For any business, email marketing is hugely important to the lead generation strategy. It serves as a vital piece to prospecting and upselling efforts. Many managed service providers (MSPs) face an initial challenge when kicking off email marketing campaigns for the first time. This is because not every MSP has a large marketing team, or someone solely dedicated to email marketing. To help MSPs make the most of their email marketing efforts, we’ve compiled a list of tips that every successful strategy should abide by.
Keep these three tips in mind when crafting an email campaign:
1. Include a Call to Action
A call to action, or CTA, gives your reader an obvious next step after reading your email. If you don’t provide them with a CTA, it leaves the reader at a dead-end. CTAs provide you with the opportunity to keep the conversation going. Your CTA can be a link to additional content, like eBooks or success stories, or it can be as simple as ‘Give me a call to discuss things further at this number ###-###-####.’ Your CTAs will give you the ability to see how successful your campaigns are. Even if recipients are opening your emails, you’ll want to know if they’re engaging with them.
2. Buying Lists or Building Databases?
After you’ve crafted your email campaigns, the next step is deciding who to send them to. If you’ve already exhausted your current prospect and customer list, you may be considering buying a list. While buying a list is a quick fix to build your database, there’s no guarantee you’ll see a return on this investment in the long run. This is because awesome email lists aren’t usually for sale, and the contacts you’re purchasing likely won’t know your brand. Instead, work on building your database over time by targeting prospects who are already engaging with your content and visiting your website.
3. Patience is Key!
Email marketing is an ongoing effort. You can’t build a few campaigns, run them, and then walk away. To see real results, it should be a marketing effort you’re regularly tackling and measuring. Keep a log of every email you send and note the date, time, subject line, topic, open rate, and click-through rate. It’s also important to note how many ‘unsubscribe’ requests you receive per email. This metric will help you weed out the less successful emails and allow you to model new campaigns after your high performing emails.
Keeping the three tips above in mind when crafting new email campaigns is vital if you want to see success. Including a call to action and keeping logs that dive deeper into your emails will yield success over time. You’ll be able to attach real data to your email marketing efforts, which will in turn have a direct impact on your prospecting and up-selling strategies. Recording metrics will only help you make your emails better, and in turn your database will grow.
More: If you’re interested in learning more about which tactics go into effecting email marketing campaigns, check out the eBook, ‘Email Marketing Made MSPeasy.’ For an even deeper dive into lead generation, join Datto for a webinar on March 23, 2017.
Pete Rawlinson is chief marketing officer at Datto Inc. Read more Datto guest blogs here.
