Five foundational building blocks for successful B2B email campaigns in the Social Trust Economy

If your job involves anything related to demand generation, you have been asked this question: what makes an email successful? More often than not, the actual question is couched in tactical execution terms completely unrelated to the actual objective of email communication. That question sounds something like "What are the best practices for creating successful emails?" Experts often respond with well-researched and tested tactical execution terms, contributing to what I consider an alarming trend in the demand gen community: email communication has become a commodity.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of companies offer pre-fab email templates, drag-and-drop functionality and plug-and-play widgets for dashboard metrics. Don't get me wrong; I consider myself a net promoter of these tools and I would not advocate banishment from your demand gen tool box. In fact, a talented and creative professional can maximize ROMI utilizing these tools and deliver smashing results. The tools are not the problem. The loss of message focus is the problem. It seems that technological advances in marketing automation technology have lulled marketers into a false sense of security about the importance of relevant messaging. It's almost as if some believe compelling content is found on aisle 14 in the widget section at Wal-Mart.

Yes, deliverability, sender scores and browser optimization are important, but they are TBU* if the message is irrelevant, uncompelling or misdirected. (*True, But Useless. Borrowed from an analogy in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Switch.)

So, when asked about highly effective B2B email best practices, I start with my five foundational building blocks.

1. You need a clever hook. Clever says more with less. Clever is visceral. Clever gets to the point. Clever requires little from your reader, yet offers an immediate and tangible reward. In order to evaluate "clever" in terms of a meaningful metric, let's apply a little A-B testing. Which is more clever?

A. I regret to inform you that I strongly disagree with your demeaning and overbearing management style and am submitting two-week's notice of termination of my employment.

B. Take this job and shove it.

A. My sincere hope is that your happiness will not be limited by your inability to engage in risk due to your relational insecurities.

B. I hope you dance.

If you chose "A" in either case, please consider a career in Human Resources. If you're unimpressed with the country music song titles, I'd bluntly suggest you invest some time listening to some of the best hook writers on the planet. Love it or hate it, you will learn something.

2. You need a compelling MTFV (more-than-fair-value) offer at the heart of your CTA. Your MTFV offer should deliver substantially more value than you expect to receive in return. We now live in the social trust economy: it's the law of reciprocity at work in an economy where trust is brand currency. In Steve Woods' latest book, Revenue Engine, he notes the well-documented rise in social media influence. In just two years since initial publication, Eloqua's Revenue Performance Management model now requires the addition of a third foundational tenet:

• Who you are
• What you want
• Who you trust

Ask yourself how much credibility you are likely to build using insignificant, branded trinkets and product brochures as currency in the social trust economy. Then come up with a real MTFV offer.

3. You need to build into your campaigns a sequential, incremental buy-in process. Not a singular interaction, but process. Even seemingly inconsequential B2B purchases are rarely conducted as single interaction. Consider how much research, analysis and socialization can be involved in the procurement of a five-dollar ream of copy paper? Knowing this, should you not expect that your email message is only one step in a series (or, depending on your sales cycle, a very long series) of iterations? If you anticipate your communication to be serial and sequential, your expectations for the reader's likely response is properly set and you can engineer a roadmap based on that likely response.

Match your message to that buyer's journey and use your response expectations to create a logical roadmap to success. Use your technology tools here to provide choices for next steps or content delivery preferences, removing roadblocks from your buyer's journey. Will the next question be how much will it cost? Provide cost calculators that can pre-populate an order form. If the next question is most likely to concern delivery time, find creative ways to integrate your production schedule data to create availability estimates. Get creative. Better yet, get clever!

4. Now that you know or message is going to be serial, you must create logical, intuitive navigation to guide your reader through your sequence. A well-deserved shout-out to the late Steve Jobs: think iPad gestures, not Ctrl-Alt-Del. Simple is almost always better. In an earlier blog, I related how my hypothesis that email readers will do what you ask led to a test that yielded 35% to 700% improvement in CTR. Ask your readers. In plain text copy. Above the fold. Examples:

When can we deliver your order? Estimate your delivery date now >
Need monthly delivery? See how much pre-ordering will save you here >

I favor buyer-centric language directly related to the CTA offer to overused and under-delivering tool names like ROI or TCO calculator. Unless you're actually selling calculators, of course. I intend to test this hypothesis in the near future, so stay tuned to {Demand Gen Brief} to see how much real performance improvement you can realize with another simple practice.

And remember serial messaging! Don't just stop with your useful tool; integrate an obvious navigation roadmap to guide your reader to the next logical step in your messaging.

5. Last, but certainly not least, you need a pre-defined, quantitative objective for your every step in your email campaign. If you think of your email campaign as a subset of your marketing funnel (you are thinking that way, right?) it is straightforward to design your campaign objectives in exactly the same way you design your funnel. This also forces you to think in quantitative terms, such as 100 MQLs, instead of imprecise terms like as many leads as possible. Reverse-engineering from a hard objective makes it very simple to figure the requirements for each stage in your serial campaign.

In review, the five foundational building blocks are not about HTML trickery or optimization techniques, but solid way to build credibility in our new social trust economy. Like any building project, unless your foundation is level, true and plumb, nothing you build on top of it will be right. So forget optimization until you have the foundation correct.  I hope you find these building blocks to be constructive as you plan your next email campaign.

© 2011, Stephen D. Turley. All rights reserved.