B2B MASS ACQUISITION & BRAND AWARENESS

For many years now, most marketers will tell you that B2B mass email doesn’t work. They will tell you that
no one wants prospecting emails and that you will onlydestroy your email reputation and brand by driving
customer acquisition through email. These are the same people who have adopted an inbound marketing
strategy telling the world it’s the only way to go. Meanwhile these people seem to have no problem with the huge spikes in cost per click campaigns and online advertising. They don’t seem to mind letting Google take control of their marketing destiny.
I’m here to tell you that these people couldn’t be more wrong about acquisition and brand awareness email. They just haven’t figured out how to use mass acquisition email correctly. Nor have they figured out how to maintain a strong email reputation and strong delivery into the inbox of their target audience.

In 2022, the number of email users worldwide is forecast at 4.3 billion.

(Statista, 2021)

In 2022, the number of email users worldwide is forecast at 4.3 billion (Statista, 2021). This figure is set to grow to 4.6 billion in 2025, making up more than half of the expected world population.
In 2022 alone, 333.2 billion emails are expected to be sent and received each day (Statista, 2021).
That’s a staggering number of daily emails.
That’s not all. This figure is also expected to increase to over 375 billion by 2025. This email marketing statistic demonstrates that email marketing is a key part of all successful multi-channel marketing campaigns. In fact, the importance of email is growing.
However, email marketing is not without its challenges. Competition in the inbox is stiff and getting noticed starts with having a relevant message that resonates with your target customer. Without a relevant message, your email is more likely to be seen as spam and not only will it not be delivered to the inbox, but it can also damage your overall email sending reputation and cause problems for you in the future.

Why should I look at acquisition and brand awareness email?
For every $1 you spend on emails marketing, you can expect an average return of $42
(DMA, 2019). Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing channel.
The latest statistics show that as many as 87% of marketers use email marketing to proactively place their content in the hands of their customers (Content Marketing Institute, 2020). The benefit of adding this proactive channel to your marketing campaigns is that it will reinforce the messaging you are driving through your paid media (display, social media and search) and organic (SEO) channels, thus amplifying your brand awareness and customer acquisition activities.
Email marketing offers many benefits, as a content distribution channel, that marketers aren’t just using it organically—one-third of them are also engaging in paid collaborations to promote their content to their partners’ email databases.
In fact, email is so popular among marketers that email engagement is one of the top metrics to evaluate content
performance. 86% of marketers say they look at email engagement metrics such as open rates, click rates, and
downloads to determine how successful a piece of content is, more so than website traffic and social media analytics.

87%
use email markeng to place content in customers hands

86%
look at email engagement metrics to determine content success

So why are so many people choosing inbound marketing over outbound?
We suspect it’s because they don’t fully understand how email works. If they understood the role email marketing could play in their multi-channel marketing success, they would certainly be using more acquisition and brand awareness email in their marketing strategy.
How does email work?

BUSINESS’S
EMAIL PREP CLOUD EMAIL HANDLING MAILBOX PROVIDER’S
VETTING & DECISION

Email Content
Business
Sender

MX Record
Check

Authenticate SPF,
DKIM, DMARC

Internet

DNS

Outbound
Mail Server

Inbound
Mail Server Authentication Reputation

Blocked

Inbox

Spam

User
Filtering

EMAIL DELIVERY IS COMPLEX

Let’s say you created an email you want to send to a particular person or list of contacts.
That email is sent through an outbound mail server which is connected to the internet, which is connected to the contacts inbound mail server. Before that inbound mail server accepts your email, it verifies your information and authenticates this email before agreeing to deliver it the contact you are trying to reach. This authentication process will also look at your email reputation and in some cases see if your email is listed as a potential spammer or threat. Depending on your email reputation, the inbound mail server decides where to deliver your email, i.e. inbox, spam folder
or not at all (Blocked). The illustration above is a simple visualization of the sending process. We’ll
get into detail on how to verify and prepare your email data to ensure good deliverability here.
This verification process has been very effective at blocking unwanted email from nefarious senders, but it has also impacted permission-based marketers in the process.
Also, most marketers today use a third-party email or marketing automation platform. One problem with these platforms is they will send your email over a single pool of IP’s.
Many email platforms will not allow their users to send acquisition or brand awareness email campaigns.
Why? Because these platforms send multiple customers emails over that single server or pool of IP’s and therefore, a single customer could damage the platforms sending reputation and negatively impact the rest of the customers using that same mail server.

It only takes one bad actor to do one of the following things to impact everyone using that mail server:
• Bad/hard bounced emails | High number of emails were sent to bad email addresses
causing a high number of hard bounces (permanent failures). This tells Email Service Providers
(ESP), and Internet Service Providers (ISP), that this company has not verified their data. Hard
bounces lead to lower IP and domain reputation at the ISP level, in turn damaging the ESP IP
pool and other mailers using those IP’s.
• Poor Engagement | The emails being sent by this company are getting low open rates and/or
clicks (Engagement). This tells the ESPs that these emails are not wanted and could be
considered unsolicited, or SPAM.
• Poor Email Reputation | The emails being sent by this company have been flagged as spam
by users or their content includes spam words, or their email volume is suddenly extremely
high (unusual traffic patterns).

When these scenarios happen, it can cause blacklist companies (i.e., Spamhaus) to list your email
domain or IP address(s) as suspect, impacting your ability to get email delivered into your prospects’ inbox. Getting removed from a blacklist is very costly and time consuming. It can take a significant amount of effort to rebuild your email sending reputation which translates into poor deliverability and lost sales.
How Do You Avoid This from Happening?
First step in optimizing your email campaign is to take control over how your email is sent. By
selecting an email platform that enables you to leverage multiple SMTPs, you can optimize delivery rates across multiple IP Pools. Remember, not all SMTPs will have the same inbox success rate for each email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, Comcast, etc.).
What is SMTP?
SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an application that is used to send, receive, and relay
outgoing emails between senders and receivers. When an email is sent, it’s transferred over the
internet from one server to another using SMTP.
The SMTP relay service can be used to resolve a lot of issues such as email deliverability and
IP reputation.
There are several other protocols that are used for mail retrieval, the process of retrieving email
stored on a mail server. The most common ones are Post Office Protocol Version 3 (POP3) and
Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
POP/IMAP are suitable for only email retrieval. An SMTP client and SMTP server can stand alone on
an outbound-only mail server, but POP and IMAP servers are useless on their own, they need to be
paired with a mail server that pulls the SMTP and POP/IMAP protocols together.
Taking Control of How Your Email Is Sent
Instead of relying on the SMTP provider your email application provides, if you have multiple SMTP
providers you can take control of how your email is sent and delivered.
Example: Let’s say you are sending 500,000 emails a week. By having three SMTP providers connected to your email platform you can route a third of your list across three different SMTP providers and reduce the size of your campaigns and the risk associated with that large campaign.
Worst case scenario you get a high number of spam complaints reported to one of your SMTP providers and they shut down your ability to send any more email. You then can investigate the issue, fix, and reroute mail to another SMTP provider to complete the campaign.

All your digital assets, including the contacts you want to reach, remain in the app, allowing you to continue your marketing campaign with less outage time, sales loss and cost.
If you are sending higher volumes of email, you can take this a step further and buy several IP addresses associated with each SMTP provider and route your email sends through both multiple SMTP’s and IP addresses.

Email Marketing Best Practices
Regardless of your email platform or the SMTP providers and IP addresses you use, at the end of
the day, you need to manage your sending reputation. This reputation, which can be at the IP or
domain level, will play a large role in how well your emails are delivered to your customer’s or prospect’s inbox. To actively manage your reputation across SMTPs, IPs, and sub-domain/domains, you should focus on your core email metrics (soft bounces, hard bounces, opens, clicks, and complaints). Otherwise, you risk wasting a lot of time and hard work creating relevant and compelling content that very few will see because it’s sitting in a spam folder.

What’s Demand Generation?
A core component of your Demand Generation strategy is to establish your company as a helpful
thought leader in the industry. You do this by creating compelling content that ultimately generates
qualified leads and thus, in turn, profitable top line sales growth.
Our experience shows that by creating relevant industry guides and insightful research studies, you can drive a direct correlation to website traffic, brand awareness and sales growth. In fact, through our Mass Acquisition Email campaigns it is not uncommon to get these guides and research studies directly into the hands of key decision makers of your potential customer base.
For example, a recent campaign which sent over 2 million emails for a client and drove more traffic to their website than any other marketing channel (for a fraction of the cost of their paid media channels). Because we were able to create industry leading research studies, the key decision makers who received these emails viewed them as relevant content and we
saw a minimal amount of SPAM complaints (in fact only 3) and less than 0.01% unsubscribe rate.

SUMMARY
As you develop your multi-channel marketing campaigns, be sure to include the opportunity to leverage your marketing by getting it directly in the hands of the Key Decision Makers within your ideal customer profile (ICP). The most effective way to accomplish this is through a targeted email acquisition and brand awareness program. We get into more detail about developing an ICP here if you need help.
• Verify your email addresses and prepare your data for personalization. If you need more information about email verification, please check out our Definitive guide to email validation
• Send helpful thought leadership content in the forms of guides, research papers, industry studies etc. (Not promotional offers—leave those to people who have already expressed interest in your products and services) Prospects don’t mind if you send them an email as long as it is relevant and helpful.
• Pick an email platform that will give you control over how your email is sent.
• Pay attention to your open and click through rates (Engagement). Set up A/B/C test splits to find out what subject lines get the best open rates and what content gets the best click
through rates.