6 Steps To Developing An E-mail
Marketing Strategy For Your Payroll Service
By Glenn Fallavollita, President – Drip Marketing, Inc.
- Word Count: 1,007
- Approximate Time To Read Article: 4.0 minutes @ 250 words per minute
Do you want more sales leads from your email marketing efforts? If you do, you will find the following six steps of particular value.
- Step One: Segment Your Databases - Before you start designing, writing, and sending a series of e-mail marketing campaigns, you need to segment your target audience the same way you go to market; therefore, we recommend creating databases that fall into these general categories:
- Clients - Payroll
- Clients - HCM
- Prospects - Association members
- Prospects - Chamber members
- Prospects - General
- Referral partners - Accountants
- Referral partners - Benefit brokers
After segmenting your lists by target audience, it will be a lot easier to develop content that is relevant to each database you have on file.
- Step Two: Clean Up Your “Prospect And Referral Partner” Databases – After segmenting your databases, it is important to remove the e-mail addresses that will cause your account to be blacklisted/flagged when using services like Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, etc. THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO YOUR CLIENT DATABASE.
Remove the e-mail addresses* that end in:
- Aim.com
- Aol.com
- Att.com
- Gmail.com
- Hotmail.com
- Mail.com
- microsoft.com
- msn.com
- netzero.com
- optonline.com
- roadrunner.com
- Yahoo.com
- att.net
- bellsouth.net
- Comcast.net
- Cox.net
- optonline.net
- prodigy.net
- SBCglobal.net
- verizon.net
Remove the “ROLE” e-mail addresses that begin with:
- Contact@
- Donot@
- Help@
- Info@
- Mail@
- Manager@
- Office@
- President@
- Sales@
- Service@
- Spam@
- Support@
- Webmaster@
* If you are buying a database of e-mail addresses, it is critical to go through this process.
- Step Three: Determine Your Content And Low-Risk Offer - Now that you know your target audience, it is time to think about what you are going to say. As I tell all our clients, “Content is king.” That being said, it can be helpful to outline the message you want to include in each e-mail campaign. Later, as you are putting together your strategy, your outline will be a nice reference to ensure you are staying on target – remember, don’t forget to add a low-risk offer.
- Step Four: Determine Your Company’s Sending Frequency And Goals - Not all sending frequencies are created equal as you can e-mail your database of payroll clients a lot more frequently than a prospect or referral partner. Ultimately, you have to decide on what works best for your target audience. From my end, I always recommend sending at least three e-mails a month to help gain maximum visibility with your databases on file. Remember, content is king and don’t be too self-serving when writing a campaign. Additionally, be careful to plan for peak buying times, i.e., year-end, upcoming holidays, webinars or events you are hosting, and the like. IMPORTANT: Don’t think for one second that blasting a generic e-newsletter once or twice a month is doing anything for your lead nurturing efforts. And if someone is telling something otherwise, they are doing your business a huge disservice.
- Step Five: Develop An E-mail Marketing Calendar – To ensure your campaigns are being sent on a regular schedule, create an e-mail marketing calendar. Not only will this help you and your team stay on target, but it will help you avoid any last minute campaigns – which tend to be filled with grammar and spelling errors, poor links and less than engaging subject lines. Your e-mail marketing calendar should include the following column headings:
- Target Send Date
- Project Manager
- e-Mail Topic
- Target Audience
- Subject Line/From Field
- Objective/Goals
- Does This Require Follow-Up By Sales Team
-
Step Six: Determine If A Salesperson’s Follow-Up Call Is Needed – To maximize the sales leads generated from your e-mail marketing campaigns, it is imperative to determine if a follow-up phone call is necessary. If it is, take the following steps:
- Create an e-mail campaign that includes a low-risk offer.
- Advise your sales team they will be taking part in a phone blitz session to help follow-up this campaign (give them 2 weeks notice).
- Create two follow-up scripts; one for talking with a live person and one for leaving a voicemail.
- Send your campaign at approximately 8:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
- After sending the campaign, wait 2.5 hours and download a list of people who opened the e-mail. Sort the list by salesperson assigned to the account, and then by e-mail addresses – then give each salesperson a list to call.
- After you and/or your salespeople leave a voicemail, make sure they send an e-mail to follow-up their voicemail message (see below).
First Name: I just called and left you a message as I wanted to follow-up on an e-mail we sent to you about 8:30 a.m. today (the one for the ________ offer).
If you want to learn how we can (reduce or increase your ___________) I have a few ideas that will help your business – just return my call or send me off a quick e-mail on the best time(s) for us to talk.
Look forward to talking soon!
Name
Company Name
Phone
e-mail Address
P.S. If you want to read what some of our clients are saying about our ____________, I have attached a few success stories for you.