Hello, hello! Welcome back to your favorite newsletter (hopefully!).

Truly though, I appreciate your continued support and attention. Time is our most precious asset, so thanks for giving me a little of yours, every week.

Have you implemented one of my recommendations? Was it successful? I’d love to hear your success stories! Send ‘em over.

Last week we talked about the impressive 36x ROI of email marketing. Who knew? (Warm) email is alive and thriving.

Hopefully, I already convinced you why you should do it, so this week, we’ll cover HOW to do it. Ready?

Legggoooo. 🏃‍♀️ 

Email Marketing FTW: The Playbook

Step #1: Good data

Everything these days relies on data. The quality of that data can make or break your pipeline and your business.

For email marketing to be effective, we need to build segmented lists, and to do that, we need good, clean data. 

Key elements of Data Hygiene

#1 Good core data

By core data I mean accurate data for your companies and contacts. Data like their geographic location, industry, job title, valid email address, etc.

For this, I recommend using Apollo’s CRM Enrichment tool.

For ~$50 a month, you can connect your CRM and push any missing or new data in through a few clicks. Beautiful. 😀 

#2 Good pipeline data

We also need good pipeline data. Meaning, good data for your current and prior opportunities or deals.

It’s SO important to make sure you have a clear process for creating (and closing) deals, managing your pipeline, and tracking key data on your deals like closed lost reason, contacts involved in deal, etc.

How can we email everyone who we lost* to competitor X, when competitor X has a major privacy breach, if we don’t track it? We CAN’T! 😵‍💫 

Step #2: Segmentation

Segmentation involves dividing your email list into specific groups based on their profiles, prior engagement, or behaviors.

This allows us to send more targeted (and effective) messaging to each segment.

Some examples include:

• All people in our CRM in Texas

• All people in our CRM who are associated with lost opportunities

• All people who are associated with a lost opportunity due to a feature gap

• All people in our CRM in Florida who we haven’t spoken to in over 90 days

…and so on.

See why we need good core and pipeline hygiene to do this? 🧠 

Step #3: Email content

Remember, your email content should educate, entertain, inform, or inspire a segmented (!) group of people who are likely to care about or connect with the message.

If I am a sales consulting agency owner, and you just had a major win with another sales consulting agency, I’d like to hear about it.

If I am in Texas and a major regulation was just released that impacts me as an employer in TX, I care to know about it.

This is always going to be unique to your business, your industry, and your market…but make sure your content is relevant and checks one or more of those 4 boxes (educate, entertain, inform, or inspire).

Step #4: Email structure

The big things to get right here are -

1. Subject line (get them to open it)

2. Body (make it easy to read - spacing and design)

3. CTA (have one and make it obvious & compelling)

A simple way to think about the subject line is…”If I saw this subject, would I be intrigued or interested enough to open it? Among all of my other emails in my inbox?”. If no - try again.

If you aren’t seeing a 30% or better open rate, your subject (or your segmentation) needs help.

For the body, send a test email to yourself first. Open it on your desktop and your mobile phone. Is it legible? Is there enough spacing between paragraphs to make it easy to scan?

Is your CTA obvious and compelling? If you aren’t seeing an 8% or better click-through rate, your CTA needs help.

What tool should I use?

If your CRM supports email marketing, use that. Don’t add another tool to the mix unless you absolutely have to.

My CRM of choice, especially for startups, is HubSpot. If you haven’t heard, they also have a pretty sweet startup discount.

Ok, that’s all for this week! Happy emailing! 📧 

Want to learn more about how I help startups increase their revenue by 150-590%? 👀 

Know someone who could benefit from being added to this distribution? Send them here to sign up!

With love and gratitude,