The Case for Email: Why Executive Attention is Crucial

Brandi Starr [00:00:25]:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi star, and we have another amazing episode for you today. And normally I would tell you who I am joined by, but for the first time ever on revenue rehab, I am also the guest today. So this week is national email Week. And as an email marketing consultancy, this is definitely a week that we like to celebrate. And so we realize that, you know, our audience is primarily heads of marketing, vps, cmos. And when you think about email, email is very in the weeds. It is a tactic that is a part of a much larger strategy and in general, you are going to have people on your team that are going to manage email.

Brandi Starr [00:01:19]:
However, I truly believe that email is a tactic that you as an executive need to give more attention to in guiding your teams and figuring out how to really tap into its effectiveness. And so for national email week, I thought, who better than to really drive home this point then myself. So for the first time ever, I am going to be interviewing myself. So we will see how that goes. You know, kind of winging it on figuring out how to do a solo episode. Although I know some people do this all the time, you know, I am used to having amazing guests here with me on the couch. You know, email, while it seems like a small detail, it is low cost, it is high impact, and it is a way to boost revenue throughout the entire customer journey. And I'm not just talking about driving net new revenue, but email can be a revenue generator, it can be a revenue accelerator, and it can help with revenue retention and why this is so important.

Brandi Starr [00:02:32]:
Because other than your website, email is really the only channel that is used end to end. So from prospect through to loyal advocate, it's one of the few channels that is used throughout the customer journey. And so in this episode, I am going to really explore why you should get more involved in email, or at minimum, really have some conversations with your team, with your marketing managers around what they are doing and how email can be a more effective channel. And so the first thing that I think about is the fact that email, you know, addresses some challenges in b, two b, marketing that other channels do not. And if we think about, like some of our paid channels and we're thinking about programmatic advertising, social media advertising, you know, there's all these different channels where we've only got a few seconds, a few words to really capture some attention and get people to the next step. But then there is the fact of. And then what? So we got them to this white paper. We got them to this webinar, we got them to this ebook or this infographic or whatever the thing is.

Brandi Starr [00:03:53]:
But then what? And this is where other channels don't necessarily address. And so this is where email comes into play. Email is really unique in that it is a channel that every single person engages in day to day. We all live in our emails. You know, you have your email on your phone, you are using email with your colleagues, with your kids, with your spouse. You know, email is a part of our day to day. And although everyone complains about the amount of email that they have, email is really important as a channel for receiving information, with the caveat of you have to actually do it effectively. And so, you know, that unique challenge that we have is it is a way to create consistency across the brand and the brand message.

Brandi Starr [00:04:45]:
It is a way to stay in consistent communication with your audience. It is a way to give out a lot more information that you can't necessarily do in other channels. So you think about even at the point where your sales team is engaged, email can still play a role. You know, if a salesperson gets someone on the phone for that quick initial discovery, with the goal to use tech as an example of getting the demo scheduled or having a deeper discovery, there is only so much that they can say in that conversation. You know, they've really got to show all the highlights. You know, hit all the things that the prospect cares about, answer all the questions, or ask all the questions that need answers in order to figure out what is the right product or solution for that client. But they can't go into all the details. And in some cases, it's those nuances, those answers to questions that may not come out, or even questions that are had by others that are not necessarily directly a part of the buying committee, but are influencers with the organization that can sometimes go unanswered.

Brandi Starr [00:05:58]:
And this is a place where email can help, because with a series of emails, we can dive into some of those nuances and details that that one to one interaction of interacting with sales or customer success or support just can't do. So even thinking about further down the journey, let's say someone has a support request and your support team is, you know, so your support team is amazing. They're able to resolve the issue, you know, when they first call in or write in or use chat. And how much more of a great touch point is it if following that interaction, that customer receives an email with further information? So we've solved this problem for you. But here's some documentation on how to do it better next time, or how to do it right, or, you know, other ways to do something, or because you're using this feature, there may be an opportunity to tap into this other thing. This allows that touch point with the customer to add tremendous value. The problem is so often because email is a low cost channel, often email is an afterthought or companies will say, oh, just send a newsletter, or there's some haphazard communications or nurtures that are happening without there really being a true big picture around what role should email play. And so one of the reasons, sort of the next point that I want to hit on is why email often goes unrecognized in b two B marketing, despite its effectiveness.

Brandi Starr [00:07:44]:
And I truly believe that it goes unrecognized because it's hard to measure. And it's one of those things that we know has some impact. And I know that everyone knows it has some impact because as much as people will complain about email and question the effectiveness of email, no one's willing to just stop emailing. And the fact that no one's willing to pull the plug on it tells me that they know that there is some underlying value. But the reason that I think it goes unrecognized is because all of the other channels have much more clear, much clearer measures of success. So if you think about if we run content syndication, we're looking at how many net new contacts are we driving in and are they the right audience? It's very clear to see what that conversion point is, which content syndication vendor is working better for you. Thinking about programmatic ads, you know, whether it's native versus display, it's very easy to see those measures and look at those reports to be able to say, here's the impact. We drove this many eyeballs on our message, this many did the action that we wanted them to do.

Brandi Starr [00:09:03]:
And so a lot of other channels, even events, whether they're in person or virtual, here's how many people registered, here's how many people attended. Other channels have much more clear measures of effectiveness, whereas email, what we have are clicks and opens. And you know, when you look, when you think about clicks and opens, you're never going to go to your board talking about, well, our open rate is, you know, it's not a business metric. And so a lot of times it gets ignored in terms of its effectiveness because we can't measure it in the same ways. We've all seen the statistics that email has a 300 and something percent ROI or $41 for every dollar spent. There's all these really impressive stats. And I always critically ask, where does that number come from? And generally the numbers that we're seeing are more from a b, two C environment. Because when you are marketing to consumers, especially if you're in retail or something, where there's a direct purchase, it's really easy to see the impact of an email.

Brandi Starr [00:10:14]:
We sent this many out, this many opened it, this many clicked it, and here's how many sales that came from it. In a b, two B environment, you don't have that same correlation. However, you do have that same impact. And, you know, when I think about how you can better measure and attribute the success of your email campaigns in a B two B space, it really has to do with context. And so this is where, you know, this is one of those first points that you can start to have conversations with your team in looking at how is email being reported on in conjunction with other channels. And so a great example was working with a client a couple years ago, and they had five different content syndication vendors that they were working with. They were kind of piloting all these vendors to see which was most effective. And there were three of them that were kind of middle of the road.

Brandi Starr [00:11:13]:
Their cost per lead was pretty average. The amount of contacts they drove, you know, was solid. And there were two outliers. There was one that drastically drove significantly more drastically, significantly more leads to the business and had the second lowest cost per lead. The other outlier drew, you know, generated the fewest leads and had the highest CPL. And so when the client was looking at their next year, like planning for their next year and determining which of these vendors to keep, because they only wanted to keep two, you know, the five was just for a pilot to figure out what was working, they intended to keep the one that generated the most leads and had a lower CPL and one of the other middle of the road ones, and they were going to get rid of the other three. And I kind of leaned in and said, before you make that decision, let's look at what happens after the lead is generated. Because in this b two B space, they sell through a partner channel.

Brandi Starr [00:12:25]:
So tying any sort of marketing activity, you know, to, directly to revenue is nearly impossible for them. And so a lot of it is more anecdotal. And so because we were running a number of nurtures, we have a full campaign map with them where, you know, depending on where they're coming from, there are specific nurtures that they go into. And based on what they do you know, they flow in and out of all these different campaigns. And so what we did was we took the performance of their welcome nurture, which all contacts that are net new initially come into a welcome. And then based on a few other things, there's one of five nurtures they go into after that. And so we looked at the welcome first, and we broke out the welcome performance purely based on each of the content syndication vendors. So we were able to see opens, clicks, content engagement, because they use path factory for those, for each of the five vendors.

Brandi Starr [00:13:25]:
And then we went a step further and said, once they came out of the welcome, what campaign did they go into next and how did they engage there? And so the outcome of looking at this data actually indicated that that vendor that they thought was their number one content syndication vendor actually performed the worst. They generated a lot of contacts. You know, the cost for each contact wasn't that high. But then those people that came from that source, when they flowed into their database and started receiving emails, they did almost nothing. They were completely unengaged. And so basically they paid for contacts that never engaged with them. Later, if I look at the other end of that, that vendor that they for sure were not going to work with anymore because they were exploring and generated the fewest number of contacts, was the exact opposite. Those contacts, once they got into the other communications, were some of the highest engaged contacts.

Brandi Starr [00:14:33]:
They stayed engaged. They consumed content. They not only consumed content, but they binged content, meaning consuming multiple pieces of content in a single session. And they did so through both the welcome and the next nurture that they went into. So although each of those contacts costs more and each of you know, and there were fewer of them, that was their number one source as it relates to content syndication for driving net new leads and looking at the other three that were kind of middle of the road, they stayed pretty middle of the road. And so, you know, we chose the two to keep. And so if we look at the fact that they were not initially looking at email in conjunction with that channel, they would have actually made the exact wrong decision in who to continue to spend their money with. And content syndication was a significant portion of their budget each year.

Brandi Starr [00:15:29]:
And so making the decision to spend that budget with the wrong vendor could have been detrimental. And so this is where we start to get better. And I use attribute not in the attribution model, we're not going to get into the a word, but in better measuring and attributing the success by looking at the other channels in conjunction with email because in general, wherever they start from, the next thing you're going to do is email them. Likewise, I'll give you one other scenario around how to best measure. We had a company client, new CMO, came in, and that CMO was very much of the mindset that marketing should still be nurturing, even once an opportunity is created and sales is engaged. Their head of sales was of the opposite mindset, that once his people got involved, he wanted marketing communications to stop. He was okay with the newsletter, but beyond the newsletter, he wanted them to end. And so there was this friction back and forth because the CMO was saying, there's a huge missed opportunity here.

Brandi Starr [00:16:44]:
And the head of sales was like, this is my territory. Thanks for your two cent, but no thanks. And so the CMO asked for my advice on how to help convince the head of sales to go along with this and so, simple suggestion. I suggested a pilot to ask for a couple of sales reps who believed in the power of email, so making it voluntary, because, of course, anytime you're doing anything dealing with the opportunity process, you run the risk of impacting someone's commission. And that commission is their livelihood. And so we didn't want to do anything, you know, force anything on any sales rep and have them point fingers back at marketing and say, this is why I didn't hit my numbers. And so we had, you know, we had the conversation, made the pitch of, you know, I helped them to organize. This is what we are going to present as the pilot.

Brandi Starr [00:17:42]:
That pilot was going to be three nurtures. And one of those nurtures was the main nurture that once an account became an opportunity, that there was a nurture that the salesperson would flag something in their CRM to indicate what product family they were talking to them about. And there was a nurturer that nurtured them with just some of the key basic information that they should know along that process. And that was one of those. Everybody was going to go through that one. Then there was a second nurture that handled objections. If a salesperson recognized that a client may have a really strong potential objection, not that they've actually said it, but reading between the lines, you know, they were able to sense some concern. There was a nurture that subtly set out to address and overcome those objections based on what the salesperson, you know, identified.

Brandi Starr [00:18:48]:
So again, there was some sort of field in the CRM that came into the marketing automation platform that was the trigger to identify the objection. And then the third nurture was for those later stage opportunities when we felt like they were in the evaluation that really was trying to reach out to those that were not directly engaged with sales, but a part of the buying committee. And in some cases, like, there was an email component because in some cases, throughout, other people had engaged with content and got on the list. And in other ways, they did some ABM marketing through other channels as well. So those were the three main opportunities. And we didn't do a ton of emails because this was a pilot, you know, we had to prove that it worked. And we needed to do so fairly quickly because once we got the green light to do a pilot, you know, we needed to get it done. And so the head of sales basically agreed.

Brandi Starr [00:19:47]:
If there were salespeople that wanted to participate, he'd let it slide. And so there were two or three, I can't remember, been a number of years now, salespeople who were like, yep, I believe that this will help me. And so we did the pilot with those people. We started nurturing all of their opportunities. We had all of the rest of the sales team as sort of the control group. And those contacts followed the current policy, which was once an opportunity was created, nothing was sent to them other than just the standard newsletter. Well, long story short, the pilot group ran circles around the control group, and it didn't as much impact whether a deal closed or not, but it did impact velocity and deal size. And so we had, you know, they had their bi team do some analysis of all of the opportunities.

Brandi Starr [00:20:51]:
I can't say exactly what all was analyzed because we just got the output after the fact, but it made a very clear statement to the head of sales that email mattered, and email is still valuable during the opportunity process. Again, with the caveat, if done right. And so this is where there is the opportunity to better measure and attribute the success of all channels once we start to look at them in the context of email and how people are engaging, once they get on our list, once they are talking to sales, et cetera, et cetera. So, shifting gears a bit, because I've been talking a lot about driving net new revenue, and so I want to talk a bit about how email contributes to the long term relationship building and customer retention. So there's all sorts of statistics. So here we had a number of us get CCSM certified, which is a certified customer success manager, because we do believe in the customer success principles and the way that you engage and retain clients. And so going through that certification process, one of the things that was communicated as being really important is the handoff between sales and success. So once they go from being a prospect to an actual customer and the communications that they receive, whether that's written, an email, verbal, etcetera, because naturally companies will have, and individuals will have buyer's remorse once they've made a purchase.

Brandi Starr [00:22:34]:
Did I make the right purchase? Was this a good use of money? Are we going to hit our objectives? Were these the right people? There's always a little bit of that, you know, nagging, shoulda, coulda, woulda, did I do the right thing? And so there's a lot of attention paid to how that handoff happens. And honestly, not enough attention paid to what communications are we sending them. And so, you know, I am a believer that that critical moment of truth, or there's all sorts of terms for them, but that critical moment in that journey of when they become a customer, how you start to communicate with them, how you onboard them as a customer, is extremely important to retention and satisfaction. And so not only should there be a whole campaign map around the communications that are for prospects, but we should also have our communication map for those that are customers. What do we need to, you know, what are those critical moments? Onboarding is obviously one renewal is probably the other most obvious one, but there are places where we can leverage email to help with that retention. And so another great example there is, I was working with a credit union some years back, and they, a key part, they were in the DC area. And so a large number of their customer base or their account holders were in Congress. And, you know, you think about congresspeople in some cases, like different roles have, or different offices have different tenures.

Brandi Starr [00:24:13]:
Some, you know, get reelected over and over. Others may be there and then don't get reelected. And so you have people in and out of DC. And one of the problems that they asked me about was they were having a problem with account retention, because what would happen is a congressperson would get out of office and they would move back to whatever state they came from and they would close their account. And these are generally high net worth people and they would have multiple accounts. And this was a big loss for the business. And so they asked me, what can we do? How can we try to get ahead of this to help people understand that even if you move out of state, there's online banking. You know, most people never go into a branch these days anyway like that, that they can keep their money in this credit union and that there is benefit to doing so even if they move out of state.

Brandi Starr [00:25:12]:
And so we started with the data and looking at what data they had that could identify accounts that were at risk. And working with their analysts, we identified that there is generally where they will have deposits and then deposits will stop, balances will fall below a certain amount or fall to the minimum and not change. Like, there were all these indicators that an account was at risk for closing and that, and so we took that data and we built a nurture for it. We actually built lead scoring and we used it sort of as negative scoring. So instead of likelihood to purchase, we did a lead score that was likelihood to, you know, for attrition that they are for churn that they would close their account. And so anyone that scored at a certain level that they were at risk, flowed into a nurture campaign that essentially help them to understand that even if they don't live in the DC area, it's still a great credit union for them to be a part of. And as a result, coming out of that, that percentage of accounts that closed started to drop. And so this is one example of how you can leverage email to really help make sure that you are protecting your revenue.

Brandi Starr [00:26:38]:
And the real, you know, the thing that is key is really getting into the thought process are what are those triggers that indicate that we should be talking to these customers or these prospects differently? And that's where I get into, when I say email done right. It's not this broad nurture that you dump your whole database into. And they get a million emails and it's all spam and you talk about, we're awesome, we're great, here's why we're awesome. That's not effective. And that's why email gets a bad rap, because that's what most people do. However, when we really give some thought about what are the communications that should be sent, who should they be sent to and what are the triggers that should indicate that someone is ready for that messaging. That's where email becomes really effective. And so when we think about, and I think I've answered like, the next question that I wanted to tackle is what role email plays in the overall b, two b marketing strategy and how it can be leveraged to its full potential.

Brandi Starr [00:27:40]:
And the way to really leverage it to its full potential is to realize email sits at the center of all communications. All roads lead to email. All the top of funnel stuff that we do to drive interest, to drive net new contacts, et cetera, all lead to us sending emails once they become a customer. If you're a software company, there is some ways that you can, you know, have in product messaging and things like that. If your b, two c, sms is big, but in general, for b, two b companies, once they're a customer, email and a lot of times, like in person events are the main channels that you have to communicate. And so when you think about email as that center and really critical part of your strategy, that's how we tap into the full potential when we start to plan email in conjunction with how we plan other channels. You know, we're running programmatic, we're running events. Then what, what's the right communication? How do we need to segment out that audience? Because when we think about these things ahead of time, this is the opportunity that if we're not already capturing that data, that we can put something in place so that we are, that we can better, better target those people.

Brandi Starr [00:28:59]:
And so email plays a huge role in being able to again drive net new revenue, accelerate revenue and retain it. And so, you know, thinking about, the other thing that I wanted to talk about was cross channel. And so I've talked about a lot of ways where email played a role. I gave an example of how content syndication and email work together. But really thinking, and this, you know, my answer in related to cross channel campaigns really ties into what technologies you have. So depending on what tech you have, so many things can become possible. But one of the most successful campaigns that I've run started with a client running multiple demand generation type efforts or top of funnel efforts. So they had this industry report that they worked with Gartner or Forrester, Aberdeen, way back in the day.

Brandi Starr [00:30:00]:
I can't remember who, but it was one of those reports that they worked with one of the big analyst firms on that they had the rights to be like the sole marketer of this report for that year or whatever. And so they ran all sorts of efforts around that. They ran paid, paid media, organic, social, paid social. They did some webinars where they pulled content from the report and did a webinar, I mean, pretty much all the channels that you can think about to attract people to download this report now, because the report was something that was highly sought after, getting people to download it was the easy part. And again, they ran multiple channels. But then the hard part was, how do we turn these people who are getting on our list purely because they want this report? There's no indicator that they wanted to buy anything from this company. They just wanted the information. So how do you turn those people into actual buyers? That's one place that the webinars came in.

Brandi Starr [00:31:04]:
So in some cases, some of the webinars were a little further down the funnel that they were offered up after you downloaded the report. There were places where there were a, there was a nurture in place, and that nurture campaign was not at all centered around by my stuff, or here's how great we are. It was continued thought leadership related to what was found in that report with a little, and here's how this ties to what we do. Sprinkled in, and with that little sprinkle, sprinkle, there were assets that they were linking to that were further down the funnel. And so where they saw engagement with that kind of content, that's where they became an opportunity to get them in front of a PDR. Where we also had the opportunity is where we saw engagements, like repeated engagement with email, but not enough to actually become a lead. They actually pushed those contexts into a LinkedIn custom audience so that they could then run LinkedIn ads to try and get in front of them in that channel using the same assets that they ignored in email. So they were engaged, but there were things they weren't engaging with.

Brandi Starr [00:32:24]:
So they pushed those things through LinkedIn ads. And so that was another way they also had, it wasn't Syndoso, but a sendoso competitor. I can't, can't think of the name now, but there was also a place where anybody from that campaign that did sign up for a demo, there was a thank you there where they did send out a gift and, you know, it had branded goodies and something else in there. And so it was orchestrated really, really well of contacts being pushed into email, pushed out of email to another channel, having direct mail pushed from the email campaign. And so there's lots of ways that all these channels can be connected. And then the last thing that I really want to tackle is how can data from email campaigns be used to inform and optimize strategies in other marketing channels? And so I gave that example around content syndication. Like that is probably the best example of how it can be used. But this is where we start to look at how is email impacting this other thing.

Brandi Starr [00:33:37]:
So if we're looking at webinars and online events, you're probably going to be sending invites via email to your audience and also running, you know, public, whether it's ad or ads or organic social. You can look at what's working in email. You know, is it messaging? Like you think about your email list is a friendly audience. And so in some cases, that's places to easily run a b testing to see what messaging is driving registrations. So that when you're then spending money running, say, paid social, paid ads, etcetera, you already have some indicator of what's working. So that's one way is to leverage email for testing messaging because it's really easy to do that in almost all marketing automation platforms. And so you can kind of see what works, see what works with an audience that's already used to hearing from you to give you some indicators of strategy as you move forward. So really looking at how email and other channels play well together and how that ties to lead generation, opportunity creation, opportunity size, opportunity velocity, customer retention, customer engagement, product usage, if you've got that data, you know, looking at what the impact of email is on all of those things and how people that fall into different categories.

Brandi Starr [00:35:02]:
So looking at your email performance by sub audiences is another way. Like are there audiences we need to be talking to differently? Are there places where our message is really landing or we're getting the product usage, being able to, you know, look at your email database and look at some of that segmentation is the other place. And so thinking about the action, you know, I always ask guests for the one thing in what is the one thing that they can do to move in the right direction. And in this case, it is a conversation. I suggest having a conversation with your team, whether it be one on one or collectively, and not just the person who's responsible for email. Because if the person responsible for email is the only one thinking about email, then you're not doing it right. You need to have all of your marketing managers, anyone that is managing the strategy and delivery of any of the channels that you use needs to be a part of the conversation to really understand how have they considered the use of email and what they're doing? How can they leverage data from the email platform to help inform what they're doing? And how can they better plan and coordinate with the person that does manage email in being able to have all of these efforts work together. And so this is a place where if you, as the leader of the marketing team, give it the proper attention, not that you need to stay in the weeds, but take a moment to get, get in the weeds with your team to really understand how do you best use, how do you unlock the potential of email? Because again, email is low cost and high impact if done well.

Brandi Starr [00:36:58]:
And so that's my advice. I would definitely love to hear how those conversations go. Share with me what ideas or feedback or questions, questions did you get from your team? I mean, obviously the shameless plug, you guys know where to find me. This is what Tegrida does. So there's lots of people listening to revenue rehab and has no idea what Tegrida does. But email and orchestrating the communication journey is our bread and butter. Not just the technology, but the process, the strategy and the technology. And how do you really unlock the potential of email? So if that's something that you're having a challenge with, there's lots of ways that we can help you.

Brandi Starr [00:37:40]:
I know people, I can connect you with the right people. But otherwise, you know, in general, this is a place where it is my goal to build the case for email and why your attention is extremely critical. So this was my first episode. Definitely drop me a comment, let me know how I did hosting the episode solo without a guest. And so I have enjoyed this so much. I think I might do it again if you guys, if it's received well, because there's lots of expertise that I have to share, but I hope that you have enjoyed this episode. I can't believe we're at the end. We'll see you next time.

Brandi Starr [00:38:28]:
Bye.