The 10 step guide to generating demand through email marketing
7th April 2015
Despite many businesses hearing about us through email marketing, some still question its effectiveness:
- “Email marketing is dead!”
- “Email marketing is spam?”
These are common things we hear when talking to businesses about generating leads through email marketing.
Whatever your view, the simple truth is email marketing is able generate high quality leads for your SaaS business. What’s more, once the content is created, you can automate the email demand generation process.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Identify your target market/niche
- Try to be as specific as possible and segment through industry, job role, location or anything else relevant
- Identify a list of businesses you want to target
2. Determine your ‘thought leadership’ position(s)
- What are you going to stand for? What’s your angle, your position, your key differentiator?
- What kind of offers will you provide? What are the logical calls to action for your software?
3. Build your database
- Build your database of personal email addresses – joe.bloggs@domain rather than “sales@domain”
- This may be through licensed data lists or a more manual process like data scraping, looking through LinkedIn or searching Google
4. Create content
- There are two types of emails to consider:
- Content based emails – linking to ‘evergreen’ content marketing material (content that is always relevant and not seasonal or tied to events) like white papers, blogs and infographics
- Offer based emails – should we connect, would you like a demo, try our software for free
- Create the content and embed it into your website
5. Write the emails
- We find emails that work best are HTML – but as “plain text” as possible so no images, colours or “fancy” HTML. Try to get emails to look like the kind of email you would send a colleague
- Create short emails that capture attention and get to the point. Make the emails personal and use only one call to action
6. Set up the autoresponder
An autoresponder is a sequence of emails sent at pre-determined intervals. This may be:
- Day 1
- Day 7
- Day 14
- Day 28
- Etc
We use Campaign Monitor but there are many other tools that automate further activity to respond to people clicking your links
7. Upload your database and click “Start…”
- Once you have your initial autoresponder sequence set up, load your database in and let the emails take care of themselves
- Hit Start/Go/Launch
- Set replies to go to your sales people and reply manually – the purpose of autoresponders is to get engagement and start a conversation
8. Add new content
- You should regularly create new content for your website and other marketing. When this is created load this into the end of the campaign
- There is one caveat with this – if content is time bound (for example a seasonal offer or something related to an event such as the Budget or Christmas) should go out as standalone pieces
9. Build your database
- Keep building your database and feed this into the campaign – you may do this monthly, or even weekly – then let the autoresponder take care of it
10. Monitor and optimise
- Now your campaign is up and running you should monitor the results and optimise the campaigns
- Look at open and click through rates (CTR) and see what you can do to improve them
- See what content works best (and what doesn’t) and use that intelligence to create new content
- Try new things and new offers, consider having a select list to test outside of the autoresponder first
Demand generation with Xander Marketing
If you follow this process and create the right content you should start to generate demand. However, this is time consuming and years of experience significantly influence your ability to write emails and create content that gets clicks. If you don’t have the time, resource or know how to do this in-house, get in touch with Xander Marketing. Request a free consultation or give us a call on +44 (0)330 223 2770.
