Category: Updates

 

 

 

Sometimes, companies make costly mistakes when emailing their customers. These can vary from minor typos to major emails being sent out to the wrong customers. Mistakes like these can lead to emails being sent to spam, businesses not taking them seriously, or email systems blocking them from emailing the company altogether. We’ll review five email marketing mistakes to avoid and how they could be impacting you today.

 

Not Personalizing Content

 One mistake that companies make is not personalizing their emails for their customers. They send out generic copied and pasted email content from inside their system. Customizing email marketing for each customer has many benefits for clients, it shows that you’re dedicated to working with them by spending the time upfront to know their business. It also reassures them that you pay attention and really cares about their needs and how your company can ultimately help them.

Not Optimizing for Mobile

Not optimizing your emails for your mobile customers can result in unread emails. According to Invespcro, “More than ⅔ of emails are being opened on smartphones and tablets” and “75% of smartphone owners use their mobile devices to check their emails”. Like the statistics state, a large portion of customers open and respond to their emails from their phones and not optimizing them to fit for mobile would be a mistake in itself. If emails are opened on mobile and they don’t render well within a few seconds, the customer is onto the next one. 

 

Not Updating Records

Another common mistake is using an old contact list instead of an updated one. Try to keep email lists up to date and routinely clean out the contacts that aren’t engaged with you anymore. Sending emails to old contacts can hurt your email sending reputation, causing future inboxes to flag your emails as spam and negatively impact your deliverability rate. As a marketing best practice, never send content from your marketing automation system to purchased lists. The list could be years old and if you send an email out and 80% hard bounced due to incorrect, or old, email addresses, your system could be shut down. 

 

Poor Subject Lines

Having poor subject lines in your emails can make or break whether or not your customers open them. According to Business News Daily, “the average open rate for emails across all industries analyzed was 20.81%. It’s hard to get consumers to open your emails, and bad subject lines can wreck your chances of boosting your open rate.” Most subject lines should be under 60 characters. People tend to open emails that have a simple, yet knowledgeable subject line. Using relatable wording for different companies can make all the difference as well.

 

Not Paying Attention To Spam Best Practices

There will be times where emails won’t be properly delivered. This is because of the customer’s inbox putting your emails straight into the spam folder. A couple of reasons why this happens comes from not including a physical address in the email, or if you use words that are usually linked to spam content. If you’re curious about whether or not your emails will be marked as spam there are tools, such as Salesforce Pardot, that can help give you feedback on if your email would be spam, and how to fix them if so.

 

 

All of these email marketing mistakes are common, but can easily be avoided if you follow best practices. Being too pushy, emailing un-opted in leads, and sending irrelevant content are also best practices to be aware of. Here at Corrao Group, we are trained in Salesforce Pardot and will help you enhance and maximize all of your marketing emails. If you’re interested in working with us, please feel free to visit our website, and sign up for our newsletter too. Hope to see you there!

Going through every little detail of the Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes can be very time-consuming. We’ve decided to highlight the most popular features that have been circulating with a description and a benefit for each new release.

It’s important to note that most of these newly released features are only available in Salesforce Lightning and not Classic.

Sales Cloud

Pardot Einstein Campaign Insights

• Description: Einstein currently gives you essential statistics and insights on how your campaigns are executing. You can discover more insights from Einstein for other marketing assets like prospect details, list emails, engagement, and marketing forms. Linking Pardot with Salesforce will enable you to keep every one of your records in a single spot.
• Benefits: Helps marketers analyze buyer behavior, dissect data, and find similarities of what your prospects share to maximize your campaign effectiveness.

Einstein Activity Metrics

• Description: When you click on an Opportunity, you can now view the last email date and the Einstein score of the Opportunity. In the reports tab, you can see who has been active and who needs your recognition.
• Benefits: Activity metrics in Sales Cloud makes it easy to get a complete view of all activity so that your sales team can know how to prioritize their time with their customers and prospects.

Einstein Pricing Guidance

• Description: When Sales reps add a product with pricing guidance to their quote, they can view the suggested target, norm, and floor discount amounts. If the representative chooses the target price, Salesforce CPQ applies the fitting discount to the quote line.
• Benefits: Helps your sales team close deals by providing them with pricing guidance based on historical deals and product pricing trends.

Salesforce Milestone Confetti Celebration

• Description: Sales will drop virtual confetti across the screen when reps reach a certain milestone.
• Benefits: A fun feature released by Salesforce to help your team celebrate success.

Visit our Sales Cloud services page to learn how we can optimize your sales processes.

Service Cloud

Field Service Lightning: Dispatch Console Enhancements 

• Description: Schedule a service appointment by dragging it from the map onto a service resource’s schedule in the Gantt.
• Benefits: Faster schedule and dispatch jobs right on the map and view long-cycle jobs by month directly on the Gantt.

Marco Enhancements

• Description: Be more productive with smart macros in Lightning Experience that include conditional instructions.
• Benefits: Increase employee productivity by automating routine tasks based on a set of conditions and criteria. Adding expressions into the builder will help specify steps, timing, and streamline macros.

Digital Engagement: Agent-Initiated Messaging

• Description: When an issue needs additional examination, agents can leave the messaging conversation to find the solution. Then, return to restart the conversation. Agents can now connect with customers via SMS.
• Benefits: Resolve customer problems faster than ever. Replies become automatically routed back to the same agent every time.

Visit our Service Cloud services page to see how we can hep improve your service department.

Marketing Cloud 

Marketing Cloud Integration with Google Analytics 360 Enhancements

• Description: Create IDs between Google Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud for a single user. By linking these two IDs, you can build audiences based on Google Analytics data for web and mobile app activity, email engagement, and offline behavior.
• Benefits: Capture the customer’s behavior and actions like goal non-completes, page exits, browse abandons, and search abandons.

Advertising Studio Integration with Google Customer Match

• Description: Users can now match their data to Google with more than just email. Now you match mobile ID, phone number, address, and user ID.
• Benefits: Increasing match rates, and make your marketing work for you. With more attributes added, customers have an increased chance at achieving higher match rates, and ultimately, a greater return on ad spend.

Einstein Engagement Frequency

• Description: Maximize customer engagement by pinpointing the right number of emails to send over a time frame. If you send too many emails, you can risk wearing down the customer. Send too few, and you might miss out on a sales opportunity.
• Benefits: Einstein Engagement Frequency addresses these concerns by discovering the best email frequency range to meet your goals with your customers or subscribers.

Visit our Salesforce Marketing cloud services page to learn how we can help customize your marketing content for your clients.

Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes in Conclusion

The Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes does bring exciting new features for Salesforce employees and customers. However, for the customers that are still using classic could be in trouble.

Lightning does need to be activated to maximize the Salesforce Summer 19’ Release Notes. Lightning will be enabled for all users coming this October. In addition, we do offer services to help you with your transition.

Sources

Salesforce.com

Salesforce release notes

Salesforce release notes images

It’s well known that 87% of B2B marketers agree that ABM delivers a higher ROI than any other method (ITSMA). The next question everyone asks is, “where should I start?” ABM for beginners is a complex strategy, and newcomers can quickly become intimidated by the time and effort it takes to run. The truth is, even a company with 10 employees can successfully execute an ABM strategy. All it takes is knowing how to start correctly with a solid foundation. Businesses just don’t start ABM with 200 accounts on day one; they start out with a few accounts, show ROI and success, correct themselves, and continue to scale. ABM for beginners starts with building the right team.

1. Form the Team

An ABM strategy is only as great as the team that develops it. It’s pivotal that ABM teams are built correctly with the right people. They will be responsible for defining the goals and KPIs, developing the strategy, and executing to produce results. There is no magic number for the right team as it varies based on the company’s size. Recommended team members include the heads of Sales and Marketing, including those involved with content strategy, technology management, and media managers. Once the team is assembled, it’s time to decide on who your customers will be with your ABM strategy.

2. Identify Target Accounts

With hundreds and even thousands of accounts on file, is there a trick to pinpointing the ones that would provide the highest chance of ROI? There is, creating your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a description of a company that is the perfect fit for your solution. Criteria can include industry, budget, employee headcount, the technology they use, etc. Based on how many criteria a company meets, they should be segmented or tiered. Those that meet more criteria of the ICP should produce the most ROI, so they should be tiered higher and given more attention and resources. For example, if your solution is perfect for a company in the manufacturing industry with a budget of $30k, has 400 employees whom all use Gmail, that would be a Tier 1 client. If an account comes in that meets only one out of eight potential criteria, they would be a tier 3 client. Once some tier 1 accounts are segmented, we can then target and message the decision-making contacts at the account.

3. Highlight Decision-Makers

Finding out those who will ultimately say yes or no to your solution at a company will help your team market to them, swaying them to say yes. These decision-makers usually are c-level, but it’s also important to find out those who may not be in the c-suite but still have a major influence on this decision. Finding out who these contacts are can be done through interactions with the company as well as conducting research. The value here is having the confidence that you know who you’re speaking to will ultimately be the ones making the decision on your solution. A buyer persona should be filled out for each decision-maker, and include info on their daily activities and pain points. Knowing about your buyers’ pain points will help marketing create their content, and help sales with their outreach since they’ll know what pains to address. Having these contacts highlighted will help you in the next step when you create custom content for each decision-maker.

4. Design Outreach Plan

In traditional marketing, the same content is usually blasted out to everyone in all types of roles. ABM is about sending custom content about how your solution(s) will help the recipient in their specific role. This requires research to be done on what challenges they face daily, and how your offering will solve it. For example, a VP of Marketing at a tier 1 account will receive content from your company on how your solution will help produce more quality leads because it is a pain point for them. This can be time-consuming, but well worth the investment. Once the content is finalized, incorporating it into the larger outreach plan will help paint the larger picture for everyone. You’ll designate who will receive content and when, when a call from sales will go out, when they will see an ad about your solution, etc.

5. Expand Accounts, ROI Reporting

ABM requires an abundance of research, but the time and resources is well worth the investment. Due to all the research your company will do, they can find additional ways that your solution(s) can help a customer that would have never been found through traditional marketing. This stops the one-and-done projects and allows a longer engagement and more success for both your company and the customer. After ABM has been running for some time, it’s time to report on your success, did ABM work for your company? ABM reporting can be one of the more difficult efforts to track unless you have the right technology. It’s not recommended to track efforts manually as it would be too time-consuming, and not scalable. Our recommended tool is Salesforce’s Einstein B2B Marketing Analytics as it helps see top-level KPIs, identifies top-engaging accounts, see current stages, and much more.

ABM for Beginners: Final Thoughts

Account-Based Marketing will take time to show revenue due to the deals typically being larger in size. With ABM’s marketing efforts generating 200% more revenue than others, it’s well worth it (Flip My Funnel). In addition to having a great strategy, the technology used is also an important factor. Tried and true for both ourselves and our customers, the Salesforce platform has all the tools and connections to accomplish your ABM campaigns. Corrao Group offers services that both help set up your system for ABM training and campaigns, as well as execute and run it for your organization. If you’d like to download our full Account-Based Marketing Guide for B2B Marketers, please fill out the form below.

When deciding whether or not to host a webinar, it all comes down to the benefits. While in-person meetings are daily events, online webinars give you the chance to market it, increasing outreach and registration. They are also very cost-effective, virtually costing you nothing. We’re going to talk about the best ways you can prepare for a successful webinar such as knowing your customer, putting content first and practicing.

Before you start thinking about your webinar’s topic and content you should get to know your audience beforehand. Knowing what type of problems the audience faces will give you time to brainstorm effective solutions and content. It helps to understand your audience’s challenges as well. What value can your product/service provide to this audience to help rid them of these problems and challenges? While gathering this information about your customers, finding out who they had been working with previously can be helpful during the call. You gain an advantage that other competitors don’t have by knowing what type of service the customers require and how to effectively outmatch them in terms of service. 

By knowing the audience’s pain points and challenges, you can choose a few topics and narrow it down to one. Common mistake hosts make is focusing too much on selling the product/service rather than show its value. A sales-pitch on a webinar is not what your audience came for. Instead, focus on providing valuable content to the audience about how your offering will benefit them, and the sales will follow. Your offering is great and the audience just needs to collect additional information, it all comes down to how it’s communicated.

As they say, practice makes perfect. A large portion of a webinar is speaking, so creating notecards and adding footnotes will help you maintain a nice and calm figure during the live presentation. Practicing with coworkers is essential, they are your best friends and hardest critics in these situations. They’ll give you specific feedback that will make you a stronger host. Don’t be afraid to record and show others your presentation to gain additional feedback. One thing that will happen after the presentation is a Q&A, but don’t worry—if you’ve practiced enough you’ll have all the answers in your head. 

Statistics show using webinars can lead to a 30% increase in sales when leads are actively engaged, and according to an article written by Sam Holzman, “73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads”. Here at Corrao Group, these tips mentioned are just the start to the hundreds of tips out there. We’d love to help you create your one of a kind presentation. If you’re interested in working with us please feel free to visit our website and reach out to us and leave a comment on your favorite way to prepare for a webinar. Hope to hear from you soon!