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How to Make Your Company a Thought Leader: Common Editorial E-Mail Formats for Lead Development (Part 3)

By Eric Gagnon

In last week's TMN, we described the content that can be used in editorial e-mail programs for lead development, and finding authoritative sources for helping you develop this content. This week, we'll move from content to form, by covering the different formats used in editorial e-mail programs.

Next to quality, clarity, and relevance in solving the prospect’s problem or business issue, the most important aspects of editorial e-mail programs are duration and consistency: Your messaging program must deliver a steady flow of solid information to your prospect over your entire sales cycle—and developing consistent, high-quality content over time is what makes execution of editorial e-mail programs so challenging.

You can use many different forms and formats to deliver your content in editorial e-mail message programs. These can be as simple as sending short text-based e-mail messages and articles, or they can be multiple-page white papers, articles, or Web links, or all of these formats. Web video is also an extremely useful medium for communicating content in your lead development messaging program.

Content is more important than form: Once you have evaluated the best content sources for your messaging program, and identified the most useful topics for your prospects, give thought to the format for the deliverable you’ll be using in your messaging program. Your final decision on which format to use, and how to present and communicate these messages is based on the length of your content, its value and, of course, the content you are sending to your prospects.

Here are some of the common formats used for content, and common e-mail message formats used to communicate these content formats, for B2B lead development programs using on-demand CRM systems.

Editorial Content Formats

White Paper: A white paper is a non-promotional document that discusses a business, technical, or other problem or issue, and describes a solution to this problem, which nearly always involves the product of the company publishing the white paper. White papers are used widely in marketing programs for IT and high-technology products and services, where readers prefer them over company brochures and other, more promotionally-oriented marketing pieces; however, for these reasons, their popularity is spreading to other industries. Because they are seen as being more credible than the usual company marketing information, white papers can often be a company’s most persuasive marketing deliverable. Wherever there is a problem that is solved by your product, there is a white paper you can write and publish on the problem to inform and benefit your prospects.

Case study: A case study is a non-promotional document that “tells a story” about one of your customers, their business or process, how they used your product, and the outcome and benefits they received by using it. Case studies used in marketing programs are written in a style similar to trade magazine feature articles or profiles, detailing the company’s situation before and after using your product, with quotes taken from comments made by those at the featured company involved in your product’s selection, purchase, and use. By documenting how your product is used by real customers in the real world, case studies help readers (your prospects) identify with others just like them (users in the case study), and thereby help to increase your product’s relevance to your prospect’s experience in their own business. Case studies can be written to showcase your customers’ experience with your product, by their field, industry, or application, which makes them very useful marketing tools for your sales team when they work with prospects in the industries and markets covered by the case study.

Applications brief: An applications brief focuses on specialized uses of your product. It answers the most likely technical, engineering, manufacturing, service, or production questions a prospect would most likely ask on how your product is used. An applications brief is a type of instructional document that outlines how to use your product to accomplish a specific task, or how it’s applied to the problems of a specialized operation. The best applications briefs share useful information gained from working with customers, such as methods to calculate cost savings or efficiency from the use of your product in the application. Like case studies, applications briefs can be written to target the needs and address the problems of specific industries or users, and they are useful marketing tools for overcoming technical issues raised by prospects which usually arise during the sales process.

Fact sheet: A fact sheet is a brief summary of any topic directly related to your product, your company, or a product feature. Fact sheets provide readers—your prospects—with a format that allows them to get the essential facts they need about your product and its features. A fact sheet can also take the form of a “Q & A” or “Frequently Asked Question” format, providing readers with a summary of the key details they need to know about your product.

Brochure or flyer: Of course, more promotionally-oriented deliverables like brochures, flyers, and other marketing-oriented materials are used in e-mail messaging programs. However, a brochure or any other promotionally-oriented material should be sent to a prospect only at the prospect’s request (such as when the prospect fills out a form on a landing page on your company’s Web site), or sent as an attachment by one of your company’s sales reps in response to the prospect’s inquiry or request, and accompanied by a personal note to the prospect. In B2B lead development programs, sending brochures by e-mail, unsolicited, to prospects will be resented by most prospects, so think about this very carefully before you send this type of mailing.

E-Mail Message Formats

Here are some of the major e-mail message methods and formats used for presenting and transmitting e-mail messaging programs, and the uses and benefits of each:

• Text cover message with attached file: This is the most common method
of personal, “spot” e-mail communications between sales reps and prospects, often sent as a followup to a phone call. Other formats, such as the ones outlined below, are better suited for use in editorial e-mail messaging programs, since attachments may be blocked by the network firewall at the prospect’s company. Also, some prospects may not have their computers properly set to open and read an attachment in the application you used to produce them; or most important, many prospects may never open the attachment;

• HTML e-mail: You can format any marketing deliverable in HTML to make
it viewable as a Web page in your prospect’s e-mail program. The advantages to this are that it allows you to include photos and graphics in the message, with attractive font and type formatting for text. The major disadvantage to using HTML is that many e-mail programs either do not or will not display graphics in the body of the e-mail text. The solution to this issue is to produce a simple HTML file whose text is also viewable in the body of the e-mail message;

• Text (or simple HTML) index page with Web link: Another reasonable
workaround to the issue of uncertain HTML display in the prospects’ e-mail program is to display a brief summary of the content of your e-mail message in text-only format, and include a “Read more--click here” link to the page containing the deliverable on your company’s Web site. To retain some formatting features, you could also use basic HTML formatting in your e-mail message that still keeps the text of your message readable by those prospects whose e-mail applications aren’t set up to view HTML-format messages;

• Text-only: Of course, you can always send your e-mail message in plain
text format, which can be read by every prospect in any e-mail application. However, according to industry studies, only 11% of e-mail newsletters are read completely, so it is safe to assume that the longer the e-mail message text, the less your prospects will care to read it. Because of this, it’s best to limit use of text-only e-mail to short messages—one screen or less (or, fewer than 5 or 6 paragraphs).

E-Mail Message Formats: Which Format to Use?

Since not every prospect can read HTML e-mail, nor can you expect that every prospect can (or will) open e-mail attachments, a text index page with a Web link to the deliverable you’re providing is, generally, the best format to use for e-mail editorial messaging programs, offering you the best tradeoff between making sure your prospects can read what you’re sending them, and measuring access to your messaging programs, by tracking page accesses from e-mail to your editorial Web page.

Using this method, your white paper, case study, or any other content deliverable is produced as an HTML page on your Web site reachable by the Web link in your e-mail index page. You can also include a more polished .PDF format version of your deliverable for readers to download from these pages and print as desired.

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.