Email marketing best practices for M&A firms – Part 2

#2. The follow up is as important than your initial outreach

I see this every day – an M&A firm struggles to get an initial email marketing campaign live.

The reasons for this can range from bandwidth to a lack of accountability on making marketing decisions at the partner level.  Once the email campaign is live, some opportunities are generated early on and the team forgets about the most valuable piece of the campaign – the follow up.

Business owners are nearly 3 times more likely to respond to your third email than your first. So, in some sense your initial interaction email is just a means to get to touch three.

Here is what works in generating responses, in our experience:

1. Use an organic follow up cadence.  Mechanized follow ups, sent at the same time and date each month read like automated email marketing.  Stagger your follow up cadence and try to mirror an actual persons email ebb and flow. It's more common early on in email communication to follow up rapidly and slow the follow up over time.  Don’t be afraid to send your second follow up a few days after your first.
2. Say something different each time. You can only introduce your firm so many times.  Plan to quickly pivot to short story telling, or value added information and updates to avoid fatigue.  Once a prospect unsubscribes you lose them forever.
3. Building an audience = building value. Think of the email marketing exercise as a audience building effort not a lead generation effort.  It’s easier to generate active leads from an audience than from a cold group who has no understanding of who you are or what you do.

All of these tips require someone at your firm to actively manage campaigns and ultimately be accountable for things like:

• Prospecting
• Content creation
• Email systems selection
• Campaign execution
• Follow up and tracking
• Testing and long term improvement

The list above is a good reminder that creating maximum value with email marketing takes some work and a diverse skill set.  There are times where we argue that one off, sporadic email marketing campaigns actually do more harm than good.  If you are running your M&A firm’s outbound marketing, we can’t stress enough – having a mid term focused strategy with a diligent, deliberate perspective on follow up will help elevate the success of the effort.

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.

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