Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 3, Ryan discusses the five key principles of demand
generation. These principles are: understanding your target audience, creating
compelling and relevant content, implementing multichannel marketing
strategies, building a strong sales and marketing alignment, and regular
performance measurement and optimization. The host explains each principle in
detail and provides practical tips for effective implementation. Additionally,
emerging trends in demand gen such as AI, machine learning, personalized
marketing, automation, augmented reality, and voice search optimization are
discussed. The importance of data privacy, security, resource requirements,and
continuous learning is also highlighted. Implementing these principles can
help businesses attract leads effectively and achieve sustainable marketing
success.
Summary notes from Episode 3:
The podcast episode discusses the five key principles of demand generation:
understanding your target audience, creating compelling and relevant content,
implementing multichannel marketing strategies, building a strong and engaged
sales and marketing alignment, and regular performance measurement and
optimization. Understanding the target audience involves conducting market
research, analyzing customer data, and leveraging social listening to tailor
messaging and deliver relevant content. Creating compelling and relevant
content involves researching customer pain points, using storytelling
techniques, and mapping content to the buyer’s journey. Implementing
multichannel marketing strategies helps reach a wider audience, increase brand
visibility, and provide multiple touchpoints for customers. Building a strong
and engaged sales and marketing alignment requires regular communication,
shared goals and metrics, and a closed-loop feedback system. Regular
performance measurement and optimization involve measuring and analyzing
performance to identify what’s working and what needs improvement, and
aligning key performance indicators (KPIs) with marketing efforts. Some best
practices for implementing these principles include aligning them with
business goals, clearly defining target audience personas, and developing a
comprehensive marketing plan. Success stories and case studies can provide
real-world examples of effective demand generation strategies. Emerging trends
in demand generation include AI, machine learning, personalized marketing,
automation, augmented reality, and voice search optimization. Considerations
for businesses include data privacy and security, resource requirements, and
the need for continuous learning and upskilling. Implementing these principles
ensures consistent and sustainable marketing success.
Full Transcript:
00:00
Today on the Demand Gen Pod, we will be diving into a fascinating topic of inbound versus outbound email. And what is the difference? Email marketing plays a crucial role in business marketing strategies, but it is important to understand the distinctions between the two and we’re going to chat about them. So in this episode we will be talking about the key goals, strategies and benefits of both methods as well as some of the challenges that they present. So whether you’re looking to build relationships, nurture leads, or achieve immediate conversions, this episode will provide some valuable insights, I hope, and some best practices for leveraging the power of email marketing. So stay tuned as we explore real world examples, discuss the pros and cons, and examine the best ways to integrate inbound and outbound email to maximize your marketing efforts. Let’s get started and unlock the secrets behind effective inbound and outbound strategies.
00:54
Hey there everybody, welcome to the Pod. My name is Ryan. Again, inbound versus outbound. So inbound emails, we’re going to break it down really easily. Inbound emails are those that are sent to people who have willingly subscribed to a company’s emailing list and have already expressed interest in its content or products. And that’s a really simple definition, but I think that the important part here is to recognize that with inbound you are gathering consent to send emails and then sending appropriate emails. In align to that consent and outbound is the opposite. We are sending emails perhaps to a broader audience without that permission to opt in. The email marketing approaches are important. Both are both important for businesses, but they provide a direct and cost effective way to communicate with customers, build brand awareness and generate leads and drive conversions. And this is really crucial because inbound and outbound both of them, while certainly the conversion rates are going to be different, they both can provide valuable insight, whether it be brand building, brand recognition or outbound is also typically used by sales, but it’s not always used by sales.
02:01
It can certainly used by marketing as well, whereas inbound, generally speaking would be used by marketing. Although you can also leverage inbound email if you kind of leave the definition as simple as are they opted in or are they not opted in, you can absolutely leverage inbound email through sales too, which I think can be really cool. So let’s first talk about inbound. Again, inbound marketing is focusing on building relationships and trust with people who have already subscribed. And you do that by providing valuable and relevant content to them. So generally speaking, somebody would go and subscribe by signing up for a webinar or downloading some sort of ebook, attending a conference and providing their email address there. And that gives you that opt in and right to be emailing them. Now in the US. You actually don’t need permission to email people who work at companies on their company email address, you can do it as freely as you like.
02:57
That doesn’t mean that they want to receive those emails and opt outs will likely ensue. But there’s no law stopping you from emailing anyone that you want to email, even like a sales capacity outside of the US. That’s completely different. And then depending on how big your company is as far as the Canspan app is concerned, and CCPA, which is the newest California email law, and I think it’s also in Nevada as well, that’s going to change too, depending on the size of the company. But for smaller companies, it doesn’t matter. You’re able to leverage outbound email as you wish. So a couple of key goals I think are educating subscribers, nurturing your leads, and converting those leads into customers. And I think that is really important for inbound to be defining what your goals are going to be and that might be per campaign.
03:51
So I don’t just mean across all of our email, we want to do this well you probably want to do lots of stuff across all of your email marketing, but the Inbound campaigns that you build should be really specific to what you are trying to achieve. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, where you actually start with what you’re looking to accomplish and then go up from there in the campaign all the way up to the segmentation on who’s actually getting into it. So what do we want to do? We want to convert our existing leads over to be either contacts or sales ready, MQLs, marketing, qualified leads, whatever the case may be, or ideally customers, depending on how long your sales cycle is and what it actually requires, right? Once you have that primary goal for each campaign, you can start to work your way up through the campaign building process to say, okay, well if we want to at least convert our basic high level leads, high funnel leads over to be contacts ready for sales, how do we do that?
04:46
We can provide this content. And one easy way to be able to look at easy is probably a little bit of a stretch, but one way to understand what content you should be providing to leads to convert them into contacts or MQLs is to look what’s worked in the past. And obviously again is assuming that you have content that’s worked in the past. If not, then you’ll have to learn as you go. But if you do have content already, and a good amount of content, then you can look at the closed one deals or your contacts that you currently have, say in the last 60 days or 90 days. And you can look at those contacts and look at the content that they have downloaded or have opened or have clicked on through email, the web pages and you can look at those guys and then you can say, okay, well we can identify.
05:35
If most people who have converted over to a contact from a lead and gone to sales, most people have looked at this ebook or most people haven’t had this webinar, then you can kind of identify that as slightly like middle funnel content, which is excellent. The next step is going to be talking about what you would do in order to actually design that content. So now you know what you’re going to send them and then you want to start thinking about what the content inside of the email should be. Generally speaking, Brevity is your friend and you want to keep that in mind. Then from there you can kind of go up to that next step. Okay, well how do we write the subject lines that align to that content in the email which align to the CTAs, which align to the actual assets that we’re going to be sending them?
06:20
And then once you have that is, okay, well now who do we actually segment our list out with in order to send those emails to the best people at the right time? Some examples could be obviously not only just the content emails with the lead nurturing campaigns, but also welcome emails or newsletters whether they be educational or product related. All of those are really great examples of inbound email but generally speaking it’s very content driven. What about outbound? So outbound email targets that broader audience without that prior permission and what does that really translate to? Well, it translates to poor open rates and it translates to poor click through rates and higher unsubscribe rates. Now while generally speaking all of those things are bad, outbound’s email position is that it’s really designed to identify people who otherwise would not know about you. And it’s sort of like trying to think of a good analogy here, but it’s sort of like spraying and praying I guess a little bit.
07:24
But if you have a really large list and maybe you’ve purchased that list, maybe you’ve sent an email to an outbound email company to send on your behalf and that would likely have, if it’s a marketing style email, it would very likely be a content email. So join us for our webinar and it’s sent to a list that you have otherwise no access to. So generally speaking you’re paying for it. Maybe companies will scrape email addresses from the internet, whether it be LinkedIn. There are lots of tools to help you do that. Like seamless AI for example, and pull in a bunch of email addresses that you think based on job title or company years, experience, whatever that case or location, kind of whatever you’re shooting for creating an outbound email list that way. And really what you’re trying to do is get that email list that you’re sending to actually opt in on the marketing side.
08:13
That’s the goal of the outbound marketing program. One of the things that I would say that you want to be looking for is to try to drive some sort of conversion. That’s a primary goal of outbound email. And I don’t necessarily mean a sales conversion. I think the ODS of that are super rare on outbound. But a conversion doesn’t necessarily have to be a sale. A conversion could be a willingness to talk. So if it’s a sales outbound email, just a reply, that’s a conversion. Any level of detail that pushes that contact, who is otherwise what we would call super cold, pushes that contact farther down the funnel and warms them up and ready to speak to sales, or at least ready to hear about who you are and what you have to offer. That is a conversion. In outbound. But you can also promote offers.
09:03
You can increase brand visibility simply by sending your brand out to a large list and then again, finally kind of getting those opt in conversions. A couple of key differences between inbound and outbound engagement levels and interaction opportunities. Inbound results in much higher engagement opportunities, and that’s really because the subscribers are interested. Outbound will very likely have much lower engagement rates. Regarding lead, gen and nurturing strategies, inbound will focus on nurturing strategies through that valuable content, whereas outbound focuses on sort of like direct sales and conversions. So talking directly to sales typically, unless it’s like a marketing outbound email and then content and messaging just kind of a recap. Inbound are really focused on educational and being value driven, while outbound emails tend to be a bit more sales oriented from a sales standpoint or from a marketing standpoint, you may try to make them educational and value driven, but really what you’re trying to do is get that simple conversion.
10:07
So on a landing page that you might be guiding somebody to from an outbound email, keep it really simple, really short, form should be really short, only picking up the form fields that you absolutely need and reduce that friction to get somebody to convert what are some pros. So we build trust, we increase engagement, we can improve in conversion rates, we certainly get better ROI, and we get personalized communication with email marketing. Regardless for inbound. Some cons with inbound, and I think it’s con, I think is a bit of a strong word here, but just if we’re going through them slower Growth in subscriber Numbers it takes a lot of work to build your email list. It takes a ton of content. It takes either money spent on paid advertising to coincide with it, or a lot of social posting, getting lucky, going viral, whatever the case may be.
11:03
It takes time to grow subscriber numbers. Inbound also can have a long lead nurturing process. I think that the average number of emails that need to be sent for some sort of conversion is between like seven to nine emails. That’s a lot of content that you have to come up with if you might think that each of those emails is some sort of asset, an ebook, a white paper, a webinar, that takes a lot of time and there’s a lot of upfront cost to doing that as well. And I think that it’s worth noting though that while there’s a lot of upfront cost to email marketing, or there certainly can be in content marketing in general, inbound marketing in general, the reward is substantial because when you build that baseline and you start building out your campaigns, you get to keep those. It’s not just a single send to one list and then it goes away.
11:56
You might purchase additional outbound lists even though we don’t really love doing that because the value is not always there on outbound email. But certainly as you build your subscriber list with inbound email you will see substantial conversion rates and substantial ROI leveraging email much more so than you will paid as a direct comparison. But they really all need each other. So in order to build that email list you have to get people to your list to sign up and paid and social organic traffic is a really good way to leverage all of that. So you kind of need to do each of those omnichannel steps in order to be able to leverage any one of them realistically. And what about outbound? So, pros and cons of outbound email? Pros it reaches a really large audience quickly and you have the potential for immediate conversions even though they’re honestly very rare.
12:46
But you can also get some rapid growth in subscriber numbers. It can also be really expensive, which I would say probably brings us over to the cons much lower engagement rates. It’ll look pretty pitiful compared to any inbound marketing efforts that you’re doing, a much higher risk of pissing somebody off. So realistically, you send a bunch of unsolicited emails to people, they may get frustrated, that may hurt brand, but it also may not realistically. And then those conversion rates alongside those engagement rates are going to be much lower as well. So sort of more money spent upfront with outbound marketing and inbound marketing you’re going to see much higher conversion with inbound over time. You may see some quick wins on outbound, but that’s really just a numbers game more than anything else and those are kind of the main differences. Before I forget, I’d also love for you guys to subscribe if you could, either on your podcast reveals to your podcast or if you’re watching this on YouTube, subscribe to our channel on YouTube.
13:51
That would be killer. Thanks so much. So what about some best practices for combining inbound and outbound email, use outbound to attract new subscribers and build that audience for inbound. So again, we kind of chatted about this, but outbound, generally speaking, might give you a really big list that you either purchase or rent, and then you actually are able to take that list, send out a series of emails or maybe just one or a few emails, and hopefully that converts people to actually opt in to start receiving the inbound campaigns. Regarding the inbound campaigns, segment, segment those email lists to target specific demographics or interests. I’ll say this time and time again, big inbound marketing campaigns will not be as successful as a series of smaller campaigns, even if it means sending fewer emails person. You end up building more emails across the board and then you’re able to segment a little bit further.
14:49
And you can also certainly leverage dynamic content for that as well. So you can have one campaign that sends to everybody and then the dynamic content inside of each of those emails will be breaking out the segments that you define as well. So you can totally do that. You’re also able to then be using inbound emails to nurture leads through generated content and you can do that through outbound campaigns. And then finally analyze and optimize the campaigns based on the engagement and conversion metrics that you’re seeing. So what’s doing well? What’s doing poorly? If you end up sending 1000 emails and you get no conversions on the particular piece of content, it may not mean the content is bad, it may mean that the email content is bad, or I should say it may not mean the asset is bad. Maybe the email content is bad, maybe the subject line can need some work.
15:36
So what are you seeing and how can you optimize based on the conversions? And then what are you seeing and how can you optimize based on the engagement? So, some tips and recommendations just start by building a solid inbound foundation and establish trust with your subscribers. That’s the very beginning. You can experiment with outbound campaigns to reach broader audience and generate new leads. But again, keep in mind you generally need to be paying for those things and it’s pretty high risk, mediocre reward I would say on the whole. Other options for inbound or sorry, other options for outbound that may better suited, could be in theory, could be things like email lists that are generated from being a sponsorship at a conference, for example, where it’s really hyper focused. But I think even still that all falls under outbound campaigns. But it’s really difficult to see those conversions with outbound.
16:35
And then you can experiment with those outbound campaigns and then regularly analyze the data and metrics to refine both of them. And then don’t forget to stay informed about new trends, new technologies and strategies that you can leverage. I hope that this has been really helpful to you. Want to keep these short. My name is Ryan, this is Demand Gen Pod subscribe if you can. Thank you for joining us today and we will see you next time.