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COVID-19 challenges webinar - making the most of email whilst being respectful to the situation.

2 mins read

It’s safe to say the coronavirus pandemic has affected us all in some way. Businesses are closing, others are being forced to work from home and some are shutting their sales and marketing efforts down entirely. To play our part in helpin you in these testing times, we brought along five industry leaders in our webinar series: helping marketing and sales professionals navigate through the challenges caused by COVID-19.

It’s just one small way of giving back to you, so you can utilise any tactics and tips during this situation to boost your efforts. Our third expert guest was Mike Donnelly, the CEO and Co-Founder of Seventh Sense. It’s actually a tool we use at Digital 22 in our inbound marketing strategy, as it uses AI to optimise email send times so they have the highest chance of being engaged with.

In this webinar, Mike explained how you can make the most of email - whilst being respectful to the situation. If you couldn’t make it to the live session, you can check out the video below, totally free and ungated.

Mike highlighted how your prospects’ and customers’ inboxes are really busy, so it’s a real battle to get their attention. However, you can’t stop entirely either as it’ll take far too long to recover when things eventually get back to normal. 

The other big takeaway from the past few weeks was that companies all over the world were blasting out coronavirus emails to their entire database - annoying people who shared their frustrations on social media. Some were even surprised how a particular brand had their email in the first place. But it gave people the opportunity to clean out their unwanted mailing list subscriptions, so it kind of backfired.

Mike offered a personal experience while offering solid advice to those of you that use email marketing tactics. Don’t overpromote as it shows zero empathy. People won’t click on the email, they’ll delete it and it leaves a bad taste. Just think about the situation and understand it, especially from a financial perspective. People aren’t going to buy something every day because they simply can’t afford it.

Instead, Mike suggests you slow down to speed up. That means…

  • Focus on your email strategy.
  • Update your campaigns and expectations by reviewing them to reflect the current situation.
  • Invest in engagement and activations.
  • Reinvest in email and position yourself for survival to thrive.

With it being such a challenge to grab attention, Mike discussed some points on how you can master your email strategy. These include:

  • The little things that leave an impact. This includes authentication, from address, subject lines, preview text, email metrics, signals and list cleaning.
  • An ABM strategy.
  • Spending time on A/B testing.
  • Using email addresses with social.
  • Your timing and frequency.

Rather than provide a really long-winded explanation for each section, hit the play button on the video above. Mike has done a fantastic job breaking down each section and discussed points even further. He talked about deliverability protection, provided ungated resources you can use right now and offered some other tips to refine your email strategy.

There were also some great questions asked during this webinar by those that attended. So stick around to the end of the video in case Mike touched on a query you had while reading this blog.

Email marketing is just one area in sales and marketing where there’s a question mark because of the current pandemic. That’s why we made sure we could offer as much value as possible. Mike was actually one of five expert guests who joined our webinar series to help you in these testing times. We were also joined by:

Inbound itself is a long game where it can take a while to see the real results. So the more effort you put in right now, the stronger your Q3 and Q4 results will be. Email marketing is a key component of the inbound process, but it’s not the only one the methodology relies on to be a huge success.

Content and video marketing, PPC, SEO and more. They all combine to create the ultimate strategy to nurture prospects and drive leads. If you want to find out more about the inbound process, what’s involved, why results take as long as they do and why the method actually works, bookmark and read the all-in-one guide below.