The Argument Against Blast Emails — Why You Should Use Email Automation

by Cyndie Shaffstall

Wander around your marketing department (or, if you’re a small business, dig through the pile on your desk), and you’ll find you, like many to most other small-business marketers — and many medium- and large-sized businesses — send emails on a overhead-intensive ad hoc or scheduled ad hoc basis.

If this approach describes your email marketing, your business probably waits until a need occurs, such as a new product or service, to even begin the design and development of the email. Once designed and built, the email is loaded into either your business email app (Gmail, Outlook, or even SalesForce), and sent using BCC to your entire prospects list. The problem comes when one of these emails is time-sensitive, needs to be sent now, and your desk or department is already under siege by a variety of other must-have-your-attention-now projects.

When you approach your email campaigns in some semblance of the aforementioned process, you are engaging in blast emails. The unfortunate reality is this process, as I said, is overhead-intensive and is the least effective method for nurturing prospects toward becoming a customer.

In addition to using a blast-email approach, some marketing departments also do not use automated-email applications (e.g., LeadFormix, Act-On Software, Pardot, HubSpot) to enable automatic sending based upon factors such as (but not limited to) type of prospect, engagement of the prospect, date and/or time, or event. Instead, these marketers use their business email accounts or email apps such as Constant Contact or iContact, to deploy marketing messages on a one-off basis, which nearly always increases the cost.

Email automation reduces costs by working a bit like an assembly line. Using themes (or templates), you can mass generate your emails, dropping in custom, personalized messaging as needed, with far less demand on your supporting cast members: writers, designers, IT, and others. These cost savings are realized in both the design and the development stages; you need one branded design instead of one design for every email, and the development team can create a single template with areas as containers for appropriate messaging. Further, the automated sending on a predetermined schedule (drip marketing) or as responses to engagement (nurture marketing) can represent a huge cost savings in the final key area, deployment.

Study after study confirms automated email marketing is far more effective across industries at converting prospects and leads to customers. According to MarketingSherpa’s 2013 Marketing Survey, there can be as much as a 15% savings on the design and development of campaigns for businesses using email automation, and businesses have cut overall waste at least by 5%. What’s more, according to Bulldog Solutions, there is an average of 75% faster sales cycle realized and a 54% increase in quota achievement. To consider the cost savings your company might realize, let’s first discuss the options for automation.

Drip campaigns

Drip marketing will keep you top of mind when your recipient is ready to enter or reenter the sales funnel — gentle reminders. These emails (or direct mails) are of a similar design and usually based upon a branded template or theme. The message is general and is sent to a general list. Of course, personalization and segmentation will ensure your message is targeted and better received even when using a general list, but the message is sent on a predetermined schedule. We often refer to this as the passive path.

Think of the drip-irrigation system, from where this campaign style acquired its moniker. The water drips at a consistent rate regardless of whether or not the plant is thirsty: drip, drip, drip. Your campaign should do the same.

In order to determine the frequency of the drip, or touch, you will need to ask, test, or survey your audience. If you are a nationwide pet food supplier, you might find twice a week is the right pace. If you’re selling enterprise software, perhaps it’s once every two weeks. The span of time in between drips does not change the definition or purpose. You are regularly pinging your constituents with a cue describing an existing relationship and providing information that, in the long run, will contribute to their buying decision.

Eventually your recipient will receive a message from you — either at exactly the right time or of the ideal offer — and they will engage: click to watch, download, or take a test drive. With this engagement, it’s now time to get your nurture campaign involved.

Nurture campaigns

Unlike drip marketing, nurture marketing fires off automatically each time your recipient engages. When you send a drip email offering a preview of your new video and the recipient clicks to view, your nurture campaign should automatically deploy a message thanking them for viewing the video and offering up a link to something nudging them to the next step in the purchasing process. Perhaps this is a white paper or a demo. It might even be a meeting with a salesperson. Additional nurturing emails are queued and deployed with each new engagement point of the recipient. We call the nurture campaign the active path because your recipients are actively engaged.

To build your nurture steps, give consideration to your current sales process: you acquire a lead, qualify the lead, nurture the lead by providing additional information as needed, and at some point close the sale. It’s critical to sit with your sales team and discuss their current process for closing sales. Along with management and your creativity, you should be able to architect a digital-representation campaign (or, if direct mail, a physical representation) of the sales team’s approach. Here’s a rough outline:

1. Acquire a prospect
2. Welcome the prospect — for your first touch, consider a blast email that simply proves deliverability and enables them to follow you socially. If the email successfully makes it to the inbox and/or is opened or not deleted, shuttle the prospect to your drip segment. If they follow you socially, add them to your nurture segment.
3. Begin the qualifying process — you could, for instance, provide a link to a YouTube video, a resource download, or high-value areas of your website.
4. Auto-respond appropriately to the lead — With each specific type of engagement, automatically send a prepared message (called an auto-responder) acknowledging the engagement, thanks them for the engagement, and offers an accelerated engagement (the next logical step in the sales process).

For instance, if the recipient watched the video, offer a white paper on the same subject. For someone shopping for dog food, the video might be a description on the benefits of the brand. If they watch the video, the next auto-responder might be a coupon for that brand. If they do not redeem the coupon you could move them to the drip campaign or you could leave them in the nurture campaign and send another auto-responder with a coupon of a higher value; with a bit of urgency thrown in for good measure (shop until midnight tonight and get free shipping). If pass on the second coupon as well, consider a video on another brand.

1. Rinse and repeat. For each engagement, respond appropriately, and offer an accelerated engagement acting as a nudge in the right direction — heading toward your shopping cart or offline purchase.

Lead scoring

If you’re using a CRM, each event from blast, drip, and nurture campaigns can and should contribute or deduct from your lead score. For instance, if a lead unsubscribes, you can deduct from the lead score and if they open an email, follow you socially, watch a video, download a resource, or visit your website, you can add to your lead score with higher numbers indicating higher levels of interest or value.

Automated and manual monitoring of your engagement with your campaigns is critical. It ensures you do not continue to email messages missing the mark and enables you to move drip recipients into the nurturing path at the appropriate time — automatically, of course.

Recipients in the nurturing path who do not engage should be kicked back to the drip campaign and those in the drip campaign do not open should be retired so as not to adversely affect your sender reputation.

Calculating the impact

It’s tough to make the argument to marketing managers, department heads, and the C-suite about why any business should turn their marketing department on end and abandon a blast-email process that has historically served them well, but that discussion is easier with the use of an ROMI (or MROI) calculator.

According to Wikipedia, the value of return on marketing investment (ROMI or MROI) is in its simplicity. In most cases a simple determination of revenue per dollar spent for each marketing activity can be sufficient to help make important decisions improving your entire marketing mix. To help our clients grasp the need to up their game, Spider Trainers has created a series of calculators within an Excel document to analyze past — and plan future — marketing campaigns.

We have all at one time or another felt as though our marketing costs were out of control, especially when we cannot directly link revenue to our efforts. Our simple ROMI online calculator and collection of various downloadable ROMI calculators will help you to determine revenue directly attributable to your marketing initiatives, be those blast, drip, or nurture campaigns. Some calculators in this collection work from the top of your sales funnel down, some from the bottom up, and one is specifically designed to help you determine how many people you need to reach in order to realize your revenue goals.

These calculators can also be used to make projections or set goals. Perhaps you would like to understand the impact of creating a more targeted campaign or higher-value download. In this case, the cost of your campaign will go up, but so should your leads (engagement) rate. If that trickles down through the formula, your ROI will improve.

Making the switch

Is it possible to convert a standard blast-campaign approach to an automated approach? Of course, it’s possible. It is easy? Sometimes. As with many things marketing, it depends upon the availability of resources.

Spider Trainers typically plans drip and nurture campaigns for clients spanning a year to 18 months. If that’s your hope too, perhaps the most difficult part of converting your blast campaign to an automated approach is planning your messaging in advance. For instance, if you are a software company, you may not know about new features or products far enough in advance to ensure your messaging stays on target the entire duration. A product roadmap can help, but they often undergo considerable changes before final launch — which means your campaign must change as well.

It’s likely a drip campaign will more closely match your current blast approach, but though they can be quite similar, there is still a cost savings to be realized here. All of the campaign’s emails can use the same theme (or template) giving way to a shorter development time for the creatives.

Your drip campaign doesn’t have to be a year long, if you’re sending two emails a week, you might opt for something as short as four months, recycling the components each new quarter with slightly updated messaging that doesn’t require full development support.

Choosing an email-automation application to handle automatic deployments will account for the biggest overhead savings since you can pre-program not just the deployment dates, but also segmentation of recipients based upon engagement or non-engagement. As noted earlier, drip recipients who engage should be automatically shuttled to your nurture campaign, another time and resources savings.

Nurturing campaigns in many ways are simpler because you’re developing auto-responder emails recognizing a specific engagement. By illustration, let’s say your first emails offer (in this order): follow us socially, watch this video, download this white paper, and download our trial version. A portion of your nurture campaign might look like this:

Like the drip campaign, these emails are automated and contribute to lead scoring, which determines sales readiness and once the lead hits a predetermined level, the lead is passed to sales.

As I discussed earlier, your nurture campaign can be thought of as a digitized version of the traditional sales process your company uses and the collective agreement on what constitutes a qualified lead. You can then review your corporate resources to align each with a point in the sales process and how that asset contributes.

In the example above, social following is a rather low-level engagement, but watching your demo video shows real interest in a specific product or feature. Follow that with a white paper on the same topic and your recipient is now waving the flag of interest. Finally a lead that has completed all four engagements is determined to be sales ready and passed to the sales team immediately.

With automation, you did not need to deploy the individual nurture emails, monitor activity in order to segment lists, or evaluate sales readiness; it’s all being done for you. What’s more, those who lost interest along the way were returned to the drip campaign, also without your intervention, and inactive drip recipients are archived.

If you would like help in converting your blast series into an automated format, please contact us. Cyndie Shaffstall (cmeyer@spidertrainers.com), is always available to discuss your current campaign and how it can be improved.

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