Conversion Rate Optimisation For B2B – Part 1

The biggest challenge B2B marketers have regarding lead generation is generating high quality leads, and that’s a fact.

Why does this happen?

This is what we’ll find out in this chapter.

• What mistakes beginners make
• How to identify what your starting point should be and what questions you’ll need answers to before getting started with CRO
• How to leverage the traffic you already have to increase conversions
• How to use surveys to find out more about your audience and personalise their experience
• How to ultimately convert more leads from your existing traffic

 

Avoid Making Novice Mistakes Before You Start Doing CRO For Your Website

How would you go about starting conversion optimisation for your website?

You could go onto Google and just check the lists of things to test, right? Or, you could just find a bunch of blog posts with extensive lists of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) techniques.

If we implement all 100 ideas at once, we’ll get this:

And yes, there is a site like this! Most of us don’t want that. At least I hope not anyway.

OK, so, we can’t do that; instead, we need to implement A/B testing. Just to test what works and what doesn’t work quite right.

Easy.

Not really. Running A/B tests to look at traffic alone can take about 4 weeks on average. If we have 100 things to test, it might take 7 and a half years to finish everything.

Not a good idea as digital marketing moves very fast.

What about CRO checklists?

They are useful, but they are just a starting point. Things that seem simple to implement with a click of a button, such as just taking a look at some checklists, are all BS. If it were that easy, we would all be millionaires.

Source: Moz.com

What about best practices?

Best landing page, best product page, best pricing page, and so on. They are useful, but again, they are just a starting point.

When you’re designing the first version of your website, best practices are where you start, not where you end up. There’s a huge difference there.

What about design trends?

We could look at all kinds of cool websites for inspirational ideas.

Such as using ghost buttons that we want people to click, but they are made to be less visible.

Not a good idea.

Or including video backgrounds on your website. They sound fun, but they distract people from what you’re offering as they’re watching what’s going on in the background.

What about copying market leaders?

Can we just copy them? For example, Amazon is doing well, and so is Netflix.

In the US, Amazon’s subscriber conversion rate for Prime is 74%. What is yours? 5%? So the difference is 15 times greater.

Is Amazon’s design or copy 50 times better than yours?

I don’t think so.

So, believing that Amazon’s success is down to its copy and design and that we could just rip it off is just naive. The world doesn’t work like that.

And copying your competition is not a good idea either. Most probably, they are copying someone else too.

So what do we do in this case?

How can we sustainably and continuously improve our conversions?

The most important thing in CRO is discovering what matters.

To find out what matters, we need to know WHAT the problems are and WHERE to find them.

In my opinion, we need to start making sure that we have a clear system in place.

Keep reading and we’ll go through some of the main steps for building a simple, useful system that you can start implementing right away.

source: Omniconvert

Nowadays, we have lots of information and a plethora of data, but the biggest problems we have in our businesses is that we don’t know how to organise and analyse that data.

We don’t necessarily need more traffic to our website or to create more content; we just need to make sure that the value we are adding is relevant for our audience and that it is converting.

So, you need to ask yourself a few things before getting started.

Ask and answer these questions before you start diving into CRO:

• Whose problem are you solving?
• What do they need?
• What do they think they need? Why?
• How are they choosing / making a decision? Why?
• What are they thinking when they see your offer?
• How is what you’ll be selling clearly different?
• Where is the site leaking money?
• What is the problem?
• What are they doing or not doing on the website?
• What leads more people to do X?

Make sure you ask yourself these questions before you get started with the rest of what you’ll be learning in this chapter of the guide.

There are 4 things that you need to do in order to get the most leads from your traffic. This is what we’ll be talking about here:

1. Getting real insights into your audience
2. Using the good old Pareto principle to understand your buyer persona
3. Developing an ongoing process to A/B test your landing pages
4. Re-engaging visitors with exit-intent

Get Real Insights Into Your Audience

We covered a lot in Chapter 2, where we talked about How To Do Market And Competitor Analysis For Your B2B Business.

There are some additional pieces of information that I would like you to look at regarding conversion rate optimisation for your website.

The first stage is to get real insights into your audience.

What kind of sources do you use to get this information?

We get our insights from:

• Web Analytics
• Surveys
• UX Audits

Get Data From Your Audience Using Web Analytics

The first thing to do is to figure out the whys and to get the right insights into your audience.

The first source you could work with is Google Analytics, or any other analytics tool that you might use. This could be Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, etc.

We went into detail on how you can get Demographics And Geography Insights in Chapter 2. Go back and read it carefully so that you know what data to look at before going ahead with CRO.

Make sure that you understand this data very well.

Get Qualitative Insights Into Your Audience Using Surveys

Now, one of the most important data resources that you should think about when optimising your website is surveys.

Surveys are crucial for getting qualitative insights into your audience and for optimising your website based on this information.

User Experience Audits – UX Audits

Here, we are looking at the flow of how you present the content on your website, so that you know what you need to change or what things you want test out.

I don’t want to go into too much detail, as UX Audits could be covered in a separate guide all of its own. If you want to learn more about it, I would recommend reading this article on Medium.

Based on these insights, you can gain knowledge about:

• the behaviour of your users
• the motivations that your users might have
• buyer personas and who your users are
• landing page optimisation: what things you need to optimise to get more conversions

The first thing you need to do in order to grab more leads is to understand your audience and to use all of the tools that are now available to you.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

 

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Experience Optimisation In Content Marketing

The last section in our content marketing chapter shall be taking a look at experience optimisation.

Here’s a dirty little secret.

Great content, even super relevant content, isn’t always enough. You need a really great experience that is optimised for your goals.

Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing at Uberflip, explains content experience like this:

I like to think about it in terms of piña coladas. There is a reason why I don’t want to be drinking one in a dingy dark basement, but on a beautiful sunny beach instead.

Experience matters a lot.

Here is what your content needs to be like to actually deliver a good experience.

• Readable
• Actionable
• Tailored

Readable

Here is an example from the social media website Buffer, which explains how they make their content readable.

They have a nice big headline to grab your attention, and really easy-to-read short paragraphs, which are actually better for mobile, so that you don’t get hit by these big walls of text.

You have social shares, subheadings, and images, which break up the text really well. It’s a really enjoyable reading experience.

Actionable

Is your experience actionable?

It blows my mind when people tell me that their goal is lead generation or audience growth, but they have no call to action. Or they do, but it is a terrible user experience.

Small quiz for you guys: What is Oli Gardner’s (CEO at Unbounce) rule on CTA?

HAVE A F#@?ING CALL TO ACTION!

Simple.

I will echo that sentiment when it comes to content, not just the landing page.

When you are creating a call to action for your content, I want you to remember 3 things:

1. Clarity
2. Context
3. Targeting

Clarity

Is It Clear? Is The Action And Value Obvious?

Context

Context is everything.

This is where we can add the wrong call to action to the wrong content. As you can see below, we have an advanced marketing blog post, but the call to action is for a beginner marketing ebook.

This is better:

Targeting

Last but not least: targeting.

Generic CTAs will only take you so far. You need to be specific about your call to action.

Here’s an example:

A generic one: “Hey, if you are interested in Marketing Automation, why don’t you try building a hub?”

…What?

As you can see, there is no content at all in this CTA.

Here’s a specific one:

“Hey, I know you are using Marketo, so why don’t you take a look at Marketo and Uberflip in action?”

This has to work really tightly with your distribution strategy.

Tailored

We want to make sure that our users’ experience is tailored, so from this position, you’ll want to take a look at how most other people structure their content.

When you look at the navigation of most websites, you have content arranged based on its stage, which may then be divided by topic and type.

This is how most people do it.

The reality is that we need to get a bit more sophisticated and strategic with how we actually put our content out there.

Here is an example from DNN.

I have never been to a resource page and thought “I want to read a whitepaper”. Have you ever done that?

I didn’t think so. But everybody still makes these organisational mistakes.

You need to get a little more strategic about how you organise your content for the people that are trying to find it.

Maybe you need to look into organising your content by type, together with by segment or audience as well.

Here’s how a company called Visual Web Optimizer does it. They do conversion rate optimisation.

They do it by type, industry, and element (depending on what element you want to test on your website).

 

So, you can get something like this: elements on the website that allow you to search for a case study for SaaS that tests price.

A much more tailored experience.

It doesn’t matter if you have thousands of pieces of content or just a few, you need to start putting some thought into how you organise that content.

That’s it.

Conclusions

To summarise, we’ve learned:

1. Customer development for content: Make sure that you are creating really relevant content for your audience. It will have a huge impact on you readers.
2. Strategic content creation: So that you are not writing blog posts just for the sake of it, create content that people care about, and then expand that into different types of content that you can re-use.
3. Distributions tactics are key: Make sure that you put some thought into your distribution strategy before you actually move on to it.
4. Experience optimisation: Of course, you need to make sure that the content you are writing is readable, has a call to action, and is tailored to the needs of your audience.

 

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

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How Do We Approach Content Creation?

How Do We Approach Content Creation?

All right, we’ve talked about relevance, and we’ve talked about customer development for content. We now know what we want to create, and we know which topics are really going to resonate well with people.

But, how do we actually approach content creation?

We seem to constantly fall back into this trap of creating more and more content. But the reality is: more is not enough.

Better: relevance is what we need.

In research carried out by UberFlip and BuzzSumo, the engagement of top marketing websites was investigated.

As we can see in the screenshots below that show slides presented at a BuzzSumo webinar, there is a big gap between the top 5 blogging sites and the rest of the websites in terms of engagement. It drops a lot.

Let’s go even deeper.

There is also a huge difference between the top 5 websites on marketing, such as HubSpot (which is a very prestigious blog on marketing), and what we would consider to be our own content down at the bottom having 8 shares or less.

That is CRAZY!

The reality is that engagement is going down every year.

Only 4% of all articles got more the 3,000 shares.

Source: The Top B2B Content of 2016: Six Lessons for Marketers

The conclusion drawn from all of these studies is that a small portion of your content is responsible for the majority of your results. The rest of your content is going to get 8 shares or less just like the BuzzSumo study shows.

3 Characteristics Of How To Create Performing Content

I don’t want to go into the techniques of how to write as this is not the purpose of the guide. If you’ve done your homework on competitive and market intelligence, you’ll already know how to research the best content for your industry and your competitors’ best content.

So, what are the characteristics of high-performing content marketing?

There are 4 questions that you should be asking yourself, and then I also want you to take a look at your content marketing and how you’re approaching your goals.

1. Is it relevant? – Content relevance is essential, and that’s it.
2. Is it aligned to your goals?
3. Is it unique to just you? – Is your company adding something that has unique value?
4. Are you looking at the world through the lens of your product?

There are many examples of unique and relevant content made for B2B content marketing.

Here are some great examples. BuzzSumo and Moz carried out a study on Content, Shares, and Links, which is where I got most of my data from on this topic. They analysed over 1m posts in order to find out which performed the best. They used this information for webinars, press releases, infographics, and blog posts.

Another great example is the Guide About Using Live Chat For Growing Your Business, made by Zoho.com and Sujan Patel. It talks about how to use Live Chat, and how to create great content for SEO, webinars, ebooks, podcasts, and so on.

Unbounce even created a landing page that offered their notes on a conference held by Uberflip to the rest of its participants, and then they redistributed them in blog posts, webinars, and podcasts.

What we learn here is to leverage content across many channels.

• PR Strategy
• Guest blogging
• Webinars
• Blogs
• SEO
• Presentations
• Podcasts

How To Distribute Your Content For B2B Lead Generation

Before you get started with this, find the answers to these two simple questions:

Where are your people?

What do they like?

Now, if you’ve done your market research and competitor analysis, you’ll have very accurate answers to these questions.

Go back to Chapter 2 to learn more.

Here are a few distribution strategies and tactics we use for our content promotion.

Our Subscribers

• Targeted Social Media (paid and unpaid)
• Influencers
• Partners (Co-Marketing)
• Discoverability (SEO)
• Content Syndication (lead generation)
• Other Publishers (lead generation)
• (VERY) Targeted Emails

Now, if we were to go into the details of each and every one of these, this guide would be an essay. So we shall focus on just 3.

Partner Marketing (Co-Marketing)

You need to answer 3 questions:

Is it targeted?

Does your audience overlap? This is the biggest, biggest, biggest oversight that I see. People are doing partner marketing with companies it doesn’t even make sense to be doing partner marketing with.

Is there an agreed upon distribution strategy?

Partner marketing can be highly effective, but you need to make sure that all of the things above align with one another.

Targeted Email (Very Targeted)

Small list = If you only have a small list or you are just starting out, you will want to keep your focus.

Big database = Make sure you segment a lot.

You do this by surveying and discovering what they want. You don’t want to be sending generic emails to everyone.

Content Syndication

The last distribution method that I want to mention in our guide is content syndication. It can be really effective but it’s got to be executed properly.

It can be implemented very effectively for lead generation. You can syndicate Ebooks, white papers, webinar recordings (which is really effective if you are a good presenter), and even articles and blog posts.

Here are some content syndications tools.

Outbrain – Native content recommendation ads (broad syndication)

Taboola – Native content recommendation ads (broad syndication)

BrightInfo – Personalising content recommendations about your site in real time

BrightTALK – Video and webinar syndication platform (targeted syndication)

Integrate – Demand Marketing (very targeted, expensive syndication)

QuuuPromote – Social Media promotion (low cost)

Webinara – Syndicating your Webinars (worth it if you are constantly creating webinars)

This method can be use for pure distribution (links to articles) or lead generation.

Remember, the more targeted your content is, and the more of these tools that you use, the more expensive it’s going to be.

But the idea here is quality not quantity. They won’t be really high volume, but they will help you to leverage your content into more leads.

If you are using content syndication for lead generation, there are two ways to do this:

1. Your content is published on a third-party site, but it links back to your own site, where it is then basically consumed on your site.
2. Your content is published on a third-party site, but it is directly available to read on this site, and so it is consumed on this site.

Keep in mind that these are two very different experiences.

With the first one, you bring them back to your own site and they become more familiar with you.

Is it sales ready? Well, maybe a little bit more sales ready then if they were to actually consume the content on the publisher site.

Leads will probably will need more nurturing though.

So, if you’re doing some syndication, you’ll need to consider what the experience is going to be like when they’re consuming your content and whether you’re going to get those leads in through the door.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

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How To Build And Convert Leads With Quality Content

Let the fun begin and start building value for your audience.

This part is crucial, as it will be your first point of contact with your customers.

It doesn’t matter whether you are going to be outreaching via email, or you simply want to rank on Google and you want people to find your solution, or you are going to be promoting your content on social networks; the content you create will probably be your first digital contact with your audience.

As Rebecca Lieb puts it, “Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.”

When we look at where we are in terms of content marketing, over 76% of marketers will produce more content in 2016 than in 2015.

But at the same time, 80% of marketers are unable to measure the effectiveness of their content.

There is a huge disconnect here guys. We are producing, producing, and producing more and more content every year, but we don’t really know if this is effective or not, and we don’t even know which types of content have the most impact.

Now, this is the most heartbreaking statistic of all: 90% of content goes unused because it’s irrelevant. (Source: Forrester)

So when we are taking a look at content marketing, how do we really extract the power of great content?

Even though content marketing doesn’t really look like a great idea right now, content marketing actually has great potential. You will have the ability to build friendships, to grow an audience, to generate leads, and to get customers.

How do we do that? How do we get more bang for our buck?

The reality of it is that we need to get a bit more strategic when it comes to the business of content marketing. So this is what we are going to be talking about in this chapter; not just the creation of content, but how we will be doing it to make a larger impact on our businesses.

Key Points:

1. Customer Development For Content – As content marketers, we need to start thinking like product managers, and we need to approach content in a very methodical way.
2. Strategic Creation – How to create content that makes the largest impact.
3. Distribution Tactics – What are the best ways to create and distribute the content you want to write.
4. Experience Optimisation – We’ll talk about how to optimise your content, and how to optimise these content experiences towards your goals.

Customer Development For Content

Let’s talk about relevance, and why this is important. In our opinion, the most important thing about Content Marketing is relevance.

Here’s the thing: most of the content out there is not relevant, and in order to get traction with your content, you have to make sure that you create relevant content.

This means that your content ideas have to resonate with your audience.

We’ve heard it all before: it’s not quantity, it’s quality. But actually, it’s not just quality, it’s relevance too. It doesn’t matter if a particular thing is good; what is important is that the content you create matters to the audience that you are trying to reach.

So, how do we actually do this?

This is what most of us do when we want to create content marketing ideas:

We get into a room with a whiteboard, because it just has to have a whiteboard, we come up with a bunch of ideas, and then we sit back and look at them, thinking that we have some really cool ideas.

Don’t get me wrong, there is value in doing that, but these will not be your most relevant content ideas. You’ll need to dig deeper. So how do you do that?

This is where the angle of customer development for content comes in.

We do a lot of customer development for products, but we don’t do it for content. Which doesn’t make any sense, because we should really be trying to understand what these people want to learn about and what they want to talk about.

How do we know what type of content is relevant for the people we are targeting?

There are three things to delve into when carrying out research on customer development for content.

1. People
2. Tools
3. Data

Let’s talk about it one by one.

Researching Your Audience (People) For Customer Development For Content

There are really four broad categories that you need to focus on when researching people in order to make your content more relevant.

If you are into the B2B space, you’ll most probably have a business development team, a customer service team, and a product team.

These are the internal teams that you have to talk with. These people are constantly having conversations with customers, so they could give you some really great ideas.

1. Customers
2. Prospects
3. Followers/Fans

Obviously, you will need to talk with your customers, prospects, and followers or fans to really understand what they want to learn.

Let’s go even deeper: how can we go beyond that?

So, it really comes down to the type of content you are going to be creating for these people.

By now, we all understand that we have top of the funnel content (TOFU), middle of the funnel content (MOFU) and bottom of the funnel content (BOFU).

Here’s a framework that I use for content research. It is developed by UberFlip:

 

Here are some great questions you can use for the audience survey questions:

Questions for followers, fans, and customers:

• How long have you been in your role?
• How many people are in your team?
• How do you compare yourself to your coworkers?
• How does the team work together?
• What tools do you use/spend the most time with?
• How do you learn about marketing?
• What kind of content attracts you? Can you give an example of one unforgettable piece of content?
• Do you look at content during the work day or outside of business hours?

Questions to internal teams:

• What’s the one area of your job that you feel you need to learn more about?
• What is your mind on most of the day? What do you think about the most?
• What part of your day do you love most?
• What part of your day do you hate most?
• If I could get you an expert about any topic to spend an hour with, who would it be and what’s the topic?
• What is your dream job?
• Who is your market here?
• What are the top non-product related questions you hear?

It is very important to carry out these surveys, as before you write even a single word, you need to make sure what content resonates the most with your audience.

Tools To Use For Content Marketing

The next very important aspect of content marketing is to dig into what kinds of tools to use for creating more relevant content.

The next aspect for helping you to create relevant content involves digging into the tools available.

These tools are:

• Industry reports
• BuzzSumo
• Answerthepublic

Some of my favourite tools are industry reports. Reports give you a great insight into what’s happening across your industry’s landscape.

I’ve already quoted a couple of them from the Content Marketing Institute’s annual industry report. These are good things to keep an eye on, especially if they are related to your audience in your customer segments.

I also use Business Insider Intelligence a lot to keep myself up-to-date with what is going on in my industry.

The next tools I like to use are BuzzSumo.com and Answerthepublic.com.

BuzzSumo is probably one of my favourites.

With BuzzSumo, you can really understand what resonates with people based on their shares.

Answerthepublic.com is similar in the sense that you can actually get insights into what people are searching for on Google. Whilst BuzzSumo gives you data in terms of shares and engagement, Answerthepublic.com gives you great information about what people are actually searching for.

Here’s a tutorial I made on how to use BuzzSumo and Answerthepublic.com, and how to use them effectively for content marketing:

— Video Coming Soon —

How To Use Data For Content Marketing

Determining relevance by digging into your own data is so incredibly important.

Now, there are really just three things that I want you to keep in mind here so that you can understand what works:

• Website metrics
• Conversion metrics
• Engagement vs. Growth

This comes down to what your goals are.

Here’s what I mean by talking about engagement metrics versus growth metrics: A lot of marketers focus too much on their “engagement metrics” and not enough on their “growth metrics”.

Source: Uberflip.com

This doesn’t mean than there is no time and place for engagement metrics. They are still important, but you really need to step back and think about what the goal of your content marketing is.

Is the aim of my content marketing to create lead generation (focusing on growth metrics) or to create brand awareness (focusing on engagement metrics)? Make sure you distinguish between the two.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

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B2B Email Outreaching Tips

B2B Email Outreaching Tips

Great, so we have our list of prospects, we know our buyer persona, and we have segmented all of our potential customers, so now it’s time to start outreaching to them.

To do this, we will use Mailshake.com, at a very low price of $9/month.

P.S. If you can afford LeadFuze.com or Klenty.com, it is more efficient to use these tools as you can automate the whole process of prospecting, segmenting, and outreaching with one tool.

With the help of Mailshake.com, you will be able to sign into your Gmail account and start one-to-one email communication with your prospects, as you’ll be able to automate this process.

Using Mailshake, you’ll be able to:

• Build evergreen campaigns – once you add a contact, a new campaign will start for each individual person with a series of emails.
• Create follow-up emails based on your configuration (Send X days after Y email is sent).
• Monitor clicks, replies, and make real-time changes to your email campaigns.

Here are a few things you need to be careful with when doing email outreaching.

Send Your Emails To The Right Person

Make sure that you are sending your emails to the right people. This is where good customer segmentation will be very important, so that you can achieve a higher conversion rate.

Interact With Your Recipients Before

Interact with your recipients before you send them emails. This can be at a conference/meetup, through a LinkedIn connection, via a Facebook group, or on a forum.

Email Templates Should Not Sound Like Templates

Use templates that don’t sound like templates. This is very important because you want to sound natural. You want to be original.

There is nothing wrong with using templates, but make sure that you craft them using your own style of voice.

Craft Brief Emails

People are busy, and so are you.

So your emails should be nice and brief and sound very natural.

Have only one message in your emails and make it very easy for your recipients to be able to answer you.

Don’t Lie In Your Emails, Be Honest

Always, always be honest with your recipients. Don’t make big promises that you won’t be able to keep later on. Don’t lie just because you want them to contact you. Be genuine and people will appreciate you much more.

Don’t Forget About A Call To Action

Make sure that you have one call to action in your email, and that it is very clear what your call to action is.

Check Your Grammatical Mistakes And Proofread

When we have spelling mistakes in our emails, it makes us look lazy and as if we’re not serious about what we’re doing. So make sure you proofread all of your emails before sending them out.

Don’t Include Attachments In Your Emails

Don’t include attachments. This is a huge mistake that many people do and all email providers will start to flag you up as a spammer.

Carry Out A Recipient Email Address Verification

Verify that your email list is clean and in working order.

Email bounces can affect your delivery rate and spam rate. Make sure that all of your recipient email addresses are working. Use Kickbox.io to do it for you, or do it manually by using Rapportive or FullContact.

Follow Up Your Emails

It takes up to about five follow-up emails to close a sale, yet many salespeople don’t follow up their emails. In fact, 70% of salespeople give up after not getting a reply from their first email. (Source Yesware.com)

Check out these cool follow-up emails.

Don’t Buy Any Kinds Of Email Lists

As I mentioned before, initial interactions with your recipients are very important for achieving high conversion rates. Buying email lists is a waste of time and money.

Email Open Rate Enemies

The funny thing is that most of these mistakes are right under your nose. And they are things that you think you are doing a good job of, but actually you might be making a terrible mess of it.

So, let’s quickly get into what those things are.

Enemy #1 – Too Many Images

Yes, images.

A lot of people think that we need to include images in our emails because we think that they are engaging or that they show what our product is.

Because at the end of the day, if you have an ecommerce business, how are you meant to show your product if you can’t use images?

Solutions

1. A single image – if you really need to include more images, have a maximum of 2.
2. Image ALT text – it helps the mail server to understand what that image is about.
3. Reduce the size of the image.

Enemy #2 – Email Size

We sometimes include so much information in our emails that the email server clips the email.

This happens when you see this:

Now, the dangers of messages being clipped happen in two ways.

1. The primary danger of your message being clipped is that it is clipping off part of your content and often (because of the way we design our emails), it is clipping off your call to action.

1. The second has to do with the open tracking itself. Oftentimes, your open tracking pixel will be at the bottom of your email in the footer, so you won’t be collecting accurate data, and you might be getting really low open rates because your messages are really long.

Solutions:

1. Just use text – email was meant for sending text, so don’t make it messy with a bunch of images.
2. Click-through for longer content – keep it simple and motivate people to click through to a longer version of your email (e.g. have a blog post summary in your email, and a long post on your blog).
3. CTA near the top – make sure you add the call to action at the beginning of the email too, not only at the end.

Enemy #3 – Unverified Sender Identity

This is the easiest one to defeat. Anybody can do it.

You don’t need to be a copywriter or a marketer.

If you expand the email you’re sending and you have something similar to what’s shown below, you will most likely be sent to the spam folder.

Why?

As you can see below, the mailing list is some weird number. This is because the email provider they use lets them send out emails without verifying the sender.

Here is an example of a verified sender:

See the difference?

It is telling us what domain is sending out the email. Much clearer, right?

Solutions:

1. Check your domain key status: http://ift.tt/1qoAt4l
2. And your sender score at: http://ift.tt/10GLh1C

If you need to get a DKIM Key, don’t worry, just google DKIM Key + {your email marketing provider} and you will get one.

Make sure that you do this ASAP before you start sending out any emails via an email marketing tool (e.g. MailChimp, GetResponse, HubSpot, FreshMail, or SALESmanago).

Enemy #4 – Bad Subject Lines

Ohhh, this is a big one.

Bad subject lines just scream out for attention off the spam filters. It is very easy to spot them.

Here are a few bad subject lines:

“Your June Hot Pick”

“Something new on the horizon”

“Verify your subscription! Don’t miss out on the latest…”

“Recap”

There’s nothing offensive or wrong, they just don’t say anything. They don’t peak your curiosity.

Some tricks include making your emails look like a reply or a forward by using “re:” or “fwd:”, or you could use some of these keywords: “you”, “new”, and “now”.

Here is a great blog post from HubSpot about 23 subject lines that work.

Enemy #5 – Stinky Content

The next enemy for your email marketing is just plain bad content. The number one predictor of your future open rates is your current content.

So if you have really bad content that doesn’t say anything, that is full of images, and that basically doesn’t give anything back to people for the time that they have invested in opening your email, then they will have very little reason to continue opening your emails in the future.

You can always trick people into opening your emails with good subject lines, but if you consistently give them non-relevant content, your open rates will go down drastically.

The key to sending good content is to know your audience and to segment them so that you are sending quality and relevant emails to the right people. Don’t forget that.

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• According to acquisition channel
• According to acquisition campaign
• According to demographics or geography
• According to the offers that brought them in
• According to device
• According to time and other “laterals”
• Ask them (surveys or quizzes)

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Here is a great resource by HubSpot on the art of sending sales email.

Enemy #6 – Your Ice-cold List

The biggest enemy of all is your ice-cold list. It is a dormant list.

If you have an open rate under 20%, a delivery rate under 99%, and an unsubscribe rate of more than 3%, then you have dormant subscribers.

Dormant = deep sleep

There is a general statistic that 60% of subscribers around the world are dormant. 60%!

You need to wake them up, guys!

[ht_message mstyle=”info” title=”Create a simple activation formula. Here is one that you can copy and tailor to your subscribers” ” show_icon=”” id=”” class=”” style=”” ]

• Day 0 – Welcome (and activate now)
• Day 1 – Fear-based
• Day 2 – Benefits-based
• Day 4 – Incentivised
• Day 7 – Get ready for the backburner
• Day 8+

[/ht_message]

Backburner = automated loop; it’s when you send them some sort of newsletter that doesn’t require segmentation or customisation.

Obviously, this is just a simple email marketing activation formula, we go into much more detail about segmentation later on. There’s more about this in Chapter 6 where we talk about marketing automation for your online business.

Activation merely unlocks further activation. This means that our work is not yet done through activation alone.

Let’s say you activate someone to click on your landing page. Now, here is someone who not only opened your page, but also clicked on it, so they must be interested. If you want them to be even more interested, you have to have the next level of ASK, to show that you want them after they have clicked on your landing page.

Maybe you want them to buy something, so you need to create further activations. So, this is the next step in terms of activation.

Now, maybe they’ve bought something but you want them to buy something else; so now you need to create another form of activation with just this goal in mind.

Maybe they’ll become repeat buyers, and now you want them to refer you. This is another potential activation.

The most important thing to remember is that OPEN RATES are a form of VANITY. For us, what is most important is achieving conversions.

You’ll learn more in the next chapter about how to create RELEVANT content for your audience that converts and how to convert these prospects into paying customers.

Keep on reading to learn more.

Conclusions

1. First of all, make sure that you have a goal and that you know who you are targeting. In Chapter 2, we talked about buyer personas and how to carry out research into your market and your buyer persona.
2. Tailor your LinkedIn Profile as it if it were your sales page. Be very brief and make sure that you get a lot of testimonials from your clients and partners onto your LinkedIn Profile.
3. Start prospecting on LinkedIn using tools such as LeadFuze and Klenty, build a list, and segment it. Make sure that you add them to your LinkedIn connections or that you start following them on Twitter or other social networks.
4. Do your outreaching via Mailshake and implement all the best practices for sending out cold emails.
5. Make sure you go through the enemies of email open rates each time you write an email.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

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from Digital Marketing Automation Consulting | MAN Digital http://mandigitalblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/b2b-email-outreaching-tips.html
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