***Updated September 2021***
So, you’re ready to engage at a deeper level with your clients, customers and prospects. Great stuff. But where do you start?
Don’t worry, we’ve launched thousands of campaigns here at Kulea HQ and the successful ones always have the same structure in place,
- Clear campaign objectives.
You might be looking to increase you open rates by 50%, sign up 50 guests to your next event, or drive £10k worth of sales. Whatever your campaign objective, make sure it’s clearly understood by your team and stakeholders, and get their buy in before commencing.
We recommend applying the SMART framework to all campaign objectives. So make sure everything you commit to is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time based.
Then write it down.
Seriously, you’d be amazed at just how many campaign objectives change post campaign to accommodate for short fallings.
You need to be brutally honest with yourself – if your campaign has failed to achieve the desired outcome by a set time, you need to rerun the campaign with different variables, such as trying a different message, a different audience, a different offer…
You might not get it right first time, but by holding yourself accountable to your objectives, and iterating your campaigns, you stand a far better chance of success. - GIGO.
This rather catchy acronym stems from computer engineering, and stands for ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ (there’s a rather less polite version called SiSo, which we’ll leave you to figure out for yourselves).
If you’re inputting out-of-date, spammy, invalid, irrelevant contact data into your Kulea account, your campaign simply won’t deliver on results. Worse than that, you may find your campaigns being blocked, as Kulea won’t deliver anything that’s generating a >5% bounce rate.
We recommend running all your data through NeverBounce’s data scrubbing tool before importing it into your Kulea account, and make sure your campaign is relevant to it’s audience, which brings us on to… - Targeting.
Avoid old school spray and pray marketing campaigns like the plague. Successful campaigns are micro-targeted and hyper relevant.
If you think your message applies to everyone in your database, think again.There is no one size fits all in marketing
Now think about how your message, offer, product or service helps support the recipient’s daily goals, or overcomes their pain points.
Does the Marketing Manager in a Tech firm have the same problems as a CEO in finance?
Of course not.
So the message will clearly need to be different. - The medium is the message.
HTML emails are perceived to come from the marketing department, whilst plain text emails are perceived to come from an individual.
Whilst people may say they prefer HTML emails, time and time again, open and click through rates are actually higher with plain text emails (with a little subtle HTML dropped in to aid with tracking and linking), as they are received as a one-to-one communication.
Likewise, when you’re sharing information, don’t send a finance director a shiny PDF brochure – chances are they’ll prefer to see an ROI calculator in the form of an Excel spreadsheet.
Your typical Marketing Director, on the other hand, will love your brochure.
Remember – craft the message to the recipient’s personality and interests. Not your convenience. - It’s not about you!
This is often the hardest step to get your head around. As proud sales people and marketers, we want to shout about our amazing product and services from every rooftop. But stop.Always put yourself in the shoes of your customer or prospect.
They don’t actually care about your product. All they want is…
…a solution to their problems
…a way of making themselves look good in front of their boss
…a way to make their life easier
…a smile and a laugh.
We call this approach Value Adding Marketing – and what it boils down to is your asking yourself with every piece of content you write, what’s in it for the recipient? - Understand where your content sits in the buying funnel.
Not all content is created equal, and the nature of your content will depend entirely on what you’re trying to achieve with it. We recommend looking at your content through the eyes of that marketing bastion, the funnel.
Top of funnel (ToFu) is where your prospects have a problem, but aren’t aware of the solution, and more specifically, your solution.
Your content at this point therefore needs to talk to their pain points, and build awareness of your brand.
As awareness builds, your prospects move down the funnel (into MoFu) and the consideration/evaluation phase. Content at this stage can be related directly back to our product or service, and can incorporate things like webinars, how-to guides (like this one), white papers and promotions.
Finally, with a relationship built, and subject matter expertise established, your prospect will move into the final phase of the funnel, BoFu. This is where purchase consideration assets, such as price lists, comparison papers, and live demos come to the fore, enabling your prospect to cross the line into customer.
Note, whilst email is often both the message AND the medium in the above funnel. Playing a distinct role in MoFu, email is also a delivery channel for many, if not all of the different content featured in the funnel above. - Loop back to step 1.
Once your emails have been written, ask yourself, do they help meet your primary objective?
Is the Call To Action (CTA) clear, and does it further your goals. As marketers, we tend to err on the side of polite, and this can at times obfuscate an email’s purpose.
There’s nothing wrong with a direct approach that states benefits, and then quickly moves the recipient down to the next stage of the funnel. - Be resilient.
No, your first email probably won’t change the world.
However, a series of value adding emails (or cadence as we call them), that inject humour and value into your prospect’s life just might!
Think of your email campaigns as just that.
A campaign – not a one-off e-shot.
Now use your marketing automation software to build a completely automated customer journey that nurtures your prospect across the line to conversion.
Go! Make the magic happen!
