Email marketing best practices for M&A firms – Part 1
Gabe Galvez
April 2, 2018
Regardless of what email platform you use, or what your area of speciality is, there are a few key best practices that often make the difference between a lead generating initiative and a waste of time.
Over the next few weeks, we will touch on 3 best practices to consider when sourcing new sell-side clients via email. After running email marketing campaigns for a large pool of M&A firms, we find these points to be the basis of high quality campaigns.
#1. Get Personal with Your Emails
There are two broad strategies M&A firms use when using email to generate deal flow – branded and non-branded emails. Branded emails are template driven, HTML rich and are often more about the firm as a brand than anyone particular person or deal. While branded emails looks great, they present a number of challenges, like:
- HTML-based emails render differently on different email platforms. This makes it very tough to format a message uniformly.
- HTML-emails read like solicitations, not real person-to-person communication.
- HTML-emails are exponentially more likely to be flagged as spam, greatly reducing the odds of contacting the prospect.
To avoid these issues, we recommend sending short form, personal emails. Your emails should be more about initiating a conversation than some solicitation from one firm to another.
Do the following to your email campaigns and we guarantee it will improve both deliverability and your response rates.
- Make sure your prospect list has accurate names. This will allow you to mail merge names to read more personally.
- Always remember to talk about them, not you. These are cold solicitations. By definition, they are not looking for information about you, but if you can speak to a pain they are having, they may listen.
- Send plain text emails. Plain text emails do not need to be rendered by a browser and will increase deliverability, often by double digit percentage rates.
- Do not include more than 1 hyperlink. Emails with many links are at higher risk of being flagged as spam. Keep your links to an absolute minimum, even if that means unlinking your signature line, logos, LinkedIn profile etc. More links = more spam.
If you are interested in developing an outbound email marketing strategy for your M&A firm, we can help!
From prospect identification, content creation and execution, we fully manage your outbound email efforts so you can focus on closing more deals. Contact us for pricing and scope details.
