Your email list is the most valuable yet undervalued asset in your business.

Potential customer emails are scattered throughout your organization.

In your sales team’s email and contact databases
In various spreadsheets and stacks of business cards
In a variety of CRMs and email software solutions, you have used

I can generate fresh new sales in any organization by simply harvesting, organizing, cleaning, and sending a few strategic emails to this pile of random emails.

That initial assembled list of emails and a relatively straightforward warm-up sequence becomes the genius of what I call the “cash register.”

Your email list often becomes the most reliable and consistent source of revenue in most of the businesses I consult.

Let’s dig into the details of how to use my proven email marketing strategy to start generating new leads and revenue - this week!

man in blue long sleeve shirt holding smartphone — Photo by airfocus on Unsplash

Harvesting and Setting Up Your Email List

The first, most obvious step is gathering all prospective customer emails together in a centralized location.

Then you need to clean and sanitize that master in-house email list.

Let’s pause here for a quick second and cover, at a very high level, what clean and sanitize mean:

Ensure that the people on your list have given your business permission or have a reasonable expectation that you might contact them via email. This permission/expectation to be contacted has slightly different thresholds depending on whether you reach consumer or business email addresses. Get this final ruling from your compliance or legal counsel.
Once you are comfortable that you have permission to email, let’s make sure that your emails will land in those prospects’ email inboxes. Use a service like Kickbox.com or Hunter.io to verify and clean out old, undeliverable, or potential bounce email addresses.
Finally, set up an email service provider platform to help you safely and programmatically run your email marketing campaigns. Solutions can vary depending on your sales operations. Many of you can run these email campaigns from your CRM. Alternatively, you can use something designed for Outreach.io, Reply.io, and Mailshake.com.

Now that we have our email marketing platform and list in order, it’s time to create and launch our email marketing campaigns and automation.

As I outline these three strategies, I will cover B2C and B2B email marketing strategies. I will do this because despite the popularity of saying, “they are the same” and “you are always marketing to individuals, not organizations,” there are specific differences between these two audiences.

Here are the three email campaigns you need to start running as soon as possible.

Lead Follow-up/Cold Outreach

If your business involves selling direct to consumers (B2C), you should always be following up on a lead, never doing cold outreach.

Consequently, you need to build your email program around lead follow-up — always acknowledging the original inquiry the consumer made with you or your company.

These are all simple, personal, text-only emails. They should look like any typical business email exchange between business colleagues.

The core of these B2C follow-up campaigns is to acknowledge the inquiry and clearly outline your process's next steps and benefits.

Here is a typical B2C email follow-up campaign template:

Email #1: I got your request. I’m in the process of reviewing it now. In the next few minutes, I’ll give you a call, discuss your needs/goals, and present some options.
Email #2: I just gave you a call. Sorry, we didn’t connect. Here are the following steps to get you to X. When is the best time to talk?
Email #3: I know life gets busy, but I’m here if you have additional questions or when you’re ready to get the process started. In case that is easier, here is my calendar link: [scheduling link].

Here is a simple conceptual strategy on how to make initial contact.

In the case of B2B, the circumstances are slightly different. You are often doing cold outreach on a list of contacts that were assembled through some means of prospecting Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and job titles.

For these situations, I use a campaign template that looks something like this:

Email #1: Let me highlight a problem you are probably experiencing and my excellent solution to that problem.
Email #2: I can get even more specific by sharing a quick case study/story and the key benefits and outcomes. You probably would like to get these results and look like a hero inside your organization.
Email #3: Can we set up a quick 20-minute call to discuss how simple this solution is to implement for you?

For B2B outreach, we are trying to intensify a potential pain point - “press the bruise” to raise solution and brand awareness and get that first conversation.

Newsletter/Lead Nurturing

Regardless of the effectiveness of your sales team, the majority (easily 80-90%) of your leads are going to be unresponsive or out of the market.

Don’t leave them unattended. Keep marketing and maintain top-of-mind brand and solution awareness.

These folks are not only potential customers but also rich sources of referrals.

In contrast to the Follow-up or Cold Outreach campaign, these email campaigns are marketed with a touch of branding and design (don’t overdo it) and content.

Your primary goals with this email campaign are continued brand impressions, deeper solution awareness, and demonstrating your expertise in your customer’s market/industry.

The key is helpful content. Think about the kind of emails that your boss forwards to you and says, “we should take a look at this.” That’s the goal - to be one of those emails.

One of the best ways to set up these campaigns is by leveraging your blog content program using RSS-to-email automation to deliver rich, fresh, well-designed content to your audience on auto-pilot.

Here is a simple sketch of what one of these emails would look like:

For this campaign type, both B2C and B2B strategies can look identical because your key objective is to keep the list warm and continue to build a sense of value with each potential customer on the list.

Sales Letter/Offers

Don’t be shy about asking for the deal.

Generally, people are on your list and stay on it because they want the value you create - the products and services you offer. But, you have to ask!

Our final type of email campaign is the sales letter or offer.

This email is mixed into your Newsletter or Lead Nurturing campaign strategy and sequence.

I like to make it a slightly longer email and written with a personal and persuasive tone that includes at least a couple of direct requests/asks to schedule a call or buy my product or service.

Here is a simple sketch of what my sales letter template looks like:

Implementing these three overlapping and relatively simple to maintain email strategies will turn your CRM into a highly productive source of fresh leads with an incredible ROI.

Selling Attention!

3 Email Marketing Campaigns Every Business…