Things might get a little daunting if you are a young business owner trying to establish the groundwork for a solid email marketing plan. You have a lot to manage, including nurturing sequences, cold email campaigns, follow-ups, and automatic responses. The list is endless.

How do you interpret things? What are the areas that need your attention the most?

To answer your questions, we invited Harpreet S to ask him all about it – from subject lines to automation tools. Here’s a summary of the same. Dive in to find solutions and insights that might seem too small but make a large impact when implemented well.

About the Guest:

Harpreet is a top-rated email marketer and consultant who has helped 65+ brands with their full-fledged email marketing needs.

Different Types of Campaigns

Typical email marketing primarily starts from building traffic for your website and getting leads. Post that, there are so many sequences that one can use. To cite some examples:

1) An upsell flow that intends to sell next-level products to someone who has already made a small-sized purchase.
2) Order update sequences.
3) A nurturing sequence for leads who submit their contact details onto your website.
4) Weekly newsletters consisting of offers, events, announcements, and insights.
5) Cart abandonment emails – for incomplete purchases.
6) Cold email campaigns to educate people about your brand.

Cold-Emailing For B2B Players

Cold emails are sent to those who have never heard of your business, and our initial goal should be to educate them about it. These are extremely sensitive emails because you are primarily contacting business owners and CXOs.

Decision-makers do not have enough time to read communications from unknown sources. As a result, they want to absorb all important information in a few seconds. Because of this, shorter emails, brief lines, easily digestible language, and an overall rapid read are what work here.

Once we’ve won them over, we take these leads to a different nurturing sequence where we inform them about your services, successful case studies, and what specifically you aspire to do for them.

Typically this sequence runs anywhere between 3 weeks – 3 months. You cannot be pushy in this situation; the best you can do is inquire about whether they are interested in similar services and arrange an appointment.

This is the internet equivalent of old-school trade show trips.

Fast-Paced Cold Email Campaigns

There’s another type of cold email campaigns that experts like Alex Berman talk about – shorter time frames, hyper-specific, and sales-positive. This is where we run a sequence of 4 emails based on the 3C’s – Compliment, Case Study, and a CTA.

While Harpreet does not contest the effectiveness of such quick-fire cold email marketing, he does issue a “warning” to us all. If the product has a high value and costs more than a few thousand dollars, he advises moving slowly and giving the consumer some time. Such transitions demand a lot of time and money, as well as substantial costs. The customer might need their own time to make such a purchasing decision.

Hence, even if you run quicker campaigns, make sure to then add these leads to a monthly newsletter or similar runs, to keep them in touch with your brand.

Anti-Spam Policies

To make sure the emails do not land up in the spam folder, there are a few things to take care of:

1) SPF, DKIM, and DMARC anti-spam policies for your domain and email account: These assist in informing servers that your email address is legitimate and that you are not attempting to bombard users with spammer posts.

2) If you have a fresh email address, wait at least two to three weeks before sending bulk emails from it. During this period, you can warm up your address by utilizing automation tools to send emails to and from your address, giving the servers the appearance that this is a working domain that sends and receives messages.

What Differentiates A Good Email From A Bad One?

• Shorter Emails.
• No Long, Complex Sentences.
• Conversational Tone.
• Bullet Points.
• Easily Consumable.
• Engaging Subject Lines.
• No spammy words like FREE..
• Avoiding sounding overly commercial in the subject and introductory lines.

Including Graphics in Your Emails

Typically, you shouldn’t use a lot of graphics in your emails.
Simple text emails are easy to read and are less likely to be categorized as spam.

Harpreet strongly advises against utilizing any visuals for B2B brands unless your product requires a visual explanation.

However, for brands operating in the e-comm space, using visuals often becomes unavoidable.

Testing Your Emails

“Manual emails are a big no, especially when you are sending these in today’s fast times. It’s simply not scalable.” – Harpreet

You’re missing out on sales and growth if you’re wasting time on manual emails. Automation is king. Coming back to the ques of testing, business-owners need to keep their strategy simple and well, and try A/B testing with smaller sample sizes.

Crafting A Minimal/ Founding Strategy

Making a list of SOPs for your email marketing is an excellent place to start. Define everything you require, including the email sequences for the various clients and occasions. Create a simplified and crystal-clear approach so that any new hire may quickly adapt to what you’re doing.

“Again, no manual emails,” said Harpreet.
Which option would you choose if you could send 45 and 450 emails in the same amount of time?

Additionally, sending emails manually doesn’t ensure a greater delivery rate. If you send out too many comparable manual emails, servers may still flag it as spam.

How to Customize Within An Automated Process

Mostly, there’s very little scope of 101 customization within an automated sequence.
You can customize based on segments, preferences, etc. by sorting your email lists.
Manual emails do, however, offer a distinct advantage when it comes to giving your emails a personalized touch. This can be done using customized subject and opening lines.

At Shivyaanchi, a “hack” that we suggest here is using placeholders or merge tags for first lines, like we use for first names and company names within the email template. As a result, while the email body is the same for all of your prospects, you may create unique opening lines for each of them.

CRM Software Recommendations

• For Shopify websites – Klaviyo (certain exclusive features)
• e-Commerce – Klaviyo & MailChimp
• For cold emailing – Apollo.io (also has a lead gen functionality), Lemlist, MailShake.

Determining the Best Time and Day

Days of the week: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays
Clock-time: 9 am – 12 pm is when the open rates are quite high, but reply rates are higher around 1-3 pm, when people are usually done with half of their day.

Based on their extensive databases, emailing softwares usually provide related ideas.

Recommended Resources

“My recommendations would be more towards aspiring to understand human psychology, marketing and purchasing mindsets in general,” says Harpreet. Here’s a list of all he mentioned:

1) The Almanack of Naval Ravikant | Book by Eric Jorgenson
2) Building A Second Brain | Book by Tiago Forte
3) Ultimate Sales Machine | YT channel Amanda Holmes
4) Alex Berman’s YT Channel

We hope this comprehensive overview was helpful.
For regular insights from email marketing experts, watch out this space:
Shivyaanchi | Email Marketing ValueBits