Spring has officially sprung and everyone is delightfully chirping a new tune. I’m keeping up with my New Year’s resolutions (for once!) and feeling in charge and on top of all things new business. (Hint: the travel and tourism industries request that no one dial them for at least forever.)
I’m seeing email campaigns really take off this year; a simple plain text email has turned up many meetings with just a reply and an openess to listen on the part of the marketer. Of course, these “plain” emails are quite calculated in their approach and response. The fact is that marketers in almost every industry are being bombarded with introductory capabilities requests in Q2 so yours better be good.
What I have found to be the most successful in Q1 is good old specificity in both my target verticals and my outgoing messages. What I mean by specificity (my new favorite word) in my target verticals is that I don’t just run and research data lists for a vertical and call it a day – I make damn sure to nail down the right titles and categorize companies within the vertical to match the agency’s most compelling work samples.
For example, say I want to reach out to the retail apparel industry. I have one group of marketers who, for the most part, are “newbies” in the game. The brands aren’t established by decades of legacy, and awareness and traction is more valuable to them at this point than online sales (note: I am not suggesting online sales is the second most important marketing objective – I am just stressing the importance of diving into the marketplace first.) I will tailor my emails and talking points to reflect the agency’s expertise in launching online brand channels that build upon a social networking community and allow the end-user to fully engage with the brand at multiple touch points.
If a second retail apparel group comprises legacy-driven department stores, I will stress in my outreach the agency’s success in online brand revitalization to boost e-commerce sales.
I think you get the drift here; oftentimes, email outreach seems so simple, it becomes mindless. With a little bit of planning, you can easily divide contact lists by vertical and then move contacts within that vertical into separate buckets. These buckets reflect different brand identities and values and take minutes to group; simply group by the first thought that pops into your head when looking at the company name (American Apparel’s messaging is going to vastly different from Saks Fifth Avenue messaging.)
After you have created your buckets o’ value, begin listing your agency’s strongest work around that bucket. The cutting-edge digital work your agency did for MTV might be super relevant for American Apparel while the successful e-commerce reconfiguration and design you did for Disney World may correlate better with Saks.
And take the bucket from there.
Again, this post seems like another monstrous “duh,” but honestly, I forget to do things like this all the time and end up repeating the same message to the wrong marketers and expecting different results (my definition of insanity.)
Break it down by experience. Relevance is such an overused word these days.
Cheers!
