Reaching and connecting with prospects has become more challenging this year. There have been significant changes around people’s work environments and accessibility, media consumption, budgets, and priorities—not to mention considerable turnover. We’ve seen the effects of these changes throughout the year and shared our experiences with you. Now, a new report from email platform Validity, aptly titled “Disruption,” quantifies how email was affected by this year’s pandemic.
With that in mind, we’re going to explore some trends that will influence email effectiveness in 2021. Then, we’ll recommend some areas to look at as your agency prepares its 2021 new business outreach strategy. In this post, we will exclusively consider the text-only email format that has been proven most effective for new business lead generation efforts.
While this information is timely and insightful, it represents takeaways from cross-vertical emails to various audiences. Email engagement rates for the advertising and marketing industry have always trended slightly lower than other verticals.* Additionally, cold email campaigns should be expected to underperform relative to emails for opted-in audiences who want to hear from the sender. So the challenges for agency new business outreach are even greater.
When sending lead generation emails, it’s important to visualize the context in which they will be received. There will likely be dozens of emails from other agencies in your contact’s inbox, so yours must stand out and offer clear proof of value upfront, which we’ll get into in greater detail below.
*Advertising/Marketing performs in the bottom quartile for open/click engagement among Campaign Monitor’s U.S. Email Marketing Benchmarks (2020): By Day and Industry. Marketing and Advertising performs in the lowest 11% of industry verticals in MailChimp’s Email Marketing Benchmarks and Statistics by Industry from October 2019 (the Creative Services/Agency vertical was only in the lower half). Constant Contact’s comparison by industries chart (as of November 2020) placed its Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations category in the lowest-performing 15% of industries.
Despite its challenges, email remains one of the most effective ways to generate leads for agency new business. The question is, how do you get your email seen by the right people and make sure it stands out from the many mediocre ones?
Here, we discuss the three most important elements of a successful agency lead generation campaign. Each of these elements, strategy, engagement, and deliverability, are interrelated and necessary. If your email campaign is a stool, consider these elements as the three legs working together to hold it up.
Before getting into the technical aspects of engagement and deliverability, we have to start with strategy. For your campaign to be successful, you must demonstrate your right to win the business you are pursuing. Even a perfectly-crafted email will come across as ineffective if your agency doesn’t have its proof points in place.
For example, a cold email will often end by asking whether there is interest in having a call, meeting, or discussion. But if you have not equipped the prospect with the tools to evaluate whether that is worth their time, it may mean you are jumping ahead in their buyer’s journey. Give them a chance to decide if they like you before you ask them on a date.
Ideally, your lead generation outreach will include a mix of compelling proof points that link back to relevant, well-developed case studies, along with thought leadership to educate prospects about your expertise in solving problems like theirs. These assets would direct them back to your agency’s website, which should be user-friendly and demonstrate your effectiveness at generating business results for clients like them.
With their interest piqued, prospects should arrive at the logical conclusion that they want to speak with you to learn more about how you can help them.
Without the assets to support this process, emails are more likely to come across as empty, sales-y, and self-serving—significantly reducing their effectiveness.
Building an email lead generation strategy typically starts by determining the target vertical and understanding what you can offer to brands in that vertical right now. From there, you sharpen the focus by identifying the best target companies and appropriate contacts in that vertical.
Segmenting your contacts by role, you can then drill down on their pain points and what language they might respond to. Next, you can layer in any relevant background information about personal connections, past interactions, trends, or news. All of these can help inform customized and targeted messaging, and the more you put into this upfront work, the greater likelihood of payoff at the end.
When you determine appropriate target verticals, a deciding factor should be the relevant work you have to show. As you start to think about messaging, plan to leverage your relevant assets, including case studies, thought leadership, and key proof points or KPIs that can be referenced in the email itself.
Other things to consider at this stage are your goals. Will you structure your email campaign to optimize for clicks first or for deliverability? And is your only immediate goal a conversation, or is there also a relevant offer for them to engage on as they determine their level of interest? How many touchpoints will be used in your campaign, by which methods, and at what intervals?
If you’ve done the strategy work upfront to create highly relevant and customized emails, you will have a head start on engagement. Here are some other factors affecting email engagement:
More on subject lines: Yesware has found that subject lines that are questions get about 10% higher-than-average open rates. They also found that subject lines with numbers get 45% higher-than-average open rates. Other winning subject line strategies according to Yesware: leveraging social proof or FOMO, generating curiosity, providing value, and addressing pain points. Test them out to see what works for you.
Something to note: Email technologies can negatively impact email campaign effectiveness. For example, as valuable as email engagement data is, the pixels in tracking software can hurt deliverability. So you may decide that it’s worth trying untracked emails without links and images to optimize deliverability and that it’s time to lean into email response rate as your key metric versus opens and clicks. These are tradeoffs that will require testing on your part.
As we mentioned earlier, deliverability continues to be a challenge for email marketers. Be sure you have all of the current SPAM triggers on your radar as you plan your agency’s lead generation campaign.
In general, simple is better when it comes to email deliverability, particularly with cold emails. Wiza has found open rates for plain text emails are 30% better than those of HTML-based emails, in part, they say because HTML can trigger SPAM filters.
For our purposes, plain text performs best. Sometimes, we've even found it improves deliverability to remove all links and images from the email (including the signature). We suggest minimizing links to no more than one or two per email, and if deliverability issues persist, see if it helps to remove all of them.
TIP: Use tools like Mailtester, Glockapps, Postmark, and AlwaysArrive to test your sender reputation as well as your email content.
Creating effective email campaigns to generate leads for your agency can be trickier than it appears, even in a “good” year. 2020 has thrown additional obstacles into the mix, and 2021 will likely include more of the same. Even so, with a consistent and disciplined approach, you should expect to see positive results from your lead generation efforts. You just might have to put greater effort into the upfront work for strategy, engagement, and deliverability.
Remember that missed messages, budget considerations, and a focus on fighting immediate fires have made it less likely for many marketers to follow up this year. If you’ve built a solid campaign, don’t be discouraged by lower immediate engagement. No response doesn’t always mean no interest. Continue to test and adjust your messaging strategy, and also be aware that your work can yield longer-term value as long as it is impactful and makes a positive introduction to the agency.
On that note, be sure to re-engage some of your "missed connection" prospects in 2021— you just might find yourself in the right place at the right time.
Image credits: Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash; Photo by Adam Jang on Unsplash; Photo by Hannes Johnson on Unsplash