Before I continue, I would like add that I sent these emails to Securities Lawyers. Not an easy audience.
STEP ONE
Define your audience: title, persona, etc.
Enough said on that.
STEP TWO
Understand what content they actively want, but also – what content they will “passively accept.”
This concept of passively accept became a key B2B metric for me... due to the incredibly long sales cycle of our services: IPO document filing with the SEC. A "sale" could quite literally take several years of relationship building. Also, another essential (and ironically opposite) factor is that sometimes a sales driver was simply being the last-brand-in-the-door. I needed regular, steady (and branded) content.
STEP THREE
Create original content.
This is easier said than done, of course. In this case, I was able to take data we already had parsed and then repackage it in a manner never offered before. I formatted the content as a very quick read for the security lawyers. The engagement with the content drew on a primal business need: competitive intelligence. It was “the week in review” content.
STEP FOUR
Set a schedule for email delivery.
As you see, I went for weekly, confident that the data I was sending was timely and meaningful enough. Anything other than weekly would just make the content longer to read and shorten my visual branding. Last-brand-in-the-door was a goal.
STEP FIVE
Build the list. Cautiously.
As you can imagine, “email blasting” thousands of lawyers brought visions of CAN-SPAM litigation to me. I launched slowly: first to securities lawyers that were clients… and reviewed the standard email metrics. Then, monthly by month, I added more lawyers into the database, collecting their names from a wide variety of sources: opt-in, conferences and actually, scraped from their own websites.
I am NOT recommending that you scape contact data, however in my niche, most law firms openly publish the emails of their partners and associates… so I went for it. My email result data supported that they would passively accept the content. Importantly, I was sending CAN-SPAM compliant emails to USA lawyers. (do not do this to EU or Canadian lawyers)
STEP SIX
Build an executable process.
Steps One – Five are useless if you cannot hit the send button. My execution time-block was built into my week; every Monday morning, rain or shine, from 8:30 – 10:30. The email was sent at 2:30 ET to assure that it was not buried in West Coast lawyers' weekend scroll of email.
COMMENTS
I use Marketo and SFDC.
I was VERY careful not to use this list for non-weekly emails more than once each quarter. This list is sacred.
After the first year, I slowly began adding demand generation “ads” for other content: whitepapers, webinars and blog posts. This email is in its 6th year.
The same content is used in a weekly blog.
The same content is also repackage monthly into a video.
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About Bradley:
"Bradley Smith is probably the most instinctive and creative marketing executive I have ever worked with.
He has the outstanding ability to combine strategic course and tactical execution in the same thought. Bradley’s branding and marketing work was a key factor that brought Shareholder.com to the attention of the Nasdaq – initially leading to our marketing partnership and, subsequently, to the acquisition of Shareholder.com by Nasdaq. He built a powerful brand."
Enzo Villani
CEO ~ Equities.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/enzovillani
PROFESSIONAL HISTORY: Managing Director of Products and Strategy ~ Nasdaq, Inc.