With new working habits, unforeseen economic challenges, and new buyer behavior influenced by a myriad of other factors, we are now seeing a complex and fast-moving buying market. For this reason, having a sales insights-driven approach can be advantageous for marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing is Still Essential
Though there are many channels now through which customers interact with brands, email remains deeply embedded in our day-to-day. There are 4 billion email users daily, which is why ROI for email marketing stands at $36 for every $1 spent.
And yet, though email marketing remains an excellent way to generate, nurture, and convert B2B leads, focus on email content has faded into the background for some brands. Why?
The problem isn’t that no one is using email anymore, but that email marketing strategies simply lack the insights needed to influence buyers to take action. However, a sales-driven strategy powered by the latest sales insights can help marketers create email campaigns that align with today's buyer behaviors.
Sales and Email Marketing: The Perfect Pair
Utilizing data-driven, actionable insights is essential to make more informed decisions that lead to sales success. Unfortunately, there is still often a large gap between the data used and shared by sales and marketing teams.
However, using data analysis, sales leaders can guide their teams and share their insights with marketing to enable more personalized and effective outreach. In other words, utilizing sales data that better understand buyer behaviors and trends allows sales and email marketing to reach the right lead at the right time with messaging that resonates.
Understanding Sales Insights
What are sales insights? When we discuss data, we are talking about the raw information about sales activities, such as when and where consumers are buying and patterns in buyer behavior. Sales insights are then the understandings and interpretations derived from that data. The data can be seen as the “what,” and the insights are the “why.”
These insights are important because they provide brands with a roadmap that guides them as they develop and refine their strategies. This includes sales strategies and marketing strategies, such as email marketing campaigns.
Sales insights can help better understand what drives revenue, allowing strategies to be improved to yield the best results. These insights also show where things are failing so that changes can be made and resources can be channeled more effectively. This, in turn, helps brands drive more sustainable growth and maximize their ROI.
Some examples of tools and resources to gain sales insights include:
- Data analytics tools
- Sales performance tracking
- Lead management software
- Predictive analytics tools
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
Sales Insights That Can Improve Email Marketing
Below are some of the top sales insights to focus on that can help you improve your sales and email marketing:
- Change your purpose: Instead of messaging being all about selling, focus on helping your buyer solve their needs and problems. Don’t just sell to them; advise and guide them through the process.
- Focus on the benefits: Instead of solely focusing on the product or service and the features, emphasize the benefits the client will gain and how it will solve their problems. In other words, the messaging should be less about the product or service and more about why or how it can help them.
- Use a sense-making communication style: Giving clients as much information as possible and telling them everything they need to know isn’t practical in emails. Sense-making is a sales communication style that guides customers through making complex decisions by helping them identify what information matters most and helping them focus on the right questions. This is a great insight to use for email marketing to keep buyers from getting overwhelmed with too much information.
- It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it: Any good salesperson knows that it’s not necessarily the words that come out of their mouths that matter, but how they present themselves and their body language. This same idea can be applied to emails. How an email is structured, the colors and imagery used, and even the text or font style can all convey a message that can make the actual word on the page be interpreted in different ways by the customer. Don’t just focus on what words you put into the email, but on how those words and the message are presented.
Drive Sales With Effective Email Marketing
If your email campaigns aren’t quite hitting the mark, you could lack data-driven insights. Your sales team likely has selling tips that your marketers can use and insights gathered from doing their own market research that can improve your marketing efforts.
At Cogo & Co., we have experience helping sales and marketing teams align their goals and processes to improve lead generation and drive revenue. This includes assisting brands in developing more effective sales-driven email campaigns.
To find out how your email marketing is working, take the Cogo Growth Readiness test and get your score. Schedule a free consultation to learn more about how we can analyze your email marketing, boost conversions across every stage, and accelerate growth for your business.
