As we approach 2025, Manchester Digital is excited to share Picturing 2025 - a series of essays from our members offering insights into the tech trends and challenges ahead. Below, MN8 share how email marketing can boost your sales and engagement next year.
Personalised email campaigns to help your business reach more of the right customers, build sustainable pipeline and drive revenue.
How do you generate new business conversations for your business? There’s a lot of ways to open doors with potential customers, but if you are like most businesses, emails would have played a part.
They’re great for this – they have a low barrier to entry, everybody has them and new technology is making sending emails even easier.
But sending emails is not smooth sailing by any means in 2024. In fact, seeing success from cold emails is becoming increasingly rare and it’s a completely different ball game to what it was even a year ago.
This is for three key issues:
Technology
As technology has progressed, new capabilities have enabled cold emails to shoot through the roof. Automation software’s are now able to send emails sequences whilst you sleep and Generative AI can write your emails for you. You don’t need to think or move your mouse to send a cold email these days, and this is what a lot of people do!
Competition
Not only has technology rapidly increased the number of cold emails, the shift of both the micro and macro-economic landscapes means that there are more businesses starting up, online, fighting to win less business in today’s economy. Inboxes are full of opportunist sales people using the same annoying emails in a desperate attempt to try win their prospect’s attention, and it’s ruining most people’s relationships with their inboxes.
Spam
In a move to protect their user’s experiences and their inboxes and address the two above issues, Google and Microsoft teamed up to roll out an anti-spam update across Gmail and Outlook this year. Now, more emails than ever are now ending up in spam than ever. 49% of emails are now going to spam and this is increasing as email providers continuously improve their spam filtering.
What was once a salesman’s and marketeer’s dream has now become a waste of time (for most).
You may be reading this thinking that cold email isn’t worth your time anymore. That is the case for a lot of the lousy professionals and companies out there. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, if you send them properly today, the opportunity is huge…
Cold email isn’t dead, you just need to be sending clever emails (by this we mean *really* clever emails) and not end up in spam.
How to Make Outbound Emails Work
Our Email Marketing Process.
Our approach to email marketing is based on addressing all of the 3 problems we have outlined above:
- Strategic use of Technology
Whilst we use intelligent technology to brainstorm and test our ideas, to help with research and to take care of low-value tasks – enhancing our efficiency and decision-making. However, we do not use any AI generated content or rely on automating our processes to prevent our emails from landing in spam and ensuring recipients engagement. Maintaining the personal touch is critical to the success of our emails.
- Contrasting the Competition
Separating yourself from the rest is critical to email success today. To be a breath of fresh air in a prospect’s inbox, we make sure that we keep our distance from the heard of naggy salespeople. We treat people like people, and use messaging that they would want to hear. We don’t follow the latest trends or buzzwords and use meticulous copywriting that stands out from the crowd and get’s replies.
- Avoiding Spam
To ensure our emails don’t end up the spam folder, we take a lot of precautions around sending our emails. There is a lot of careful consideration that goes into our email operations with over 20 different tricks that help us get past the spam filters every time and we are able to achieve a 100% deliverability rate for our emails.
The Art of Cold Emails
Besides addressing these issues, there are so many different aspects that must go into the consideration of successful email copy. Cold emails are turning into more of a fine art than anything.
The art is a fine line of balancing power plays, psychology, social proof all into a small body of text that carries an engaging tone.
Here are some of the critical principles that you must take into consideration when writing your copy:
Subject lines – these need to be punchy, short, specific and engaging.
Hooks – you need to hook your prospect’s attention based on the recipient’s benefits, not yours
Main body – must tell a big story in a few words, precise and super clear with no fluff.
Calls to action – these need to be present to control the interaction, but they must be easy to understand and cannot be pushy to deter a response.
Key Benefits of Cold Emails for your Business
- Direct Access to Targeted Decision Makers: Nearly every buyer in business has an email. With cold email, you can have direct access to your ideal buyer at minimal cost.
- Quick and Measurable Results: Emailing is a quick and effective channel which can get results immediately. It’s an agile approach and can quickly pivot, scaling efforts up or down depending on your needs. Emailing is also an affordable way to gather market research by testing new campaigns, offerings and market segments – gaining loads of insight into your go to market strategy.
- High ROI: The costs around cold email are very, very low compared to other marketing channels, and if done correctly, can have enormous rates of return on investment.
- Relationship Building: Emails enable you to initiate an initial relationship with your prospects which you can build out with activity from other channels.
Success Stories
Contract Cleaning
We helped a contract cleaning company in the UK uplift their revenue by 80% through cold emails.
The company got most of their business from calling and had used cold email in the past but never with much luck.
By sitting with them to understand their offering and nail down their ideal customer, we took the time to build out a well-defined sales strategy. Using this we developed email campaigns and managed to book the meetings that helped them land 3 new contracts, all with 6 figure revenues.
Bespoke Software Development
In another example, an Irish tech company came to us who won all their new business from inbound leads and referrals. Their sales team had tried using cold emails to improve their pipeline, but had not seen much success. We reviewed their strategy and advised where it could be improved.
Similarly, we sat with them to find out what their ideal prospect looked like and built a bespoke outbound strategy for the business to contact the relevant prospects on email.
The introductions they initiated here generated 9 months of work for the company across numerous projects.
