Tomicide Solutions, May 2017

7 Misdirected Inbound Marketing Practices That Can Play Wrecking Ball on IT SMEs Bottom Lines

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan


Have you ever come across the Sulawesi (Indonesia) babirusa? If not, then check them out. They are impressive animals with a little problem.

Besides the two normal tusks that those pedestrian, garden-variety wild pigs have, these beauties have one or two extra tusks growing through the roof of their snouts.

The problem is that if they don't grind their tusks on a regular basis, their growing tusks eventually kill their proud owners by piercing their skulls.

And it's easy to imagine that it would be a rather slow and agonising death for those poor buggers. First a piercing headache and then the end. (Compassionately humming The End by The Doors)

Luckily, they are smart enough to consider the nasty medical consequences of their nature-given predicaments, and work hard to keep those tusks nicely trimmed.

Humans may have invented manicure and pedicure, but I reckon it was babirusas that have invented tuskicure.

Babirusa
Photo credit: Coke Smith, cokesmithphototravel.com

I've mentioned this interesting factoid of nature because they have something to do with email marketing. Well, in an oddball and roundaboutish way, but you'll soon see the commonalities.

Just as those through-snout tusks can boost babirusa boys' beauty and attraction to babirusa girls, so can email marketing can turbocharge IT firms' marketing effectiveness.

But if it's done incorrectly, IT firms can also kill themselves. Well, at least their marketing campaigns. Although they escape from being pierced through the skull.

So, in this intoxicatingly inconspicuous article we discuss 10 email marketing mistakes, and if these mistakes and how to avoid them can pierce the skulls of IT marketers, then they are much better off than those negligent babirusa boys who in the great excitement of romancing babirusa girls, have forgotten to trim their tusks and the painful reminder comes when the great skull-piercing Grim Reaper is knocking on their foreheads.

Many years ago, Mark Twain that reports on his death were greatly exaggerated.

So are the reports on the death of email marketing.

But, it seems, email marketing is here to stay, and the stats below prove the point...

However, just like everything else, email marketing is also riddled with traps. Traps like...

Mistake #1: No Or Unclear Buyer Persona

In the 2000 movie the Patriot, Mel Gibson's character, Benjamin Martin teaches his sons to shoot and advises them...

"Aim small, you miss small."

Translating that phrase into marketing, it means that the more detailed your buyer persona is, the more precise your aim becomes to address your email to that specific persona.

For instance, if you are a general IT consulting firm, what can you write in your emails without sounding too generic?

But if you're a different IT firm, offering backup and disaster recovery services exclusively for multi-store shopping centres, then your message will be very clear and crisp.

You can use the special jargon and a tone of voice that is perfect for this specific market, but would be totally meaningless and inappropriate for other markets.

As marketing maven and one of my marketing mentors, Dan Kennedy is fond of saying...

"If you're not ready to repel people, you're not ready to attract them either."

You have to polarise your market.

Think of US President Donald Trump, radio DJ Howard Stern, or radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Some hate them, some love them, but there is no one in between.

And in order to maintain their popularity and earning potentials, they prefer to keep it this way.

A few years ago, a retail chain called Target expanded to Canada from the US. Target wanted to be a mid-market chain, knowing that Wal-Mart was the low-price option and The Bay and Nordstrom the high-price option.

In the expansion, Target took over an otherwise successful retail chain called Zellers.

Then, within a very short space of time, Target totally failed and snuck out of Canada with its tail between its legs. The great expansion and the invasion of the North failed.

Why?

Because Target wanted to serve the middle-of-the-road market, not realising that some Wal-Mart shoppers were happy with Wal-Mart and bay shoppers were happy with The Bay.

They had no intention to change their favourite stores.

And just as Wal-Mart and Bay shoppers can be uniquely described, so can be your buyers.

Your marketing is like laser. The more focused it is, the more powerful it is.

Mistake #2: Unclear, Misleading Or Impotent Subject Lines

Subject lines are pretty limited, so you have to be clear and straight to the point.

Of course, when you have room for being clever, be clever.

No, don't be condescending, but if the context allows, you can be gently smartass-ish. It can cause a good giggle or two.

Many Internet marketing gurus have succeeded with subject lines like "Hey", "Dude" or "Open", but that can be a bit of a problem with B2B buyers.

While B2C buyers are more forgiving for pure entertainment, B2B buyers don't have time for that. Investing thousands of dollars and risking their jobs in case something goes wrong is not entertainment for them.

So, they need clear subject lines.

And when they open your emails, your message had better be relevant to the subject line.

A study by AWeber, one of the oldest email automation providers, reports that emails with clear subject lines get 541% more clicks than emails with clever subject lines.

Emails with clever subject lines are opened by curious people who want to see what's behind those one-word subject lines but have no intention to buy anything.

By contrast, emails with clear headlines are opened by people with clear intentions. They may not buy today, but at least they have a better than foggy idea about what they're seeking.

Some winning B2B email subject lines are...

In the B2C world, including the person's name in the subject line is a winner, but in the B2B world, it can backfire. It's fine inside the email's body though.

Why?

What's in the subject line I perceived as public information and anyone can see it. The body of the email is private information and only the recipient can see it.

Vagueness also work in B2C, but be careful with it in B2B.

The big difference is that in B2C, you sell to people who are not experts at what you sell.

When you sell IT B2B, most of your buyers have in-house IT experts or if they don't, they can have access to IT expertise to help them to select the best IT company for their objectives.

Closely related to the subject line is the "From" part of your email. Since this is something you readers see, make sure you keep it consistent and the emails come from a real person with a real name. Also, don't make the mistake of using "puttinginfo@domain.com", or "noreply@domain.com".

Those emails communicate to readers clearly that you don't want to hear from them, and if they want to contact you, they should make an extra effort to do so.

Mistake #2: Miserable List Segmentation

Whenever you receive an email, start reading it and recognise how well it addresses your problems, then you know that someone out there really understands your industry and has done a good job at segmenting the email list which you are on.

Let's say, there is an IT firm that offers backup, disaster recovery and some other services for private medical facilities (hospitals and speciality clinics) where data handling is tightly regulated.

The firm has a big email list of medical facilities, but since there is a huge difference between facilities, so the difference must be there in the emails too.

The firm can't send the same message to a 300-bed hospital as to a 10-chair dental clinic.

While there is overlap, managers of hospitals and dental clinics have different IT-related concerns.

In terms of IT, there are many commonalities between a dental clinic and a 10-bed chiropractor/massage clinic, but not with the hospital. So, they must be addressed separately.

Further, some clinics need system maintenance while others need new systems installed.

The other factor is some medical facilities select through RFPs and others through relationship-building.

However, I suggest that you drop the ones that operate through RFPs.

Service Breakdown

As you can see, on the backup side alone, we have four distinct segments that require four different email messages.

Non-RFP buyers are real businesspeople.

RFP buyers are procurement agents without a shred of entrepreneurship in their bones.

They require two distinct communication styles.

Yes, I know it can be a tad fiddly to cater for all these segments, but as you measure your results, you can decide whether or not the segment in question is worth nurturing.

If not, drop it like a hot potato.

For instance, in my view, staying in touch with procurement agents is about as futile as trying to avoid hypothermia by engaging in a heated argument, since all they care about is low price.

And that's not because they really care about the company, but because the more they can save, the more bonus they get at the end of the year.

If you feel a bit overwhelmed about segmentation, you find a good starting point here.

Mistake #4: Broken Links

This problem is both annoying and expensive.

It's annoying to people who receive your emails and expensive for your recipients can't take your desired action, they end up in a cyber cul-de-sac with nowhere to go.

And this issue raises the point of customising error pages. Yes, instead of just telling visitors that they've landed on an error page, tell them how to get out of there and what to do next.

Hongkiat has complied a collection of customised 404 error messages, and that may help you to customise yours.

But don't not stop with creating some cute messages only. Create some short instructions of how to get out of this predicament and find the right page the visitor is seeking.

To avoid broken links, send out a test copy and test the links at least in the five most popular major browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

If you use Aweber, Mailchimp or a similar email automation program, it also allows you to collect information on what browsers your subscribers use to read their emails.

Mistake #4: Missing Call To Action

Good email marketing rests on direct response marketing principles.

One of those principles is that you always give readers a reason to respond to your message.

It's one thing to get your emails opened and read, but how about that next action you want your reads to take? Yes, a physical action.

Do you want them to visit your blog and comment, download something or buy something? Very important.

One significant part of your sales funnel design is to create specific calls to action in your marketing, and when people take that specific action, a specific thing happens to them inside your sales funnel, and this is how they advance towards the decision-making point where they can decide whether or not to do business with your firm.

Many moons ago, back in the MS DOS age of computing, if you wanted to move your computer, you had to use the special MS DOS command "Park" to pull the reading-writing heads from between the storage plates, so the heads wouldn't plough into the plates and destroy them.

The park command was the trigger and the heads' movement from between the plates to the side was the action to your trigger.

And depending on what actions (basically the triggers) your readers take, different things will happen in your sales funnels, and they happen 100% automatically.

Some of the most effective calls to action are...

Granted, you can't use this approach to sell five-figure (or higher) custom-built services, but you can sell introductory productised, off-the-rack services, and I strongly believe that before you try to sell high-five, six or seven-figure engagements, you should sell a small (1-2 days) 3D Discovery/Diagnostics/Disqualification) engagement for about 5-10% of your typical project price.

To emphasise your call to action, you can repeat the download link 2-3-times in the body of the email.

Mistake #5: Mobile And/Or Responsive Negligence

US Consumer Device Preference Report 2015, has reported that, on average, 48.3% of people check their emails on their mobile devices, with retail being the highest market (63%).

It means that if you want to make sure that your email render correctly on mobile devices too. And that raises the great plain text vs. HTML dilemma.

Yes, HTML looks more impressive, but this is something you have to test with your market.

Right now, I'm still on plain text, but may well move to very simple HTML. By simple I mean that I would use only basic formatting, like bold, italic and maybe a basic colour scheme.

But I would stay away from frames, image headers and other complex structures.

To make your email mobile friendly, consider some key steps, like...

We also have to look at the differences between mobile friendly vs. responsive design.

Mobile-friendly design can be described by...

Unchanging static content

By contrast, responsive design can be described by...

But before you start fiddling with your website, read Hootsuite's article on creating mobile-friendly websites and then check what you can do with yours.

Mistake #7: Purchased Lists

There are slits that you grow from scratch and lists that you can buy based on your specific criteria.

They are different kind of people, so send messages to them separately, because they require different tones of writing.

There are five types of lists:

Response lists consist of existing clients and highly qualified prospects. One group has already bought form you and the other is just a whisker's away from making their first purchases. Both groups have high trust in your company and your products. What makes the prospects on this list hot is that they've already bought products complementary or similar to yours, so they are familiar with the product and now they just have to get to know your company.

Compiled lists are lists of cold prospects who've expressed some vague interest but have never really taken action on your offers. Many of them are the typical "big hat, no cattle" people who can talk up a storm, but when it comes to turning their talk to walk, well, they are less than committed.

Newsletter lists are good because their members actually expect to receive information on a regular basis. But the information must be good.

Depending on how the owners have conditioned their newsletter subscribers, some lists are fine with some selling but some are very sales allergic, and they unsubscribe at the slightest attempt of selling on your part.

Announcement lists' members are in constant sales mode. I frequently receive announcements from best Buy, Amazon, Audible and other sellers.

This is nice but consider that what you sell is not the same category a Best Buy's or Amazon mass-produced products. You sell highly differentiated services (I hope, you package your products into some high-margin services) and that requires a different promotional process.

But what we have to know about announcement lists is that only 3% of prospects are in buying mode, so, the response is not terribly high. So, write your email in such a way that even if people don't buy, they can take a kind of action that advances them forward in your funnel.

Discussion lists are the email responses of forums, where like-minded people discuss specific topics. Members don't deal much among each other, but forum owners can make offers to members. The Warrior Forum is such a platform. Members buy, sell and exchange ideas.

Among all these lists, the best ones are that you've grown from scratch in-house.

To learn more about compiled lists, you can read Using Purchased Lists For Email Marketing - Do They Work?

In my experience, purchased lists can work, but you have to go to a good list broker and be willing to pay more than the lowest price for your list. And then send out a gentle offer which is easy to respond to.

Mistake #8: Sending Email Without Permission

This is a sensitive point.

This is interesting and sometimes plain idiotic.

For instance, in Canada, by law, you are not allowed to email people who haven't given you permission. But you have to contact them to gain their permission.

It's like making it illegal to ask a girl out on a date without her permission, but to get her permission, you have to ask her. But that's illegal.

Unfortunately the creators of hyper-stringent Canada's Anti-Spam Law (CASL) and the somewhat more relaxed US CAN-SPAM law didn't care about such little details.

After all, they are government bureaucrats, many with a passionate hatred for business, although they live rather lavishly on our tax money.

But that's the law and there is not a sausage you can do about it, so you have to work around it.

By definition, a spam email is a commercial mass email sent to people who haven't requested them. But that's only the surface.

In Canada, if you send a first-time email to a friend, who gave you his email address but not his explicit permission to send him emails, with a recommendation for something expensive like a car, he can rightfully report you for spamming him and you can be arrested.

After all, the car recommendation could be a covert commercial offer from which you may benefit financially.

A short while ago, a guy here in Canada spent some time in prison for disagreeing with some women on Twitter over some political issues. Apparently, there was no threat or any kind of name-calling, just plain disagreement in a peaceful debate. The women reported him for harassment and he got locked up.

But...

...if you send one single email (no CC or BCC) from your email client, not from your email distribution software (Aweber, etc.) and include your full name, your company and physical mailing address with a fairly short and intelligent message, which is not a sales pitch, it can't be turned into spam, because you offer full disclosure of your identity and you're not selling anything.

There are legal and ethical workarounds to growing your list, but follow the carpenter's rule: Measure twice and cut once.

I would also give you the carpenter ant's rule, but I have no idea what it is, so let's move on. But it could be, "Measure twice and chew once."

Before your send a new request email, make sure it fulfils some basic compliance criteria.

Mistake #9: Pushy Self-Promotion Or No Promotions At All

Oh, the two extremes. Either too much and too heavy promotion or nothing. Not a sausage.

Email is a marketing tool and good marketing is a precursor to sales. It means, good marketing should gently nudge readers towards the next desired action. It can be a decision to buy or a decision to gobble up your next piece of content.

Yes, they can say yea or nay, but our job is to take them to that point. If they buy, it's great. If not, that's good too. Maybe they buy later. The main point is that they reach the decision point and make up their minds.

So, we have to find that middle ground in our emails that gently push readers to the next stage in the sales funnel. It's like holding a bird in your hands. If you hold it too loosely, it flies away, but if you hold her too tightly, it dies.

So, your emails should push subscribers forward so gently that they don't even realise that they are being pushed.

State schooling is a good example.

It brainwashes both children and their parents so gently, that they don't even notice it until they realise that after 12 years of government schooling (some people erroneously call it education), kids have a hard time to find even minimum-wage jobs.

When you promote something, especially something expensive, your readers want to know quite a bit about it.

But since space is limited in an email, the best bet is to put an enticing message in the email's body and then link it back to a sales letter on your website.

On the website, you can better describe what you sell, and have a better chance to initiate a new project. This article on Get Response demonstrates how to find that delicate balance where you're still promoting but not annoying.

The other extreme is when the email is missing even a shred of promotion. It's really like going to the river every day, dumping a bucket of fish feed in the water, but not having your fishing gear with you to catch some fish and going home empty-handed day after day.

According to various studies, emails the most effective if they have one call to action with three links.

In his email copywriting course, Email Copy Made Easy, Jay White teaches four locations to link back to the sales page from the email...

  1. In the middle of the copy

  2. Just before the closing statement

  3. After the closing statement and before waving good bye

  4. After the writer's signature

So, just keep a good balance. Lots of valuable content and some promotion gently weaved in.

Mistake #10: Forgetting To Track Campaign Results

I heard this from the late Gary Halbert first: HITS means How Idiots Track Success.

Many businesses track the wrong indicators of their email campaigns.

Mainly, they track lagging indicators, that is, indicators that show what's already happened, and totally ignore indicators that represent something that can happen.

Sadly, so many email marketers get so excited about sending out emails and then creating new emails that they simply forget to track their previous emails' performance.

The good thing is that tracking your campaign can be made pretty simple.

Mind you, it means you actually track the right indicators. Tracking bogus indicators like open- and unsubscribe rates is as useless as roasting a chicken with the help of the smoke detector.

It's technically doable, but it will be a horrible experience pretty much on par with a zombie apocalypse.

The best bet is to select the desired indicators that you want to track, track them and for advanced analysis, you can download it as an Excel file and fiddle with in a pivot table.

Then you can massage the living daylights out of your data and create graphs so cunning that if you put a tail on it, you could even call it a weasel.

Of course, it all depends how flexible your analytics programme is. You may not even need Excel at all.

The other good news is that most email management programmes offer preponderance of training, so you can learn the ins and outs of dashboard machination and fine-tune your email monitoring to the nth degree.

Summary

Yes, on the surface, email marketing may seem to be pretty fiddly, but if you think of the potential pay-off, I believe it's worth investing the time and effort to learn it.

Oh, and also pay attention to the content in your emails.

In the first few email to new email recipients, be a bit neutral and bland. No, not totally bland, but don't show your true colours yet.

Start introducing your true colours very gradually and cleverly weave it into the content of your emails.

Let's remember your readers want both valuable information and entertainment. Well, give them information in an entertaining way, so they have a good reason to return and read more of your materials.

In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.

Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.