Growth Marketer Academy: Episode 4 – Why Email Should Be a Cornerstone of your B2B Lead Gen Plan, Part 1

When it comes to generating and nurturing leads, the most profitable tool in your arsenal may surprise you.

Email.

Wait, what?

Ok, ok, I know what you’re thinking, “email is so 1985”. But that’s because most marketers aren’t doing it right.

We are going to give you the secret to effective email campaigns that – once set up – can return major dividends for years to come.

If you’ve written off email marketing you’re leaving money on the table

A study by Marketing Sherpa found email marketing to be the primary lead generation tool for 81% of B2B firms surveyed.

In this episode – Part One – we’ll cover:

How to use email in B2B lead generation

In the next episode we’ll cover:

How to use email to nurture a lead into a customer

What isn’t going to work:

1. Spam cold outreach Cold outreach still works, but not the way you’re doing it. The typical spam message won’t work. The same message to every contact in your vertical is lame and so 2005.

We all know you sent out 15,000 emails and they all said the same thing.

2. Some minor personalization of an otherwise canned message doesn’t work either.

Changing a line or two in an otherwise canned message won’t lead to a true lead

In fact, it may turn your customers off and leave you with reputation damage.

Business owners and executives are busy people

If you waste their time filling their inbox with junk messages, they will develop a negative connection with your brand

You aren’t fooling anyone with your “Dear XX, We are so excited to see that you like XXX. We have a great product/service XXX” message.

For goodness sake, PROOFREAD

This message is your first impression

These mistakes can get you instantly categorized as junk mail:

• Spelling errors
• Grammar problems. Yes – their, they’re and there are going to be important!
• Template issues. Example, when you code for a first name but don’t have one and the recipient sees “Hello <first name>,”

What to do Instead: Video outreach messages

Highly personalized, but you can template certain portions.

Finished videos seem 100% personal, but certain portions will be the same for every recipient.

In your audience analysis, you identified the pain points of each tier of your potential targets (entry-level worker, manager, owner)

Craft solutions to the pain points of each target.

The solutions (the parts that sell your product/service) can typically be templated.

Example:

Let’s say you provide automated phone systems to medium businesses.

Your target audience likely has many of the same pain points, right?

• Complicated systems require a lot of employee training
• Equipment is expensive
• Customers hate robo-systems that are hard to navigate

Your introduction and closing should be 100% personal, but the parts where you talk about your own service/product and how it can benefit them can be the same across all outreach videos

You can get a dozen or so pitches and string them together.

If you’re comfortable with video editing, you could film certain sections and edit them in.

Even if you aren’t ready to take on video editing, this technique can be done in a one-shot video.

Having certain portions templated across multiple clients makes it easier for you to get through 3-4 videos a day.

How to Make the Videos

1. Make a script

• At least some bullet points
• Stuff you want to make sure you cover
• You don’t want to forget your target’s name or forget to introduce yourself

2. Plan to make several practice videos before your final draft. The more often you do it, the more comfortable you’ll be
3. Don’t try for studio-worthy perfection

You want it to look personal, not overly edited and polished

Be conversational

We’ll walk you through an example here from start to finish. This model can be applied to any B2B service or product.

Let’s say that you’re selling an automated cloud backup solution to companies.

You’ve chosen to target the medical vertical, specifically stand-alone urgent care facilities.

Now identify your targets:

• Front Office Clerk
• Doctors
• Administrators

Find specific names of the people who hold the positions at the facility you’re targeting in the video.

Use the company’s website, LinkedIn, your sales team may even know some of these people.

You’ll create a different, personalize video for each person. Each will contain certain common elements.

You’ve identified target’s specific pain points.

• Front Office Clerk – need easy, HIPPA compliant access to historical records
• Doctors – need quick access to records when patient in room
• Administrators – costs of storage

1. Create intro (20-30 seconds).

Define who you are

• Hi, Janet, I’m Jackson.  I work for a company named ABC Data Solutions as an information management specialist.

How you became aware of that person & why you’re contacting him/her

• I was reading John Smith’s new article about the challenges urgent care facilities face when implementing data backup solutions and I noticed you follow him too.
• The piece made me think of <XX Urgent Care> facility because I know you guys see XXX patients in a week and keeping those patient records compliant and accessible is a huge challenge.

OR

• I’m getting ready for the Urgent Care Facility Conference in November and I noticed that your company attended last year.
• I’m gonna stop by your booth at the show, and wanted to make sure that you recognized me – so here I am!

Let them off the hook

• I know data backup isn’t exciting. I know that you guys may already have a great solution in place.
• But I thought taking a few minutes of my time to share some easy ways to navigate this complicated area would be a good way for us to get to know each other.

So, let me get right into it.

2. Identify the pain points & how your product/service addresses those.

Define their business purpose to show you understand it

I can see that <XX Urgent Care> is the leading after-hours care provider in XX County.

You service hundreds of patients each week.

You face unique challenges for accessing patient records from an off-site facility during regular business hours. It gets even harder after hours.

You strive to provide thorough patient care on a tight timetable.

I have a few ideas about how you could achieve these goals a little better.

Template how your product fixes their (common) pain points.

Here’s where you can templatize your solution to the common problem, depending on who you’re creating the video for.

Front Office Clerk

Pain point: need easy, HIPPA compliant access to historical records

• You’re fielding records requests from all sides
• When a patient you haven’t seen in 3 years walks in the door, you need quick access to records that are surely stuck in storage
• Here’s how our backup solution solves this problem…

Doctors

Pain point: need quick access to records when a patient is in the room

• You service an average of XX patients on a given shift
• The longer you have to spend hunting for their patient records, the longer it takes for you to get them on the road to feeling better
• Here’s how our backup solution solves this problem…

Administrators

Pain point: costs of storage

• Storing files – onsite or online – is expensive
• The staff time spent retrieving data from offsite storage is expensive
• Here’s how our backup solution solves this problem…

3. Give them a reason to reply.

This is basically your lead magnet.

My team and I did a bunch more work researching:

• How much time a facility of your size can save with our data management solution
• How patient welfare and physician satisfaction is improved by our data management solution
• How much money a facility of your size can save with our data management solution

We’ve put together an in-depth report.

Let me know if you’re interested in learning more and I’d love to connect.

Some may choose to offer some sort of incentive.

Limited time discount

Waive some fee

Make sure to call out the value if you do this

Add some urgency

Example: “you don’t have to decide this week, but I just need to lock the offer code on your account before the sales team discontinues the code next week”

Track, Track, Track

Use wistia for video analytics

Add tracking pixels to your email signature so you can retarget.

• Facebook
• Linkedin
• google tag manager

Use marketing automation to track how/if the leads respond, opened the email, read email, etc.

And in our NEXT episode, we will go over how to choose an email automation program that will work for YOUR business.