Ken Krogue

A few months ago, I talked a little bit about the question, “Is leaving a voice message an effective marketing or sales strategy?”

The answer is a definite yes—it’s very effective, especially when it’s combined with other modes of contact, email, calling, faxing.

I wanted to follow-up with another small set of tips for creating good B2B marketing and sales emails.

1. The day of the “awesome marketing email” is pretty well gone. Remember those days when the Internet was still new, and you’d get a pretty email with pictures, and colors, and swirls? At the time it was cool. Now we’ve been trained to tune them out, because we know that it’s “corporate.” Unless it’s from an email list that we actively subscribe to, we generally ignore the corporate stuff.
2. The day of the simple, targeted email is here. Keep it short, keep it simple, stupid. If you’re going to template-ize your emails, make them look like they just came from your desk, like it’s something you whipped up in three minutes. “Hey this is Dave, just following up on some info you requested. Feel free to call me, or shoot me an email back.” Done. The End. Believe it or not, we’ve even found that strategically placing a small typo in the body of the email gives the impression that it was a “personal” email, not a junket, and can increase response rates.
3. If you’re using a sales or lead management CRM (if you’re not, you should be), strategically include some small bit of information from their file. Most systems will merge data fields from the CRM directly into the body of the email. “Hey, I see you came across us at our booth at (insert XYZ Trade Show from the CRM data here).”
4. Remember, the goal of an email is not to sell your product on the spot. The goal is to get the decision-maker to respond.

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Top 30 Articles on www.KenKrogue.com (with total views) and a Summary of Ken’s Forbes Articles

1. What is Inside Sales? Our Definition of Inside Sales | Ken Krogue – 56,369 Views
2. Inside Sales Best Practices - 9,281 Views
3. Inside Sales Tips by Ken Krogue - 5,488 Views
4. My Final Comment on my “Death of SEO” column on Forbes - 6,411 Views
5. 31 Linkedin tips – How-to-use-Linkedin-Best-Practices for B2B Prospecting - 5,680 Views
6. Prediction – SEO will be Dead in 2 Years - 3,976 Views
7. KPI – Key Performance Indicators – 2,285 Views
8. Inside Sales versus Outside Sales – 2,226 Views
9. Is Leaving a Voicemail Worthwhile? – 2,100 Views
10. Inside Sales Tips – How LinkedIn Gives you 3 Free SEO Backlinks - 3,057 Views
11. About Ken Krogue - 1,943 Views
12. Inside Sales is Top Method of Lead Generation – 1,074 Views
13. Inside Sales Training - 1,888 Views
14. Good to Great by Jim Collins - Ken’s Notes Summary – 1,526
15. Inside Sales Tips – Skip to the Beep – 1,392 Views
16. Inside Sales Best Practices: 7 Ways to Increase Contact Ratios - 1,360
17. Climb the Trust Ladder to Increase Results in Prospecting - W/ VIDEO! – 1,339 Views
18. Harvard Business Review says Sales is No Longer About Relationships - 1,148 Views
19. Inside Sales Tips – No Vacations Last Week of the Month – 1,140 Views
20. Lead Generation Strategies: When to Call, When Not to Call? - 1,049 Views
21. Inside Sales Tips – Specialize – 998 Views
22. Inside Sales Tips – Interest is The Counterfeit of Need – 898 Views
23. Behind the Cloud – Ken’s Notes – 877 Views
24. 6 Reasons Salesforce Users Need Hosted Dialer Technology - 856 Views
25. Demand Generation Tactics and Strategy – 689 Views
26. Power Dialers - 665 Views
27. Inside Sales Best Practices: Gathering Direct Dial Phone Numbers - 601
28. What is Lead Response Management – 573 Views
29. Ken’s Rules: The Business Card Rule - 430 Views
30. Josh James Shares 36 Startup Rules - 399 Views

A Complete Summary of Ken Krogue’s Forbes Articles, Including his newly updated “Definition of Inside Sales” and his #1 on all of Forbes (and his most controversial) article “The Death of SEO”

Author: Ken Krogue | Google+
Summary of Ken Krogue’s Forbes articles