Email marketing has been one of the highest performing outbound lead generation throughout the 2020. Everyone is sick of pandemic talk (so are we!), but it’s also important to be aware of the changes you can make to your business strategy to capitalise on the most effective channels at the moment.
That said, to make the most of direct email marketing, a lot of factors come into play. The core part of any email marketing is the data you use for your outreach, and for reasons more than just how many people you contact.
Email data is only accurate at the second it’s collected, and after this changes can be made that you have minimal control over and your database accuracy deteriorates rapidly over time. Using tools to get email data and verify it close to the time of a campaign can help optimise the accuracy of your data and results of the campaign.
Deliverability of email addresses is the first part of all outbound email marketing, and without this it’s going to be challenging for the rest to be successful. Firstly, it’s a numbers game. The higher the percentage of emails that deliver, the more people receive your emails. THis is the first step to people opening the emails, reading them and responding.
The initial deliverability of outbound emails also feeds back into your campaign, and can affect subsequent deliverability. If a high percentage of emails are bouncing, this can negatively impact the domain you’re using to send the emails out. This then leaves you more susceptible to other companies’ spam filters blocking your emails being delivered to valid email addresses. If you then get a high percentage of your emails being blocked, that feeds back into your domain authority again and leaves you at high risk of being marked as spam. It’s a downward spiral from there. Likewise, if your email data is of high quality and has a high percentage of opens and engagement, your domain will gain more authority and the emails will have a far higher deliverability.
The best way to minimise the impact of this is to get email data that’s as recent as possible, to improve the accuracy. Removing any email addresses that may be generic, such as info@ or email addresses for personal domains such as google which have stricter spam filters can also help.
Accurate data only helps you also if you’re reaching out to the right people. Targeting the right people for any campaign is crucial. If people you’re reaching out to aren’t relevant, they are less likely to open, interact with and reply to the emails you send them, so ensuring you focus on the most relevant job titles of the decision makers makes a huge difference. These people are also the most likely to be interested in your product or service and respond to become sales opportunities, which is of course the end goal of any outbound campaign – so you’re improving your success rates too.
It’s always quality over quantity, and this applies to your email data too. Sending out thousands of emails to poor quality data will lead to far poorer results than ensuring you’ve got a list of accurate email addresses of prospects who are decision makers within your target market.
We take care of this for you, pulling only the most up-to-date email addresses just days prior to beginning outreach, to minimise the impact of email addresses being invalid or no longer in use. Combine this with our expertise on targeting and reaching out to the right people for your business, we offer highly targeted and extremely successful campaigns for a fraction of the cost of other businesses. All data is included free of charge, as well all the campaign setup and a full strategy session on targeting the correct people for your business.