Content Marketing Decoded: Email Marketing with Noah Kagan – Part 2

Anyone involved in content marketing knows that the World Wide Web is full of concentrated knowledge, expert tips and training on SEO and SEM, social media marketing, content strategies, link building and much more. But in everyday life there is often no time to follow all these digital experts and platforms. That’s why we created our blog series “Decoded”. Each post is dedicated to a different specialist and their input on a topic from online marketing. This time it’s the turn of email marketing expert Noah Kagan.

Email Marketing: The Best Tips from Noah Kagan – Part 2

Hardly any business can do without strategic email marketing. This important element in the customer journey enables you to generate leads that later turn into paying customers. But how do you get to the email addresses of your target group? How do you make them stand out from the multitude of emails your contacts receive every day? And how do you get them to click on the links in your newsletter? To find answers to these questions, let’s look at the best email marketing ideas from digital expert Noah Kagan and his team at Sumo.com.

Noah Kagan has already had an impressive career in online marketing. He worked as No. 30 at Facebook and No. 4 at Fintech company Mint. In 2010, he founded Sumo, which provides free marketing tools to small businesses so they can increase their traffic. With these custom-built tools, he and his team could grow the mailing list for AppSumo to over one million subscribers. Noah has published guest articles in the Huffington Post, Forbes, and Apple News. He also shares his knowledge from personal experiences, studies conducted, and interviews with other digital experts in blog posts, YouTube videos, and podcasts.

By the way: You can find Noah Kagan’s first five tips on email marketing in another article. The first two articles in the Decoded series focused on digital expert Neil Patel and his SEO hacks for better search engine rankings. In the third and fourth part, we looked at Michael Stelzner’s tips for success in social media marketing.

Tip 6: Make time for the essentials – marketing automation through targeted workflows Part 2

In the first article on Noah Kagan, we already looked at three workflows for email marketing. Today, we’ll introduce you to four more workflows. They help you define processes for different situations in sales and marketing and to automate the corresponding email sending. This way, it well takes your readers care of and you have time for other tasks.

Drive sales negotiations

We sell not only some products at fixed prices, but are part of an auction. Ash Read of Sumo cites the example of Uniregistry, a company that mediates between the owner of an Internet domain and a potential buyer. Through an automated e-mail workflow, Uniregistry moves price negotiations forward:

After a visitor asks about a domain, he or she receives an initial e-mail with information about the broker who handles it. Three days later, the interested party receives a simple text email with the price of the domain name and a request for a response. If there is no response, the company sends the prospect another email five days later encouraging him to contact them to negotiate the price.

Provided there is no response here either, the prospect receives further emails at increasingly longer intervals to trigger a response. At the end of each email, the “Click here to respond” call-to-action is included to make it as easy as possible for the reader.

Automate problem resolution in customer service

When interacting with existing customers, certain service issues may come up again and again, such as fixing a technical glitch or updating payment methods. To keep customers informed of the current status, you can also use marketing automation. Ash analyzed Netflix’s email workflow for this purpose. In the first email, the streaming provider informs the customer that the payment was unsuccessful and asks the customer to update their payment methods via a link. A second email confirms the change of account data and invites the customer to the platform again with a call-to-action. Once the payment collection on Netflix’s part has been successful, the customer receives a third email with the confirmation.

Ash recommends the following approach to this type of email workflow:

• Clearly identify the problem
• Include a simple step-by-step guide to resolve the issue
• Notify the customer once we resolve the issue

Use re-targeting email to bring back prospects

Re-targeting ads are one way you can bring prospects back to your offer. But this also works with an email workflow. AirBnB collects user data on its website: In which location is an accommodation searched, what type of accommodation, in which price category, on which dates, etc. Based on this individual search history, the platform emails the interested party a few hours later with suitable offers. About ten days later, an email follows with more suitable offers: the most popular accommodations in the respective city.

Reactivate former customers

If customers have purchased nothing from you for a while or have cancelled a paid service, you can try to reactivate these customers with the email workflow. LinkedIn sends a series of emails to former subscribers for its premium version, and each focuses on the various benefits.

The first email is about viewing profile visitors, the second is about InMails and LinkedIn Learning, and the third is about smart job search options. The sends are each accompanied by an invitation to try LinkedIn Premium for free for a month. As Ash notes, the professional network sends such emails to former customers every month, which recipients can quickly find annoying. Here, decide for yourself at what intervals you contact former customers.

Tip 7: Successful email marketing in the B2B sector – it should be short

Email marketing is not only excellent for the B2C sector, but also in B2B. However, there are different rules here:

• In B2B, mostly, several people in a company decide on an investment. The recipient of your email is not necessarily the decision maker.
• Because of the many people involved, the decision-making process also takes much longer than in B2C.
• Professional e-mails are usually opened during office hours, and sometimes on weekends in the case of home office employees. Therefore, conduct tests to determine the ideal sending time.

Understand your target audience

You should know your target group very well, as Bill Widmer from Sumo.com points out. You can find out, for example, with a short questionnaire that you send to your existing list:

• Why did you originally sign up for [brand name]’s newsletter?
• What can we help you with? OR How can we help you achieve your goals?
• Are you the owner of the business or an employee/freelancer?

Analyze the interests of your target audience(s)

Check out forums of professional associations and professional networks of your target audience to learn more about the topics that interest them. Another option: offer your subscribers a free phone call to learn how they can be more successful with their business. While giving them expert tips, you can learn more about their motivations during the conversation. The results will form the basis of your B2B email marketing.

Send value-added emails

Every element of your emails should add value, from the subject line to the specific offer.

• Be direct and get to the point quickly. After all, your email is just one of many that land in your subscribers’ professional inboxes every day.
• Help your readers with clear CTAs like buttons and links.
• Keep images and videos to a minimum.

Test your approach

Bill from Sumo.com concludes by advising that you test your approach. The above B2B email marketing tips are recommendations. However, your target audience may like long stories and lots of images. By testing different approaches with your target audience, you will ultimately find the optimal form and achieve high open and click-through rates.

In the article “B2B E-mail Marketing: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need” you will find more tips on this topic. Bill Widmer also presents many examples of B2B e-mail campaigns.

Tip 8: Increase recipient engagement with confirmation emails.

One method Chief Sumo Noah Kagan still swears by is confirmation emails. They have some of the highest open and click-through rates. Why? After a user places an order, signs up for a newsletter or makes a booking, they want to know if they were successful. You can take advantage of this motivation: Add additional content to the automatically sent confirmation email to increase recipient engagement.

Sumo.com recommends the following as best practices:

• The confirmation email should be simple in design, consistent with your brand’s corporate design, and in line with your communication guidelines.
• Explain to readers who have just signed up for your newsletter at what regular intervals they can expect what type of content.
• Use the number 3 (or 5) to alert the recipient to additional offers. With three choices, you avoid making the reader feel overwhelmed.
• Use the confirmation email to alert the recipient to additional free content that may interest them.
• Make the customer journey as seamless as possible by directing readers of the confirmation email to a landing page that includes only relevant information or content.
• Use social proof in your emails: opinions from customers, experts, and influencers build trust in your brand.
• Connect the confirmation email with opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell. However, be careful not to push too hard for another purchase.

If you want to know what such confirmation emails can look like specifically, check out the related post by Stefanos Bournias on Sumo.com: “How To Leverage Email Confirmations In 2021 For Explosive Growth”. Here he shares ten of the best examples of confirmation emails from various companies. Noah Kagan’s confirmation email for OkDork.com is also included.

What does Gerrit from Crispy Content® have to say about it?

“Noah Kagan’s tips on email marketing are so valuable because he backs up his theses with numbers. For him, this is no art: His blog has immense reach, the leads in his email list match the products he sells, and: He sells digital products at scale. So his tips are not the result of any lab experiments, but first-class field research with subsequent empirical proof.”

Editorial Team Crispy Content® Team

Creative, smart and talkative. Analytical, tech-savvy and hands-on. These are the ingredients for a content marketer at Crispy Content® - whether he or she is a content strategist, content creator, SEO expert, performance marketer or topic expert. Our content marketers are "T-Shaped Marketers". They have a broad range of knowledge paired with in-depth knowledge and skills in a single area.