Most email campaigns I\u2019ve come across provide a great answer to the question \u201cWhat does your company do?\u201d<\/p>\n
Not surprisingly, they fail to generate leads.<\/p>\n
Because people receiving those emails are not asking that question<\/em>.<\/p>\n If you look at it another way, these emails respond<\/em> to leads. Therefore, they can’t generate<\/em> leads. (For the purpose of this post, a lead is defined as a company that has shown interest in knowing more about a vendor\u2019s product \/ service).<\/p>\n No wonder suspects don\u2019t open – let alone respond to – such emails.<\/p>\n This is not a failure of email marketing. It\u2019s a wake up call for marketers to rethink the messaging of their leadgen emails.<\/p>\n A leadgen email should address a different question:<\/p>\n Why should I care about you?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The answer to that question should be the core message of the leadgen email.<\/p>\n To come up with that answer, the vendor should follow an \u201coutside-in\u201d approach. By which I mean its content should be oriented such that it looks at things from the prospect’s perspective. Specifically, it should first outline the pain areas and hot topics faced by the target company and then describe how the vendor’s offering can address them. In other words, it should give a few good reasons why the prospect should be interested in knowing more about the vendor\u2019s product or service.<\/p>\n While \u201cinside-out\u201d elements used in most email campaigns – like features, benefits, case studies, capabilities, etc. – are important, they shouldn\u2019t take the center stage in a leadgen email. The trick is to reorient these elements such that they reinforce the core message.<\/p>\n The same “outside-in” approach is also required in target lead list compilation, cold calling, rebutting objections, and all other activities performed at the top of the funnel.<\/p>\n We help B2B technology vendors generate leads by creating email flyers based on what we call \u201cMarketable Items\u201d, which package a vendor\u2019s strengths and differentiators into a compelling reason to buy \/ adopt that resonates well with the pain areas and hot topics of the target market. Please find below a few examples of Marketable Items and a sample Email Flyer.<\/p>\n As you can see, Marketable Items consciously leave out more things about a vendor’s product \/ service \/ company than they include!<\/p>\n To that extent, creating Marketable Items is an “exercise in sacrifice”, as Gartner analyst\u00a0Jake Sorofman characterizes positioning in Six Reasons Why Your Positioning and Messaging Probably Isn\u2019t Working<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Increasingly, who you are is defined by who you aren\u2019t. What you become depends on what you\u2019ve left behind.<\/p>\n – Jake Sorofman, Gartner<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Before closing, let me hasten to add that the vendor should abandon the above approach after generating a lead.<\/p>\n That’s because, by that time, the case has moved beyond the top of the funnel and belaboring business value any longer will jeopardize the deal, as the vendor mentioned in this post<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0learned to its dismay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a slightly edited version of my answer to the following question on Quora: How Do I Run An Email Campaign To Generate B2B Leads? Most email campaigns I\u2019ve come across provide a great answer to the question \u201cWhat does your company do?\u201d Not surprisingly, they fail to generate leads. Because people receiving those … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b1-integrated-marketing","category-it-marketing","category-mandatory-category"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3787"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8912,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3787\/revisions\/8912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/sales-funnel-01.jpg\")
<\/a>Called \u201csuspects”, people receiving these emails may not even know about the existence of the vendor sending them out. Even if they do, located\u00a0at the \u201ctop of the funnel\u201d (TOFU) in marketing-speak, these people don\u2019t really care about the vendor – at least not yet. Added to that, they\u2019re not expecting this email, so it may interrupt what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/leadgenemail-fi-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n