As a Managed Service Provider, it’s crucial that you keep in contact with both your current customers and new leads through email marketing.
Keeping yourself and your business top of mind ensures that when it comes time for them to decide who they’ll be doing business with, you’ll be at the top of the list.
You need to carefully plan out WHAT and WHEN you’ll be emailing. Providing value to your prospects is the only way to convert them to paying customers.
To help with your email marketing, our team has put together some tips that you can use…
Tip #1 – Your Opening Salvo
First impressions are important, and because you aren’t face to face with your clients, the only way you can effectively capture your audience’s attention is through your writing.
It’s especially crucial when it comes to creating your email subject lines. Having a basic understanding of copywriting is imperative to your email newsletter’s success.
Let’s play a game. Which of these two subject lines do you think is more likely to be opened?
- New Managed Services Available
- Customers Saved Over 30 Hours This Month With This…
Use these guidelines to you create something compelling that get opens and clicks for your newsletter:
- Don’t use the same format every time.
- Make the first phrase something specific that, by itself, would interest readers.
- Keep it short (no more than 50 characters).
- Don’t use caps or exclamation points (these can trigger spam filters).
Tip #2 – Make Sure your Content Is Readable (On All Platforms)
Your emails should be optimized for both viewing on Desktop and Mobile.
In its State of Email report released in March of 2017, Litmus reported that 54% of all emails were opened on mobile devices. If your content doesn’t adapt to whatever platform readers open it on, you could see bounce rates skyrocket to well over half of all recipients.
Before you send your emails, check them from multiple devices to make sure they are readable!
Tip #3 – Get To The Point
Just because you’ve written a subject line that sparked interest doesn’t mean you’ve fully captured the attention of your reader.
Movable Ink’s 2014 US Consumer Device Preference Report, which measured how long users spending viewing emails, showed that 3 seconds was the average.
Remember, people tend to skim and scan their email, often on mobile devices, so 3 seconds isn’t a lot of time to win people over. Your emails should get straight to the point, no fluff!
Our marketing team suggests that MSPs break their emails up into 4-6 segments, each with one- or two-sentence blurbs.
You want readers to open your newsletter, scan the headlines, blurbs, and images in just a few seconds without missing anything.
Tip #4 – Seal The Deal
The whole idea of your email is to bring readers one step closer to your website, and ultimately to contacting you…
The first step was your subject line, which you wrote to convince as many readers as possible to open the email.
Your second step peppered them with content designed to keep them interested for more than three seconds, but now what?
Silly as it might sound, the color, shape and size of your “calls to action” (CTAs) have huge impacts on click-through rates.
For Pronto’s MSP clients, we usually include about 4-6 CTA buttons which are colored to match the company’s logo. Combine that with a few words that promise immediate results — like “Get started now,” “See more deals,” and “Try it for free,” — and your newsletter will start to generate a sizable portion of your site visits.
Tip #5 – Test, Test and Test Again!
Not only should you test the content and look of your emails, you should test the time of day and how frequently you send your emails.
Segment your email list into two or three different groups and optimize your scheduling by comparing results between groups. Once you’ve picked a time and date, spend one or two newsletters A/B testing each of the variables listed above.
For example, spend one month testing which subject line style gets the most open rates, one month on how many segments results in the most site visits, and one month on which CTA design is the most successful.
Hopefully these tips give you an idea of what you should be doing with your MSP email marketing.
I know it can be a bit daunting, especially if you don’t have copywriting, graphic design and data analysis skills, so it’s worth considering delegating the creation, sending and analysis of your campaigns.
Consider this…
Each month you’re going to need:
-
- Cloud newsletter management software that runs about
$25 per month
-
- .
A minimum of 1 hour
-
- to create subject lines, headlines and segment summaries of your content.
2 hours
-
- to mobile optimize and test your newsletter.
2 hours
-
- to find images, create your layout and design your CTAs.
Another 2-3 hours
- for setting up A/B tests and then data analysis as well.
Let’s say you bill your time out at a rate of $30 per hour. Your time cost will be $210. Add on the $25 for your newsletter software, and each month the sending of your emails costs you $235.
For less than half of that ( only $100/month) you could have Pronto’s in-house expert team take care of everything for you. Schedule a call with one of our Marketing Experts and let us get your MSP email marketing up-to-scratch today!