Organizing Content For Complex Email Marketing Campaigns
For most companies doing email marketing, gone are the days of “batch and blast” broadcast campaigns. And that’s a good thing—according to Experian, personalized marketing emails receive 29% higher open rates and 41% higher click-through rates.
In B2C email marketing, personalization plays out with everything from dynamic customer names to pulling in specific products a customer left in their cart. But that’s a topic for another day. Right now, let’s talk B2B marketing and the move toward account-based marketing (ABM).
What is ABM? Glad you asked. It’s an approach where a company’s marketing and sales teams work together to craft highly-targeted messaging, one prospect or client at a time. The goal, of course, is to engage target clients on a one-to-one basis, and the call to action is typically to set up a meeting, call, or demo. Emails often include links to helpful and compelling assets, like white papers, blog posts, infographics, or webinar recordings.
When it’s done well, ABM campaigns can improve marketing ROI, generate highly qualified leads, and drive significant revenue. But it gets complicated—and fast.
Let’s say you run a software company that has developed an app to help large retail clothing companies have real-time access to their inventory across their entire company. You’re looking to get more clothing stores to adopt your technology, and you’ve got a good database of leads already. You want to start with a 5-touch email series. Great.
But wait—your approach should be customized by persona. Let’s see...you should send one type of message to C-suite types, another to merchandising leadership, and yet another to the IT team. Throw in regional store managers and operations executives and you are now looking at 25 email versions, not just five (5 touches x 5 personas).
This has quickly become a complicated and time consuming project, especially for the copywriter, any stakeholders who will have to review the content along the way, and the people responsible for scheduling and deploying each and every touch.
When Lyons Creative first started working on ABM campaigns, with every new client and every new project, we kept thinking, “there’s gotta be a better way.” There’s no reason we should be writing out every single iteration, especially when some of the tweaks across personas are pretty minor. (It was a pain for the reviewers, too).
After experimenting with a few different copy document formats, we turned our wonderfully talented admin loose on creating a template that streamlines the process of creating copy for complex ABM marketing campaigns.
At a high level, here’s what makes it so great:
It’s organized by send date, so you can clearly tell “what goes out when.”
You can simply check the boxes to note which personas should receive each specific asset.
There’s also space to customize subject lines by persona (a must!).
When it’s time to write the body text of the email, you can write a generic version first, noting dynamic copy sections in red. Then below the copy block, there’s a handy-dandy table that lets you show which personas will get their own unique body copy. This layout lets reviewers see all the persona-specific iterations for a send in one place—and avoids the need for making the same edits in multiple places.
Here’s one more great thing: We love this template so much, we want you to have it too! Click here for free access to the template. It’s a Google Doc you can make a copy of and use to your heart’s content!
Questions on how it works? Comment below or get in touch.
Written by Jen Lyons
