B2B Email Marketing

At the center of any sales automation program is contact data and an email marketing platform.

Email marketing has been the number one sales and marketing channel for many years. Email studies report the return on marketing investment between $14 to $44 dollars for every dollar spent.

However, email has some serious challenges. Deliverability has become increasingly difficult; most email service providers (ESP’s) will no longer allow you to send non-optin emails, internet service providers (ISP’s) make it very easy for users to flag your email as spam hampering your deliverability and the inbox competition continues to increase daily.

For these reasons, SLA recommends using a sales automation platform for lead generation activities and marketing automation platforms for long-term lead tracking, scoring and nurturing. I write about the differences in these two strategies on my LinkedIn profile here.

In short, SLA provides the email data, technology and expertise to execute your sales automation campaigns on your behalf. You just have to monitor your inbox for responses or have us monitor your inbox for you passing you only the qualified leads. We can also help manage your leads on a long term basis because statistically, only 25% of the leads you generate today will close in year one while 75% of leads will not convert until years two or three.

Database Marketing

At the core of our lead generation services is our advanced database marketing capabilities. While we can target prospects in any demographic or firmographic like industry, job title, company size, revenue, and location we can also target prospects at companies based on their content consumption on over 5000 business websites. We call this “Intent Data.”

Example: Let’s say we notice that Acme Company has been reading a lot of articles related to personal wealth management and business insurance. We can pull contacts from our database at Acme Company that match your ideal customer profile and include those prospects in your email campaigns. Doesn’t it make sense to send email introductions to prospects we know are consuming content related to your products and services? When we use these advanced database marketing services we can see an increase in conversion rates as high as 300%.

Email Personalization

The personalization capabilities of our sales automation platforms are incredible and are only limited to the data you have on file about your prospects. The most common email personalization tactics use first name, job title, company name, and industry.

Example Email:

Hello {John},

The statistics prove that the more personalized and relevant your lead generation messages are the more likely you will get a response. The more advanced personalization tactics can include product purchases, expiration dates, birth dates, competitor information, common connections on LinkedIn etc.

Subject Lines & Messaging

Subject lines are mostly responsible for email open rates while messaging and offer are mostly responsible for conversion and click-through rates. We have tested hundreds, if not thousands, of email subject lines, messages and offers for our clients.

B2B Data

SLA provides free access to our database of 60 million B2B contact records so there is no need to buy data. In fact, the cost of the data alone is more than the cost of our sales automation programs, let alone the cost of the technology and staff to run these programs.

Setting Goals

The goal of a sales lead automation strategy is to automate the sales prospecting process, increase the number of responses from prospects, engage in more conversations, identify opportunities, set up additional meetings and close more sales.

Getting Started

There are 10 steps to implementing a sales automation program. You can see the on-boarding details here. The steps include creating your ideal customer profile, pulling contacts from our database of 60 million records that match that profile, to setting up the email engine, creating the email messages, scheduling the automated follow-up tasks, define goals, reporting and making improvements to your campaigns.