029. Leveraging Email for Each Step of Your B2B Buyer Journey

Foreign hello everyone, this is Emilio Garcia. Welcome to another episode of the Man Gen Studio, a series of live events where we share demand generation insights for B2B marketers at B2B brands. It's and really happy to have the opportunity to talk to you again as every Friday I hope you're having an excellent date. Today we are having a, we're going to have a conversation around a topic that started as a conversation as a question from one of our clients in one of our weekly meetings. And basically the question was what is the best way to use email marketing depending on the, you know, the, the, the database that you have. And so the question was basically, you know, I have thousands or tens of thousands of contacts. What will be the best way to reach out to those contacts and most, most strategies that I have seen so far, basically what they do is that they share a kind of newsletter to everyone and while it's a good start, it's better than not communicating with your database at all if you have a large one. You might be missing out the opportunity to be more specific depending on the data that you have on your contacts because not all of them will be at the same stage. And so that's pretty much the reason that triggered this episode. Today we are going to discuss how can you leverage primarily the lifecycle stage or the stage that your buyer might be into at any given moment as a way to segment your database and share more relevant messages than just a newsletter. Now, it's not the only layer that you can put on top to for segmentation. I'm going to actually share some examples depending on the life cycle stages where you can go and use order parameters as another layer that you can add on top of it. For example, it can be the industry of the contact if you have that information available from the company. It can also be the what is called sometimes lead status which is used by sales to determine how engaged or have a more detailed understanding of the stage of the contact. For example, if it's a qualified person, if sales is trying to reach out to them and any variation of those ideas. You also can use the status of opportunities or deal stages as another layer to put on top. And finally a popular one is what is called buyer Personas. If you have a committee of buyers and some of them are in different departments, they usually have different interests and different kind of content and topics will be of interest to different groups. So you can layer all those ideas on top of the lifecycle stage. The only caveat on that idea is that for every layer that you put on top of them, you will have multiple emails and channels to create, right? Imagine, for example, if you have six or seven lifecycle stages that you want to segment for and you just add the industry, for example, three main industries that your company might be interested in targeting. You have just multiplied your possible segments into 21. So in theory you can go and create a specific emails for those 21 segments, which is obviously a big task. Some of that can be automated, of course, and that's where marketing automation tools come in handy. But my general recommendation is that usually if you're just moving into the space from just having this general newsletter and you want to start being more relevant through segmentation, start simple. Start with something like just the Lifecycle stage. Or if you rather start with industries or live status or buyer Personas, if that makes sense. More sense for you because you have that information available or because it's relevant for management, Start in this other layer. But be aware that trying to layer more than two of those criteria can be very challenging if you are only if you are the only person implementing that right. If you have the help of an agency, you have the help of a large team, then you can go while and implement multiple combinations or variations on that idea. So given that concept, let us move on into each of the tactics and the first. The first one and an important caveat here. I'm using HubSpot definition for lifecycle stages, the one that they have on their software. Different marketing Automation tools and CRMs will have a different name for that field and different stages, but the general idea is the same within your database. Usually if you are sharing that information with marketing, sales and customer success, you have to have a feel where you tell yourself and the rest of the company that works with the database if that contact, it's a prospect, it's a current opportunity, it's a client, or it's the past client, for example. So you want to have a place where you can describe the stage of the potential buyer at any given moment. And in the case of HubSpot, they use this particular field called Lifecycle stages to accomplish just that. So I will use that as a reference, but again it's very valid against the rest. So I will start with the email tactics that you can use for subscribers. So this is the simplest of the or the less sophisticated group of contacts. And some companies don't really have them. Maybe they don't have a newsletter or any other kind of regular content that they share with their audience. But if you have one, usually Your segment for subscribers has very little information. You usually just have the email and in some cases you might have the first name, maybe last name and that's it. Very few people will share more than that to be part of a newsletter because you really just need the email. So this is in some cases in some companies, a large segment in others is not that big. And usually the tactics that you can implement here, because you rarely have more information than just the email, is to offer some of your high content or high valuable, sorry, high value content that you have available in the website, you can offer directly on emails. Right? So very, very common ideas like guides and ebooks are good to start. But you can also have more interesting resources like workbooks or proprietary information or data that you have company have created over time that might be of value and worth exchanging for something more than just the email address. And pretty much what you're trying to accomplish in these first effort is to get some, some additional data or some additional information about the contact and to gauge a little bit about their intent, right? There's, there's a group of people that will be subscribers to your content that don't have, maybe won't have on the long run any commercial intent for your company. And that's fine. You part of the reason you create the content is to educate and help the, not necessarily to sell to everyone that is following your content. However, there's going to be a section of them that might have some commercial interest, if not a transactional one. And those you want to know if that intent exists so you can create more relevant content for them. Right. So they can move on into the next stage. So usually for those kind of emails you are trying to convey that and valuable content is a great way to do it and will help you with profiling if you don't have that data internally, right. In exchange for that information, valuable information that they might not be able to get anywhere else, you might ask for the company that I work for and therefore you might get insight into their industry, their job title, and therefore you get insight into the kind of buyer Persona they are and similar ideas. So that's the simplest tactic that you can implement for subscribers. And, and obviously you have to. It will be helpful if you can tie that to some behavior. Right? So some common moments where you can send those kind of emails is when someone just subscribe, you can share your best content for them to follow up and some deep content or some valuable content that you can exchange for for that information. Also is when, if they are, if There are recurring visitors of whatever content you create. If you are able to track that, right, like in the case of a blog post, then you can use those events to send relevant messages and not send them to every subscriber that you have. And finally, you can do specific campaigns from time to time when you release that valuable content. Your subscribers database is an obvious target to see who of them are interested at all in that particular piece that you might have. On top of that, obviously you can layer industry if you have that information available. There are some marketing automation tools that allows you to infer the company based on the email address, if it's a corporate corporation or a company email. So in that case you have a sense of the industry already, even if that person haven't shared with you. So that's another layer that you can put on top of that one. And while maybe buyer Persona and definitely deal stages will not make sense now for leads, usually here you have a little bit more information. Depending on how you have the rest of your content, you might have information about the buyer Persona, the industry, if you have information about the company. And in more complex implementations, maybe marketing itself have a sense of the engagement of the lead, right? If it's a person that visit the website or currently consume content, so you might have those behavioral ones at this stage, your potential email tactics draw a little bit into the subscriber ones, right? So you can still share valuable content like webinars on demand or your next podcast episode, or valuable piece of content that you have created recently. So you have that in common with subscribers. But the biggest opportunities, you can really apply segmentation here, right? If you have, for example, information about the industry, one industry in particular that you want to target, then you can share that more specific information with the leads that belong to it. And obviously the other big opportunity here is that you can move from that informational intent of a potential lead or a lead into more transactional ones, right? So from time to time you can sprinkle in this audience the idea of, well, we have these available products or, or here are some comparisons. Here are some information on how our solution compares to available solutions in the market. Not necessarily your competition, just alternatives to what you offer. So you can be more commercial here to some extent. My general recommendation is that you base that on intent, right? For if, for example, in your page, in your website, you have any page where there's some additional intent to visit, like your pricing page, or information about case studies or about your company, or even the contact us request demo page, then you can use that behavior if that segment is large enough to trigger some those kind of emails are more commercial in nature, right? And again here the goal with leads would be to use the segment to generate some possible marketing qualified leads, right? Some leads that raise their hand and say I want to speak with sales. So that will be a good idea. Now for the next lifecycle stage, marketing qualified leads. Most of the ideas here go around the fact that usually the way that you get marketing qualified leads if you already have them on the database is that they take commercial action. And the three or four more popular ones are someone fills a form that is either requested demo or I want to speak with a sales rep. The other one might be a phone call. If you track that and it's a phone call for your cell phone number. For example, if you have one dedicated line and the person answering the phone call triggers the fact that that person needs to talk to a sales rep. If you have a meeting being scheduled in your website with a sales rep, if you have that available. And finally, if you have a live chat or any similar tool and you have an option on your decision tree for someone speaking with a sales representative, if that that particular workflow triggers or sequence triggers, then you have a person that becomes a marketing qualified lead. So those might be some of the different channels that you can move people or people can move themselves into that segment. Final one is that if you use any behavior to score someone as a marketing qualified lead, in that case, if they they go beyond certain thresholds. I don't like that one that much because not necessarily clear intent. I'd rather have something more tangible like the person actually reaching out and asking for information. And usually also at this stage because they have that commercial intent, you get more information about them. Right? So I usually recommend that you sprinkle some questions that cater to what is the problem that you're trying to solve or some information that you want to know that allows you to understand if they are ready to start the buying process right. In our case, for example, if someone is already spending in advertising, that's a good signal. So those are the questions that you can do on your forms to try to understand the level of intent and also to really have people that have commercial intent. Once you get an mql, the while they wait for a sales rep to talk to them that that's when you can trigger some emails that talked about your company, talked about how you are different. You might share some information about your case studies. And as you can see, that's where you can layer information into the industry. For example, if you have a large database of case studies and some of them are for a particular industry and that person matches the industry, you can create specific emails that share not just your most popular or most famous case studies, but specific ones are going to be very relevant to that mql. So that will be a group of emails that you can trigger that happens immediately when someone wants to have a conversation with sales. And the order group of emails are for MQLs that for whatever reason don't move forward and they get stuck in the process and sales never takes them either because they consider them unqualified or just because they lose momentum and so they stay on the MQL queue. And another trigger that you can use for that is an MQL they started the process but for whatever reason stop and after a few months you want to reach out again to see, depending on the reason why they get stuck, if it's still an opportunity to restart a conversation. One very easy example is someone that is interested but end up not being ready because they have to wait for the they have to wait for the budget process to start at the end of the year, for example. So in those cases they can say maybe an MQL and you can trigger some emails when the time gets closer to that. In other cases can be because the person is not decision maker. It can be because they don't have the right budget and they will go back and try to have the right size for that to happen. So in those cases you can create those emails or sequences after a little while to reach out and see if you can continue the process, if this is still relevant for the contact. For sure, those are some more of the things that you can do on MQL here. Now moving into sales qualified leads in a very similar way, when you know that sales process have started, you can use some of the same tactics that we were discussing about when someone becomes an mql, it's only that they can be more specific. Maybe for those cases when someone is still not an opportunity but at least sales have started to have a conversation, an active conversation with that prospect, then it might be a good moment to share more in depth information about your company tools around return on investment if that makes sense for your company too. Or if during this process there's a trial in place, then some helpful material or resources on how to take advantage of the software or the service, if that applies. And in a very similar way to marketing qualified leads, if for whatever reason the lead that was accepted by sales or source by sales, lose esteem and end up not becoming an opportunity. You can create a different set of emails around the idea of trying to resurface interest from them. So very similar. There are some companies that only use MQLs, there are some companies that only use SQLs. There are some companies where the process is not moving from MQLs to SQLs, or they just have this process where inbound source leads come from or become MQLs and sales source leads become SQLs. So they're in different paths, outbound and inbound. So whatever the play that you might have there, use that to understand what will be the best tactics that you can use on the email. Now, in opportunities in this particular case, usually there's already a pipeline being developed and the sales rep might be working on a quote. And at this point, at the beginning of that process, you can use again some of the similar tactics that we have for marketing and for sales. But you can be more granular on the case that, for example, two of the situations that happens is that the deal gets postponed or it doesn't go forward for whatever reason. And so if you want help the sales team to reignite the interest in the proposal, you can trigger emails after a little while. And the other big bucket of opportunity is, is the lost opportunities, right? So the process went along and you lost that potential prospect, but they move forward across the process fairly, fairly importantly. So if after a few months you want to reignite the conversation, you can use the information about the deal and the kind of product that we're interested on or the services that we're interested on to use that as a trigger to start a conversation, right? So those are some of the opportunities that you can use there in the case of customers, right? When you have those clause one opportunities, the initial emails that you can create obviously are related around onboarding, right? Making sure that the client has successful. So this is the realm of customer success and marketing can help here coming up with ideas on what will be good copy and timing for helping the customer to have success with the service and product and to reduce the amount of time that is dedicated to support, to customer support. Also it's a great opportunity after a little while, right? That's the other, the other tactic that you can use here with customers is after a little while to start asking about the satisfaction of the client. So all the realm of net promoter score surveys and other kinds of surveys around the service, those are great opportunities here to use email to understand if a client is happy with the service or if he's not happy with it and to trigger action events based on that. And another big bucket of ideas for emails at this stage is upselling and cross selling. Obviously you will use the information that you have from the NPS so you can offer upselling cross selling opportunities to customers that are really happy with your service, that might not be aware of the other products and services that you offer. And for those that are not happy, then maybe you have internally a team that handles those cases to just, you know, do good by the client and win them back and have them on the, on the happy customer camp. So and finally the other potential segment that you can create on the customer lifecycle stage is that some of those clients, hopefully for not bad reasons, eventually stop being clients, right? So you will have these bucket of inactive clients that you have won, but for some reason they don't didn't purchase again or they stopped their recurrent service. And so again in a very similar manner, after a little while you can define triggers, for example just based on time or based on they coming back to your website and start asking well, would you be interested on starting a service again with us or trying to sort of product or service. So within the group of active clients, where in the group of clients you have this group of inactive clients that you can take advantage to resurface interest on the products. Now the last group and this group, the evangelist come from, for example, one way that you can define him is, is all those clients are all those clients that are really happy with your service and usually usually score your company or a specific product 9 or 10 on your NPS. So you can trigger an automation where you classify that group as evangelist. And this group is important because one of the great things that you can do with them is to ask them if they will be willing to participate in the creation of case studies for your company or in the, in the or just to share testimonials that you can post on, you know, the website that makes sense for your company to create reputation for your brand. And as you can imagine doing, those tactics are helpful because they circle back to what you can use at the beginning as email marketing tools for your leads and your subscribers. Right? So that's the way that you close the circle and where your evangelists help you to get as promoters help you to bring new potential leads through Word Map. So it's important to use the opportunity to communicate with them and start that process. That promoting aspect can be leveraged in very different ways. If your company is more in the, in the realm of case studies, reading case studies, you can create those. If they are really, really valuable, you can put them as a gated content that you can share to those subscribers and leads. You can also create videos or just invite them to whatever, you know, audio format or video format you might have for content creation. That's also helpful, gives you extra presence on your industry if that is relevant for some of your clients and that usually close the circle for your life cycle stages. And so that's all that I have for today. As a summary, as we were saying, I share with you some of the tactics that you can, some of the ways that you can segment your database. My recommendation is that you start with Lifecycle stages is the easiest. Most of the cases at least you can separate what your prospects are, your opportunities are, your clients are, and your promoters are. That's a good way to start and that will help you to create more relevant emails. If you have the right type of content and after a little while, if you continue to use those segmentations and you start having success and there's a group where you can layer things like industry lead status or deal stages and even buyer Personas, you can create those layers and be more relevant for your B2B buyers. Just again, as a final warning, be careful with not overcomplicating the effort if you have multiple layers. It will be hard to implement if you have limited resources. So I hope you have find this episode helpful. As always, don't miss the next one. Visit Demand Gen Studio Searching online and subscribe to any of our channels to listen to, listen to or watch these episodes on Demand has been a pleasure. And until the next episode, bye bye.