BC Startup Sales Podcast – Optimizing Email Response Rates with Taylor Gould (BetterCloud)

Per Forrester Research, spend on email marketing grew to $2B in 2014, reflecting annual growth of over 10%. While in the context of the startup world, that might not seem explosive, it’s impressive for a medium that has been around for nearly 40 years. As the story goes, Gary Thuerk, marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corporation, kicked off the very first email marketing campaign in 1978, sending off a promotion to a few hundred early Arpanet users.

Today, email optimization has evolved into a thoroughly quantitative field, and as any modern marketer or salesperson knows, the keystone is getting people to actually open your messages. So this week, we sat down with Taylor Gould, the VP of Marketing at BetterCloud, to discuss his strategies for optimizing email response rates in another episode of the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast. BetterCloud is a provider of insights, management, and security for cloud office platforms including Google Apps and Office 365. Based in New York, the Company serves over 30MM users across over 50 organizations, and with ~$50MM in venture financing behind it, is on a growth tear. No doubt, Taylor’s work to align BetterCloud’s marketing and sales efforts has been a critical part of that success. So we’re excited to have Taylor join us on the podcast to discuss how he, by putting a few critical tactics to work, has managed to increase his email response rates by more than 400%.

In particular, we’ll cover how to thoroughly personalize your email campaign messages (both marketing and sales) using more than just the traditional few dynamic fields like name and company. The first key step is choosing those additional data points that will have an impact on email response rates for your targets, as they will vary depending on your customer profile. We’ll talk about how to wireframe your multi-touch campaign by target type, which will then guide you in choosing the appropriate dynamic fields. It may make sense, for example, to include dynamic details on a particular customer segment’s pain point, mention specific software alternatives they may already be using, reference past touch points you may have already had, or suggest a meeting time and format that’s tailored to the lead. And once the appropriate dynamic data fields are selected, in order to truly boost your email response rates, you’ll need to have data sources in place to enable those dynamic fields. While the topic is one that any marketer has probably grappled with, it’s a strategy that’s becoming increasingly important to salespeople as well.

Taylor brings a great background in SaaS sales and marketing to bear on the subject at hand today. Before joining BetterCloud in 2011 (its founding year), he served as a marketing manager at Cloud Sherpas, a provider of cloud advisory and technology services for top tech brands with specializations in SalesForce and Google Enterprise. We’re confident that nearly any startup stakeholder will find this week’s episode useful as he or she thinks about bringing en email optimization strategy to the next level. Happy listening!

If you liked “Optimizing Email Response Rates” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, head over to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!

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