Optimize B2B Email Messaging

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

email, deal, naomi, talking, messaging, personalize, buyer persona, list, company, upper management, build, funnel, bit, email marketing, work, marketing, write, product, platform, gong

00:00

Hi. I'm Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand180 podcast, and CEO of Millennium agency, where we talk all about branding, marketing and growth strategies. So today, I'm excited to bring in our guest, Naomi Salman from story logic. We're going to be talking about email marketing and really how you can elevate your email marketing strategy to drive growth. So a little bit about Naomi, and then I'll have her speak a little bit more about herself. But she has worked in several hyper growth startups in Tel Aviv and a part of the start of the nation, including both scrappy series A companies and even both powerful unicorn she focuses on crafting messaging and writing copy performance marketing teams to improve those conversions and click through rates and bring in those higher quality leads. Thank you, Naomi, for joining me tonight.

00:53

Thanks for having me.

00:54

This should be a fun conversation, so I'd love you to just maybe share a couple additional points about yourself that

00:59

may I may not have covered, and then we can get right into it.

01:03

Yeah. Essentially, what I do is I help demand gen manager, or, in case, email, sometimes lifecycle manager, to optimize their copy. Because if you're spending $100,000 on Google or LinkedIn or through other partnerships, then you really want to make sure that in your messaging was on point, and you are getting all of the lead that you can out of that then. So that's my job, figuring out how to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, by looking into the CRM data, Tableau data, whatever it is, and then turning that into better messaging and better creatives across the that's great.

01:44

So we always hear about a lot of failures around email marketing, and there's a lot of misconception, especially in the B2B space, when it comes to copywriting and messaging. How do you address some of those misconceptions that are out there in the market right now?

01:59

So I would say that my biggest myth buster is saying that emails have to be, well actually, they have to be visual heavy. They have to have very little text. I think as marketers, we always tend to default to having less tech make it more punchy and more CTAs. And I don't think that's actually the case with email marketing, I think, from what I've tested, email is a really great opportunity to create more of an intimate connection, because you're already in that person's inbox, and so you can make it a little bit more time coming, and you can go a little bit deeper into the messaging and provide a Little bit more text, because users today are savvy, and they can smell marketing language from 10 miles away. And so I think that if you can be a little bit more authentic, and you can provide a little bit more contact and you can deliver a message that really resonates with them, then you actually have a much better chance of earning that click.

03:06

I do hear a lot about, you know, cutting back content, you know, adding visuals, all kinds of different strategies that are out there that you do some research, that's what will come up. And I will say that today, I think there are a lot of people are just getting inundated with emails, and if it's not a meaningful, almost personal slash professional email that comes and hits your desk, then again, it's just another email. So can you speak a little bit about what? When we talk about funnel, there are different layers within the funnel. Can you speak about maybe what those are and how you might the types of emails you may use to move someone through that funnel.

03:46

So there are different email I would say, that you have. If you're sometimes in media buying, you're paying for an email in somebody else's list. So it's still an email that's not in your list, like morning brew, for example, you can pay for a space in their email list, so that's one that's more top of funnel. When it comes to email, you have email within a free trial, if it's more of a product led growth, and you're trying to get people to use different features to drive them along to get them to sign up for a full subscription. And I would say, you have product dates. You have make better email. You have then you have retention email, so you have people continue using the platform, preventing them from churning. And then I would say, lastly, more sales LED. You have outreach emails. Sales is always writing a lot of emails to get people to either to connect with them or to push them through the funnel. And so I would say those are also type of email, and you can use a lot of the same technique or writing. Out email and writing outreach email.

05:01

So there are a lot of different techniques. So how do you think somebody should sort of adapt that messaging when they're going through the funnel? Do you have some examples that you may want to share when a funnel versus maybe when it's close to the bottom of the funnel? Yeah,

05:17

sure. So I think that it really depends on who you're talking to in B2B, because in B2B, as opposed to B to C, you're dealing with a committee. You have the champion who's driving the deal. You have maybe a member of upper management, and you have, typically somebody from the finance team and maybe sort of going to be using the product, but may not be involved in the deal stage at the initial basis. So I think it's when it comes to top up file, bottom funnel for email, I think it you really have to think about who you're writing to, because a lot of times it's different, because the champion is going to be driving the deal. They're going to get involved at the early stages, and then somebody who's upper management may be involved in the more later stages. So I think that can be helpful when you're thinking about and then later, later, if you're talking about they're already using the platform. They're already using a free trial, you may be actually dealing with an end user. So like, for example, with Gong, you're going to have the sales leader who's thriving the deal, but you really have the sales representative who's using platforms, or even somebody like a marketing manager who's using the platform for reefer, right when it comes to email, as opposed to ad or landing pages, you have to think about who you're talking to. And so I would say my best tip for thinking about which member of the buying committee you're talking to, first of all, think about that person and then go into the specific details that are going to be present in their life. So if you are speaking to a champion, you want to really settle down into that situation that they're dealing with in their everyday life. Are they dealing with a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open? Are they trying to analyze their marketing campaign, but they feel like they're working in the dark. They don't know they don't have the right data. Are they trying to manage payment but their payment systems are so inefficient that they have boxes of checks in their in their storeroom, then they can't cash because they're too overloaded. Can you find those exact examples? And I think for a champion, you're going to deal with those kind of pain points. For somebody in upper management, a lot of times, it's going to be, we saw our competitor in an industry publication, and actually, we want to be in that industry publication. We want our brand name in all the headlines. We want to be seen as the industry innovator. Can you get us in that, in that publication? So it's important to, number one, think about who you're talking to. And number two, think about what are the things that really matter to them. A VP is probably not going to deal with the everyday pain point that a middle manager is going to deal with. So we're

08:29

really talking about making sure we understand who the audience is, what their role is, what they do during the course of the day, understand their pain points, and trying to address those pain point when companies do just sort of cold email marketing, when is it time to just give up? How many emails do you send out? Do you have a rule of thumb when it comes to that, if you're going to be pushing emails out to try to drive traffic or new business, five emails, 10 emails, 100 emails. Do you have a system in place or any recommendations for our audience around that

09:02

well, definitely not 102 months, I would say, aim for three to fives. But make it really personal, especially with ChatGPT, it's really easy to send out a ton of emails. I know I get emails in my inbox that are totally irrelevant, so I think it's fewer emails, but make them really personal. Make sure that you do your research. Make sure to if they have gone through funding ground. To mention that an interesting study that gong did, Gong analyzed tons and tons of emails, personalized email or outreach email from failed team, and they they found that somebody who is lower down in seniority is going to respond to more personal detail, so mention where they're from, where they went to university. If they worked at a company that you know or that you've used, mentioned details that pertain to their birth lives and for upper management, you want to mention things that are more relevant to the business. Did they release a new a new feature? Were they in the news recently funding round I mentioned before, so that's also a good rule of thumb to personalize it relative to their seniority level, right? Okay,

10:27

no, that's great. That's great to hear. All right, awesome. Well, I'm just thank you so far, Naomi for sharing some insight. I just want to thank our audience today for listening in. And if you like what you heard, please hit like, share or subscribe. And we would love to have you review our podcast as well. But let's get on to the next question, because I am curious about this piece. Do you have some certain research methods that you actually recommend when you want to build this accurate buyer or profile or persona out that you think might be a little different than what's typically built though? Yeah,

11:00

absolutely. I think it's hard for B2B to do research, because a lot of times it's a more complicated buyer persona. You have different ICT within that buyer persona. You don't necessarily have access to the customers themselves to do interviews or survey, because a lot of times you're working in a large company, you can barely reach out to them. That people don't respond. It's a smaller customer base. It's really hard for marketers to get good data and do really good research. You may have g2 or Capterra, but blimpton And so what I usually do is I will go into gong or chorus or if a smaller company, usually the sales team records their sales call. So record the demo calls and their discovery call, and even if it's just on Zoom, chances are they have those recordings saved because they use them for onboarding, not just for sales reps, but for other team members. And so what I do is I will go through those calls, I will transcribe them if they're not transcribed, and then I will write down three categories of information. I will write down examples of their pain points. What is going on in their life that is frustrating them? Are they waking up in the middle of the night? Are they overloaded with spreadsheets? Whatever it is, I'll write that down. Then I'll write down their image of success. Sometimes customer success can also help with this. How do they describe success, both on a more personal, emotional level and on a professional level, and then thirdly, what are they concerned about that's holding them back? Do they now want to give credit card details? Are they worried about integrations? Are they worried about team adoption? Write it down and write it down in their work, or transcribed, copy and paste it and then I use that to build my buyer. What does their life look like, not in terms of demographics, not how much they make, or what region of the country they live in, or how many years of experience they have, but what does their life look like in relation to your product, both and when you go to write email, you can just sort of plug and play. You can take those examples and say, if you are still dealing with this, then we have the loop, and then you give the exact example in their own work. And that's how you can be really fresh and original and make your email feel very personalized. And that's beyond just their name. It feels very authentic. It feel like it's less corporate. It feels like it's coming from so

13:33

14:43

Yeah, so I think it's based on the action that they take. This is where you really want to make sure that your infrastructure is built out so that if they sign up for a newsletter, or they if they come through a webinar, or if. They come through somebody else's list, then you're tagging that. So that could be based on solution if and making sure that you that you're asking the right information. So you're asking their job title, and you are asking their company. And then again, if they come in through a certain action, they read a certain blog. You can usually see that through HubSpot. Did they read a blog when they came in? Did they come to a certain webinar? Did they look at a certain free resource, a free tool? Then that you should be able to tag that, and then you can go through your list and then separate it based on that data. So if they looked at your pricing page, you know they have high intent. And then so you might be able to give them on email that's a little bit more aggressive. If they came in through a webinar for a specific solution or specific industry, then you can provide them email around that. And so with email, it's really about making sure that you tag it appropriately. And then so personalization can come in through the information that you have related to your product. So it's not information necessarily about their personal life. If it's more of a marketing email is approved with sales email, it's personalization based on the interest that they've already shown, and then you can be or it's, for example, if you're doing more of an ABM approach, or you're sending email to a specific list, then you may be able to cultivate the list around that category. So, for example, in a previous company, we were creating a list of people who used a specific e commerce platform, and so we knew that everyone on that list used that specific platform, used Bigcommerce, so we were able to write an email pertaining to the use of that platform, and we knew generally the size of the company and What they may be dealing with, because we created that list. So if you're very diligent about having the email that come in, or cultivating a list based on a certain characteristics, then you can write based on it. All right, I

17:13

have one last final question for you, because I think that this would help the B2B companies. Is today, I think it's getting more and more crowded, as we all know. So how does the B2B Company actually stand out in that type of marketplace, a real crowded marketplace? So

17:28

there are a lot of different ways that I would say. I'd say number one, use the Civic information we've already mentioned that before, use the customer's own voice and avoid the corporate jargon. But I would say that my favorite way is to use use visual language. This is something I'm dealing with with a company now that I'm working with they are targeting very savvy marketers, and so you can't use languages of a dashboard for very savvy market. And so what we're doing is coming up with a more visual language describing visibility and insight using images like eyeing on your competitor. How can we get an image of that so that you're communicating visually, because everyone is being a picture of a dashboard, we're so used to it that we skim over it entirely. And so I think the trick is, can you make it look a little bit more organic. Can you make it stand out? Can you make it look like it belongs in your feed, and stop people scroll and so again, my favorite way to do that in can you come up with something more abstract? If you're talking about strategy, maybe it's a chessboard. If you were talking about getting more organization, maybe it's a picture of a tangled mess of wires versus wires that have been untangled. That's an example that we use that work very well, and it seems a little bit strange for marketers that are so used to showing the product, showing the product, don't repot it, but it can really help get people of attention, and it can communicate much faster in a busy market. So for email like put it at the top of the page, show something that speaks to people's deeper, deeper need, the need for control, a need for organization, a need for more visibility. These things that are one level below the surface of what we're getting on a tangible, practical level. Great.

19:28

Now that's helpful. Thank you very much, Naomi. So this is Naomi from story logic. Naomi, I'd love for you to share with the audience how they can get in touch with you and where they can get more information. You

19:40

can find me on LinkedIn, Naomi Soman, or you can visit my website, storylogic.com or email me directly team@storylogic.com

19:50

Great. Thank you, Naomi. And again, I want to thank our guest for listening in today, and on behalf of B2B Brand180 podcast. Thank. You again for listening in and if you'd like to get in touch with me, feel free to email me directly, and you can hit our website at Mill, M, I, L, L, dot agency, or lindapanaris.com and or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you again for listening. You.