There are a variety of different emails that I send out through LoopFuse OneView on a monthly basis. With a freemium offering of our product, the volume of inbound leads we receive has increased substantially making it more important to nurture these prospects through email marketing. I have emails that have been created and built into leadflows so that my existing database of users feel the LoopFuse love and we continue to educate them on the best practices within the product. In addition, there are prospects that we reach out to through email marketing to help educate them on marketing automation and the benefits of utilizing such a tool.
No matter what type of email I am crafting, I always run down a checklist of 5 things before I click the “Send” button. Because once that button has been pressed – there is no going back.
1. I want to make sure my call-to-action is compelling enough for the list of prospects I am targeting. Did I create content that is relevant to my target audience? Is there a call-to-action? Remember who your audience is before sending any email out. Is this a prospect list of C-level people or IT management? Customer or prospect? A technical whitepaper may be appealing to your IT friends but few CEOs will find the time or have the interest in this type of material. Read through your message one more time – make sure you have put something in the subject line that will grab your audience’s attention and make them click-thru.
2. I double-check that my personalized fields are pulling accurate data. The personalization feature in our email marketing tool is pretty powerful. I can add lead information directly from my CRM and populate it into an email campaign I am sending. Or I can pull contact information from an existing list in Loopfuse like a tradeshow attendee list. I think it is nice to add a personal touch to an email but you have to know your list and the accuracy of the fields you are pulling from. I used a list from a recent tradeshow where we had gathered information through a lead retrieval machine. The way that the conference had collected information was First Name/Middle Initial in the First Name column. If I would have sent an email using the personalization feature for the first name it would look unprofessional – “Hi Cindy C.” Always check your list for contact information accuracy. In addition, did you set your “personalization defaults?” This will prevent any of the personalized fields you have entered from appearing blank. Instead of Hi “blank” your recipient would see Hi “valued customer.”
3. I read through my email and do everything possible to decrease my chances of looking like spam to my target list. First, make sure your unsubscribe link is functional and looks good. In Loopfuse, you have the ability to customize the link so that you are not just ending an email with some bold, black link at the bottom of the page. Let’s be honest, as a marketing or sales person you sometimes wish that unsubscribe link was not there. So I take the time to incorporate the link into the overall design of my email template. Now it is an integrated part of my email design and can even look like you personally added it similar to your signature. Second, have a read through my message and avoided any “spam” terms; for instance, do I have the word “free” scribbled throughout the text. And lastly, have I utilized the Auto-Authentication feature in our product. New to Loopfuse, using this feature lets the receiving email server know that the email is coming from “Loopfuse”, on behalf of “you” making your email look less spammy.
4. I send a test email. I cannot stress the testing enough. And Loopfuse makes it really easy with its new user interface to send test emails as you create your content. You just type in up to 10 email addresses straight from the campaign wizard and hit send. This gives you the ability to send your email to multiple email addresses and test the appearance within the different email clients. For example, when I test my campaigns I test to my @loopfuse, @yahoo and @gmail addresses. This allows me to see how my HTML renders in each client. Not only do you need relevant content in your email but you want them to look professional – no misspellings or weird characters added into the message.
5. I schedule my email campaign for a future date or build a lead flow that will send it out based on the prospect’s activity. Avoid sending emails to prospects too frequently. The last thing you want is a hot prospect to be turned off because he has received 5 emails from you in one week. Make sure you check to see how recently your list of prospects has been emailed. I avoid this issue by building leadflows for my prospects which automatically sends out emails over a certain time period – not too often but often enough to stay relevant.
Until next time…
Tags: eMail Marketing, LoopFuse
