Everyone’s an expert when it comes to email marketing strategy.
However, if you lead your company’s go-to-market playbook for an IaaS, SaaS, or fintech company, you almost certainly need to adapt to modern marketplace realities.
Segmenting Your Email Marketing to Match Modern Buyer Preferences
With hypercompetition on a global scale, we all know that the customer is now in control. Especially in a long sales cycle B2B buyer’s journey, your prospects call the shots for when and how they’ll interact with your sales team with a considered buying decision.
Most of the time, your ideal prospects will be a good 60% to 80% of their way through the decision-making process before your sales team is invited in.
How can your company compete and win in this environment?
Consider these four email marketing strategies that are especially relevant to companies in IaaS (infrastructure), SaaS (software), and fintech (financial technology):
Email Marketing Action Items for IaaS, SaaS, and Fintech Companies
- Segment your contacts properly by both buyer persona and lifecycle stage -- An astonishing number of email marketers skip over the most basic of best practices. Make sure you segment by (a) who they are and (b) where they are in the buyer's journey with your firm. Treating a customer as a prospect is a surefire way to burn goodwill.
- Eliminate duplicate systems or at least integrate -- Regardless of whether the workaround is all about saving money or failing to confront silos with your company, your customer's email marketing experience will almost certainly suffer if you have data spread over two or more systems of record.
- Be careful of your email sender reputation with prospects -- When sales teams at IaaS, SaaS, or fintech companies overzealously cold email prospects or pressure their marketing teams to ignore permission-based email best practices, there's a very high risk that your company's email sender reputation will suffer. In many jurisdictions, you may even face legal consequences. And If you think shortsightedly about overdoing cold emailing, you will increasingly struggle for your email marketing campaigns to get through to your prospects or customers. Suppose your company operates in a high-trust space, especially within IT or digital marketing. In that case, it's not a good look for your prospects' or customers' IT departments to lump your company in with the email bad guys. You are better than that. Play the long game.
- Practice good list hygiene -- Make sure your email service provider (ESP) makes it super easy for prospects and customers to change their email frequency or unsubscribe if someone wants to. Don't block the exits. If your emails are delivering good value, your unsubscribe should be relatively low. If your emails are purely self-promotional, expect to have a much higher unsubscribe rate.
How do you use email marketing to grow your IaaS, SaaS, or Fintech company? Let me know in the Comments box below.