Email Marketing Best Practices for M&A Firms – Updated
Alex Karlsen
June 17, 2020
This week, we explain: 1. How to manage your audience long term. 2. Content ideas to keep your message fresh over time.
Managing your audience over time
We touched on this idea in earlier articles but it is worth reiterating: Email marketing in M&A is not just about lead-gen, its about audience building.
That said, we need to own the fact that this exercise is not just about shaking the tree, but about planting seeds.
Ensuring you have an “audience building mindset” will require that you have different paths to move each prospect down based on their behavior, or level of interest. At minimum, you will have prospects that fall into the following categories:
- No response – Until the prospect says no, treat this as an audience building exercise. Continue to follow up quarterly or even monthly as you see fit.
- No interest – Enter these into a long term, yearly follow up cadence.
- Interest but timing is wrong – Semi-annual or quarterly follow up cadence.
- Interest but do not qualify (lack of EBITDA, circumstance etc.) – Semi annual or quarterly follow up cadence.
- Interest and qualified – Take immidiate action.
Each of these 5 prospect types will require different follow up content. While not incredibly complex, there are enough moving parts in planning a productive M&A email marketing strategy to require some help to maximize your results.
Below are a few suggested content strategies for use in follow ups:
- Recent transaction announcements – Specific to each prospects industry
- Relevant industry news – Send short, personal updates about deals in the industry..even if you did not directly represent them
- Company updates (on your firm) – New hires, recent non-related closes, newsletters, blog updates etc.
- Specific calls to action – Sellability analysis, Value Builder, meeting offers, etc.
We highly recommend having these prospect response types and “trees” well defined prior to starting your email marketing campaigns.
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.
