Optimizing B2B Email Messaging to Drive Growth with Naomi Soman, Storylogick Consulting

In this episode of the B2B Brand180 podcast, Linda speaks with Naomi Soman from Storylogick Consulting about enhancing email marketing strategies to drive growth. Naomi, who has a wealth of experience in hyper-growth startups, shares insights on dispelling email marketing myths, personalizing emails for different stages of the funnel, and accurately targeting various buyer personas. The discussion includes practical advice on leveraging CRM data, using visual language in emails, and customizing email content based on recipient actions. Naomi also provides tips on managing personalized email campaigns and standing out in a crowded marketplace.


01:44 Common Misconceptions in Email Marketing
03:31 Understanding the Email Marketing Funnel
05:04 Personalizing Email Campaigns
10:48 Effective Research Methods for Buyer Personas
17:19 Standing Out in a Crowded Marketplace

For more information about Naomi please visit https://storylogick.com/ 

Linda's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/

Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/

Linda's Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/

Transcript

Linda Fanaras 0:00

Hi, I'm Linda Finares, host of the B2B Brand 180 podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, where we talk all about branding, marketing, and growth strategies. So today I'm excited to bring in our guest, Naomi Soman from Storylogick. We're going to be talking about email marketing and really how you can Elevate your email marketing strategy to drive growth. So a little bit about Naomi and then I'll have her speak a little bit more about herself. But she has worked in several hyper growth startups in Tel Aviv and it's the heart of the startup nation, including both scrappy series a companies and even a powerful unicorn. She focuses on crafting messaging and writing copy for Facebook, performance marketing teams to improve those conversions and click through rates and bring in those higher quality leads. Thank you Naomi for joining me today.

Naomi Soman 0:53

Thank you so much for having me.

Linda Fanaras 0:54

This should be a fun conversation. So I'd love you to just maybe share a couple additional points about yourself that may, I may not have covered and then we can get right into it. Yeah, essentially what I do is I help demand gen managers or in case of email, sometimes life cycle managers to optimize their coffee. Because if you're spending a hundred thousand dollars on Google or LinkedIn or through other partnerships, then you really want to make sure that your messaging is on point and you are getting all of the leads that you can out of that spend. So that's my job, figuring out how to. Deliver the right message to the right person at the right time by looking into the CRM data, Tableau data, whatever it is and then turning that into better messaging and better creatives across the funnel. That's great. So we always hear about a lot of failures around email marketing, and there's a lot of misconceptions, especially in the B2B space when it comes to copywriting and messaging. How do you address some of those failures? misconceptions that are out there in the market right now.

Naomi Soman 1:59

So I would say that my biggest myth buster is saying that emails have to be flashy. They have to be visual heavy. They have to have very little text. I think as marketers, we always tend to default to having less text, make it more punchy, add more CTAs. And I don't think that's actually the case with email marketing. I think from what I've tested, email is a really great opportunity to create more of an intimate connection because you're already in that person's inbox, and so you can make it a little bit more text heavy and you can go a little bit deeper into the messaging and provide a little bit more text because users today are so savvy and they can start Smell marketing language from 10 miles away. And so I think that if you can be a little bit more authentic and you can provide a little bit more context and you can deliver a message that really resonates with them, then you actually have a much better chance of earning that click.

Linda Fanaras 3:06

I do hear a lot about, you know, cutting back the content, you know, adding visuals, all kinds of different strategies that are out there that if you, you know, Do some research. That's what will come up. And I will say that today, I think there are a lot of people are just getting inundated with emails. And if it's not a meaningful, almost personal slash professional email that comes and hits your desk, again, it's just another email. So can you speak a little bit about what, when we talk about a funnel, there are different layers within the funnel. Can you speak about maybe what those are and how you might. The types of emails you may use to move someone through that file.

Naomi Soman 3:46

So there are different emails. I would say that you have if you're sometimes in a media buying, you're paying for an email and somebody else's list. So it's still an email, but it's not in your list. like morning brew, for example, you can pay for a space in their email list. So that's one, that's more top of funnel when it comes to email, you have emails within a. free trial if it's more of a product led growth and you're trying to get people to use different features, to drive them along, to get them to sign up for a full subscription. And I would say you have product updates, you have newsletter emails, you have Then you have retention emails to get people to continue using the platform, preventing them from churning. And then, I would say, lastly, more sales led outreach emails. Sales is always writing a lot of emails to get people to either to connect with them or to push them through the funnel. And so I would say those are also a type of email. And you can use a lot of the same techniques for writing sales emails and writing outreach emails.

Linda Fanaras 5:02

So there are a lot of different techniques. So, how do you think somebody should sort of adapt that messaging when they're going through the funnel? Do you have some examples that you may want to share when it's top of funnel versus maybe when it's closer to the bottom of the funnel?

Naomi Soman 5:17

Yeah, sure. So I think that it really depends on who you're talking to in B2B because in B2B. B2B as opposed to B2C, you're dealing with a committee. You have the champion who's driving the deal, you have maybe a member of upper management and you have typically somebody from the finance team, and maybe somebody who's going to be using the product but may not be involved in the deal stage at The initial phases. So I think it's when it comes to top of funnel, bottom funnel for email. I think it You really have to think about who you're writing to because a lot of times it's different Because the champion is going to be driving the deal They're going to get involved at the early stages and then somebody who's in upper management May be involved in the more later stages so I think that can be helpful when you're thinking about and then later, later, if you're talking about, they're already using the platform, they're all using a free trial, you may be actually dealing with an end user. So like for example, with Gong, you're going to have the sales leader who's driving So you may not have the deal, but you may actually have the sales representative who's using the platform or even somebody like a marketing manager who's using the platform for research. Right. So I think when it comes to email as opposed to ads or landing pages, you have to think about who you're talking to. And so I would say my best tip for, Thinking about which member of the buying committee you're talking to first of all, think about that person and then go into the specific details that are going to be present in their life. So if you are speaking to a champion, you want to really drill down into the exact situations that they're dealing with in their everyday life. Are they dealing with a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open? Are they trying to analyze their marketing campaigns, but they feel like they're working in the dark? They don't, they don't have the right data. Are they trying to manage payments, but their payment systems are so inefficient that they have boxes of checks in their, in their storeroom that they can't cash because they're too overloaded. Can you find those exact examples? And I think for a champion, you're going to deal with those kind of pain points. For somebody in upper management, a lot of times it's going to be We saw our competitor. In an industry publication and actually we want to be in that industry publication. We want our brand name in all the headlines. We want to be seen as the industry innovator. Can you get us in that in that publication? So it's important to number one, think about who you're talking to. And number two, think about what are the things that really matter to them? Because a VP is probably not going to deal with the everyday pain points. that a middle manager is going to deal with,

Linda Fanaras 8:29

So we're really talking about making sure we understand who the audience is, what their role is, what they do during the course of the day, understand their pain points and trying to address those pain points. When companies do just sort of cold email marketing. When is it time to just give up? How many emails do you send out? Do you have A rule of thumb when it comes to that, if you're going to be pushing emails out to try to drive traffic or new business. 5 emails, 10 emails, 100 emails. Do you have a system in place or any recommendations for our audience around that?

Naomi Soman 9:03

Well, definitely not 100. 100 is too much. I would say aim for 3 to 5 um, but make it really personal. Especially with ChatGPT, it's really easy to send out a ton of emails. I know I get emails in my inbox that are totally irrelevant. So, I think it's fewer emails, but make them really personal. Make sure that you do your research. Make sure to if they have gone through funding ground to mention that an interesting study that gong did gong analyzed tons and tons of emails, personalized email or outreach emails from sales teams and they They found that Somebody who is lower down in seniority is going to respond to more personal details. So mention where they're from where they went to university if they worked at a company that you know, or that you've used mention details that pertain to their personal lives. And for upper management, you want to mention Things that are more relevant to the business. Did they release a new, a new feature? Were they in the news recently? A funding round I mentioned before. So that's also a good rule of thumb to personalize it. relative to their seniority level. Right.

Linda Fanaras 10:27

Okay. No, that's great. That's great to hear. All right. Awesome. Well, I'm just thank you so far, Naomi, for sharing some insight. I just want to thank our audience today for listening in. And if you like what you heard, please hit like share or subscribe, and we would love to to have you review our podcast as well. But let's get on to the next question because I'm, I'm, I am curious about this piece. Do you have some certain research methods that you actually recommend when you want to build this accurate buyer or profile or persona out that you think might be a little different than what's typically. built out?

Naomi Soman 11:00

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's hard for B2B to do research because a lot of times it's a more complicated buyer persona. You have different ICPs within that buyer persona, and you don't necessarily have access to the customers themselves to do interviews or surveys, because a lot of times it's you're working in a large company, you can't necessarily reach out to them, the people don't respond, it's a smaller customer base, it's really hard to For marketers to get good data and do really good research because you may have G2 or Capterra, but it's, it's limited. And so what I usually do is I will go into Gong or Chorus, or if it's a smaller company usually the sales team records their sales calls. They'll record their demo calls and their discovery calls. And even if it's just on zoom. Chances are they have those recordings saved because they use them for onboarding, not just for sales reps, but for other team members. And so what I do is I will go through those calls, I'll transcribe them if they're not transcribed, and then I will write down three categories of information. I will write down examples of their pain points, what is going on in their life that is frustrating them, are they waking up in the middle of the night, are they overloaded with spreadsheets, whatever it is, I'll write that down. for listening. then I'll write down their image of success. Sometimes customer success can also help with this. How do they describe success both on a more personal emotional level and on a professional level? And then thirdly, what are they concerned about that's holding them back? Do they not want to give credit card details? Are they worried about integrations? Are they worried about team adoption? Write it down and write it down in their words or if it's transcribed, just copy and paste it. And then I use that to build my buyer persona. What does their life look like? Not in terms of demographics, not how much they make or what region in the country they live in or how many years of experience they have, but what does their life look like in relation to your product, both before and. when you go to write emails, you can just sort of plug and play. You can take those examples and say, if you are still dealing with this, then we have a solution. And then you give the exact example in their own word. And that's how you can be really fresh and original, and make your emails feel very personalized, that's beyond just their name. It feels very authentic. It feels like, It's less corporate. It feels like it's coming from a person.

Linda Fanaras 13:32

So when companies are marketing, obviously they may want to sort of broad stroke and email marketing message and campaign out there. But we're talking about dealing with multiple buyer personas, a list that has to be super personalized. How do you deal with the list size? It's like to personalize even a thousand individuals. is a lot of work. So how do you build that list out? are you personalizing them once there's some, there's, they've shown some interest in your product or service, or are you starting to personalize those on the onset? So even if you were to take a list of, you know, 500 people to personalize and say, okay, this person has a dog and this person is up at night because they have to, you know, they have a very stressful job because of X, Y, Z. And then building emails around that context. is challenging. So how do you deal with number one, the size of the list, you know, number two, having these multiple personas and then addressing them? When do you start to address in that very personalized way and how does that all work?

Naomi Soman 14:44

Yeah, so I think it's based on the actions that they take. This is where you really want to make sure. That your infrastructure is built out so that if they sign up for a newsletter or they, if they come through a webinar, or if they come through somebody else's list, then you're tagging that. So that could be based on solution. If and making sure that you that you're asking the right information. So you're asking their job title. And you are asking their company and then again, if they come in through a certain action they read a certain blog you can usually see that through HubSpot. Did they read a blog when they came in? Did they? Come to a certain webinar. Did they look at a certain free resource, a free tool, then that you should be able to tag that. And then you can go through your list and then separate it based on that data. So if they looked at your pricing page, you know, they have high intent and then so you might be able to give them. that's a little bit more aggressive. If they came in through a webinar for a specific solution or a specific industry, then you can provide them email around that. And so with email, it's really about making sure that you tag it appropriately. And then, so personalization can come in through the Information that you have related to your product. So it's not information necessarily about their personal life. If it's more of a marketing email as opposed to a sales email, it's personalization based on the interest that they've already shown. And then you can be, or it's, for example, if you're doing more of an ABM approach where you're sending an email to a specific list, then you may be able to cultivate the list around that category. So for example, in a previous company, we were creating a list of people who used a specific e commerce platform. And so we knew that everyone on that list. Used that specific platform used big commerce. So we were able to write an email pertaining to the use of that platform. And we knew generally the size of the the company and what they may be dealing with. Because we created that list, so if you're very diligent about tagging the emails that come in, or cultivating a list based on certain characteristics, then you can write based on

Linda Fanaras 17:13

All right, I have one last final question for you because I think that this would help the B2B companies. Is Today, I think it's getting more and more crowded as we all know. So how does a B2B company actually stand out in that type of marketplace? A real crowded marketplace.

Naomi Soman 17:28

So there are a lot of different ways that I would say, I'd say number one, use specific information. We've already mentioned that before. Use the customer's own voice and avoid the corporate jargon. But I would say that my favorite way is to use use visual language. This is something I'm dealing with with a company now that I'm working with. They are targeting very savvy marketers. And so you can't use, images of a dashboard for very savvy markers. And so what we're doing is coming up with a more visual language describing visibility and insights using images like spying on your competitors. How can we? Get an image of that so that you're communicating visually because everyone has seen a picture of a dashboard. We're so used to it that we skim over it entirely. And so I think the trick is, can you make it look a little bit more organic? Can you make it stand out? Can you make it look organic? Like it belongs in your feed and stop people scroll. And so again, my favorite way to do that is you come up with something more abstract. If you're talking about strategy, maybe it's a chessboard. If you were talking about getting more organization, maybe it's a picture of a tangled mess of wires versus wires that have been untangled. That's an example that we use that work very well. And it seems a little bit. Strange for marketers that are so used to showing the product and showing the product and showing the product. But it can really help get people's attention and it can communicate much faster in a busy market. So for email, like put it at the top of the page, show something that speaks to people's attention. Deeper, deeper needs, a need for control, a need for organization, a need for more visibility. These things that are one level below the surface of what we're getting on a tangible, practical level.

Linda Fanaras 19:28

Great. Well, that's helpful. Thank you very much, Naomi. So, this is Naomi from StoryLogic. Naomi, I'd love for you to share with the audience how they can get in touch with you. And where they can get more

Naomi Soman 19:39

information. You can find me on LinkedIn at Naomi Soman. Or you can visit my website storylogic. com or email me directly team at storylogic. com. Great.

Linda Fanaras 19:50

Thank you, Naomi. And again, I want to thank our guests for listening in today. And on behalf of the B2B Brand 180 podcast, thank you again for listening in. And if you'd like to get in touch with me, feel free to email me directly. And you can hit our website at mill, M I L L dot agency or lindafenaris. com and, or connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you again for listening.