s important to highlight two key advantages of the employee inbox that at this time, can’t be replicated at scale elsewhere.
Here are 3 reasons why you should consider a new email marketing in 2020:
Email Is Everywhere
Various social channels are sweeping the nation, but still aren’t always the best means to foster a business relationship. LinkedIn is a great breeding ground for sharing thought leadership and content, but it’s hard to educate specific targeted accounts on how your product can specifically help your intended audience. If we simply break this down to a numbers game in the world we live in today, not everyone lives on social media just yet and if they do it’s most likely in hopes to have one personal aspect of their life. But everyone has email as an avenue of communication.
Personalization
The hottest topic in sales and more specifically, tech sales, is personalization (also known as account-based marketing). Being able to speak the language and to the pain points of each of your accounts is very important. Marketing automation is a great platform to use to keep the pulse and attention of your audience, but when it comes to building value in the sales cycle, ABM is the way to go. We see this done so well with display ads on the internet. If you type into google right now that you’re looking for new shoes, chances are you’ll soon see a display ad that magically appears to make the buying process much easier. Sigstr + Terminus help guide these exact principles in the 1:1 inbox every single day.
Account-Based Sales Approach
Personalization and Account-based sales go hand-in-hand. Reaching out to targeted accounts takes time and the initial outreach is just the tip of the iceberg. Most deals are done primarily through email and by phone once they are engaged in the buying cycle. It’s important to share the right content at the right time every time we engage with them. The main focus here is to build an end-to-end relationship with your accounts so that the working relationship post-sale is seamless. Outreach.io does a great job of explaining the pros and cons of this approach in this “The Challenger Sale vs. Account-Based Sales” blog post.
For example, our ADR team is always promoting the latest content or event for initial outreach. Beyond that, our email signature banner sometimes includes messaging specific to the region or account we’re emailing. And as they move throughout the buyer’s journey, from one opportunity stage to another, they will see different banners along the way. After a demo they might see…
If we are going through the technical evaluation process they might see…
And lastly, after a sale, we welcome them to the family. Communication through the sales cycle is the foundation of your relationship. So why not build it during this time? Tell them who you are, always be a helpful resource, and celebrate when appropriate.
Does your company have a product release, new ebook, or event coming up? There’s a channel that you already own that can help your team promote any important initiative in a personalized way.
