This is gonna hurt, pull up a chair and get comfy, because we need to be honest about something.
Enterprise B2B email campaigns are fundamentally broken.
Sales and Marketing teams often feel pride sitting on a pipeline swelling with potential leads— it feels like a well earned testament to our strategic prowess and marketing acumen.
Yet, the sobering reality is that the well-trodden path of outbound campaigns are unlikely to yield even a 3% open rate.
Yes, 3%. That’s not a definition of success.
But it’s better than calling cold, right?
It’s saving grace is that it’s potentially three times better than cold calling outbound, but let’s call it what it is, it’s a 97% failure.
Remember too that this isn’t real engagement. Someone clicked. It’s not a measure of activity, or discussions.
Outbound marketing has likely been tolerated only because the alternative, outbound cold calling, is dreaded by most sellers.
It’s a real hard pill to swallow, especially when considering the enormous effort poured into crafting messages that should, in theory, resonate with your audience.
The Wrong Formulas
For too long, we’ve relied on a formulaic approach to content creation. I know – myself and Laurence have been working on content ideas with enterprises for over 2 decades.
You hunt for that untouched topic, strive for a unique product angle, issue a compelling call to action, and cross your fingers that it resonates with a wide enough audience. This ‘formula’ is fraught with complexity and uncertainty.
But hang on you cry – what about ABM? Account-Based Marketing promised a targeted salvation but has buckled under its own weight, chiefly because of 2 key issues.
First, it’s been unable to scale effectively due to the costs involved in executing a personalized engagement and Second, when the marketing team consider which accounts they need to target?
They often ask sales who they want to target. This may seem well intended, but relegating this task back to the sales team is flawed logic. These are prospects and customers you likely already know, who should be nurtured in a different way – it’s guesswork dressed as strategy.
The Wasted Effort
When you consider the time, energy and money that went into the development of the campaign, the re purposing of suitable (often existing) product content, the persona-account targeting, the considerations that went into creating the right customer incentives, the training of the sales people who will follow up – you hope, no… you NEED the content you have chosen to be right.
In truth the response rates give evidence to the fact that the content, more often than not, clearly misses the mark—not because it lacks quality, but because it’s not personalized, not relevant to our prospects’ immediate concerns, priorities or objectives.
It’s a systemic issue, rooted in a deep-seated vendor-centric view where campaigns are dictated by the sellers desire to speak, when the time is right for them.
A New Dawn
But there is a silver lining. We can pivot. As I said in another post, rather than abusing the power of the machine to shout louder and more frequently, we can embrace the power of the machine to help us become more efficient. We can use the power of AI to help us identify and target better, to dissect and understand the challenges and objectives our prospects face. This isn’t just hopeful conjecture; it’s the new reality we are building.
AI can guide us to the topics that matter to each and every prospect, tailor content that strikes a chord, and inform sales discussions that convert.
We stand on the brink of a new era in Go To Market strategies. Where AI doesn’t just enhance our strategies—it revolutionizes them.
Informed decisions, driven by AI, can help us craft campaigns that don’t just speak to prospects but engage them on a level that matters.
The future is not about educated guesses; it’s about intelligent, informed engagement.
If you are unhappy with your 97% failure rate, stay tuned, we will show you very soon how we have addressed this.
Lee Fisher
CEO and Founder, Nucleus