Q: Our MSP wants to take a different approach to its email marketing strategy. We have heard about the benefits of taking a segmented approach to email marketing, but we don’t know how to begin. Do you have any tips to help us segment our email marketing as efficiently as possible?
For MSPs, email marketing is one of the most effective tools for turning leads into business opportunities and partnerships. However, many MSPs are unable to take advantage of all the benefits that email marketing can offer. Some MSPs conduct their email marketing with a very “hands-off” approach, while others will abandon their email marketing efforts altogether if they don’t see immediate or high returns. By taking a segmented approach to email marketing, your MSP should be able to avoid these roadblocks and maximize the usefulness of these tactics to your business.
We recently sat down with Sarah Duffy, senior manager of the demand generation marketing team at Barracuda MSP. To help you effectively transition leads into customers, Sarah shares how a highly targeted and segmented approach can help you achieve email marketing success.
First steps of segmenting
Make sure that your emailable database is clean. This means that all the email addresses in your database are valid and they don’t bounce back. You can’t get started until your email database has been cleaned correctly. If the emails that you send bounce back, you are not going to be able to get too far.
Once your database is clean, determine how you want to segment your audience. Do you want to segment based on titles, industry, employee size, or location? If you want to target by titles, the copy in your email should be different depending on who you sent it to. If you send it to the CEO, the language to the CEO is going to be different than if you send it to the CFO, for example. If you’re going to send different emails by industry, then you need to know how to communicate with them in terms they understand.
If you’re an MSP and want to make more money, an easy way to do this is by focusing your email marketing on businesses with more employees. From there, decide how you want to craft your message based on who you are going to target. I recommend doing research on the types of emails that these folks in the industry prefer. Some prefer text emails, while others prefer graphical emails.
Setting your strategy
First, create a strategy of how you are going to be emailing individuals in your database. Is it going to be a regular cadence, such as once a week, once a month, or something more sporadic? From there, you should determine what action you want them to take upon reading your emails. Do you want a response from the recipient? Do you want to alert them to a special offer that you currently have ongoing? Something like, “We’re giving new customers their first month free.” Or will it be educational information to help them be more aware of their business in the industry from an IT perspective? For example, the importance of end user security training, where they can learn more about it, and what solutions and services you offer.
If you want to take this concept a step further, think about tying it in with other ongoing campaigns, so that your online presence is cohesive.
Lastly, as with all types of marketing programs, especially email, make sure that you are constantly testing. If you send an email and it doesn’t work, don’t give up. One bad campaign doesn’t mean that your email program will never be successful. It just means that you need to make tweaks to the messaging and who you’re targeting. Continue testing to see what works for you and your IT business. What works for one IT business is not guaranteed to work for yours.
The benefits of taking a segmented approach
As Sarah showed, segmenting the email marketing of an MSP is a very detailed process, but one that can provide many positive rewards to your MSP business. Being able to segment your email marketing will allow you to personalize and customize your messaging to your audience. This personalization will show your audience that you are paying attention to them and value their time and business, which is obviously very important to them and will increase their positive feelings towards your MSP business. Segmenting your email marketing gives you the ability to experiment with the messaging and other aspects of your email marketing, so that you can see what works and what is unsuccessful.
Photo: Tzido Sun / Shutterstock
