So, you’re looking to automate your sales and marketing efforts on Pipedrive? You’re in the right place. This handy guide explores everything you need to know about Pipedrive marketing: automation, tools, integrations, workflows, and more.

At Outfunnel, we’re obsessed with connecting sales and marketing data—whether you prefer an all-in-one suite, a best-of-breed stack, or a mix of both.

Below, you’ll find our favorite Pipedrive-friendly tools, with an emphasis on third-party marketing automation that integrates cleanly.

You’ll see our hands-on take, plus highlights from user reviews on G2 and Reddit. By the end, you’ll be able to shortlist the best options for your use case.

1. Can you use Pipedrive for email marketing?
2. Email marketing integrations for Pipedrive
3. Marketing web form integrations for Pipedrive
4. Marketing and ROI reporting integrations for Pipedrive
5. Website visitor tracking integrations for Pipedrive
6. Which Pipedrive marketing integrations should you choose?

Can Pipedrive be used for email marketing?

Pipedrive started out as a sales CRM with a core functionality built around pipeline management. 

In recent years, the product has acknowledged the sales-marketing handshake, adding Campaigns by Pipedrive and other add-ons that cover parts of the buyer journey.

Short answer: Yes, you can run marketing from Pipedrive—especially simple newsletters and basic automations. Longer answer: for more advanced use cases, dedicated marketing tools + tight integrations usually deliver far better results.

Before we dive into tools, a quick definition of the three core marketing automations most teams want to nail:

1. Email marketing — newsletters, drip sequences, and event-triggered journeys
2. On-site lead generation — forms, chat, and visitor identification
3. Marketing reporting — analytics that attribute revenue to channels and campaigns

Get these three right and the rest is much easier.

Email marketing integrations for Pipedrive

When your email platform and CRM are tightly connected, good things happen:

• Dynamic segments update themselves—less manual work and importing-exporting CSV files.
• Sales context (opens, clicks, pages visited) appears where reps live
• Shared KPIs & workflows keep marketing and sales aligned

Different tools have different “DNA,” so pick based on the emails you send and the data your sales team needs.

A. Marketing email platforms (broadcast + triggered sequences)

One-off emails keep leads warm and drive product education.
Triggered sequences nurture based on behavior (e.g., trial signup, onboarding, upgrade cross-sell).

Here are the top platforms that handle both well and play nicely with Pipedrive.

1. Campaigns by Pipedrive is a built-in and no-frills email automation tool 

Why we like it:

Campaigns by Pipedrive is a decent choice if you have simple email automation needs and want to gather your sales and marketing data under one roof.  

• Tight integration with Pipedrive. Create new emails, automate your email campaigns to segments defined with Pipedrive filters, record email engagement as Notes.
• Easy-to-use email builder. Easily drag and drop images, buttons, icons, and more.

Where it may fall short:

• Missing some popular features (e.g., limited templates, no A/B testing, limited bounce handling).
• Contact management friction. Converting contacts to subscribers can be semi-manual.
• Extra cost. Sold as an add-on.

Pricing: Available as an add-on. Pricing starts at $13.33/company per month when billed annually.

2. Mailchimp is a popular and effective tool for sending marketing email, coupled with a strong template editor and many Pipedrive integration options

MailChimp evolved from a basic email marketing tool to an all-in-one marketing automation platform for businesses of all sizes.

Why we like it:

• Generous free plan.
• Many beautiful, professionally designed templates
• Relatively intuitive despite the sheer amount of features.

Where it may fall short:

• Support is solid for basics; complex issues can drag.
• Huge price jump from Standard to Premium plans. MailChimp can get really expensive, especially when there are other similar tools at comparatively lower prices.

Pricing:

A free 1-month trial is available for Essentials and Standard plan

*Based on 500 contacts

• Free: $0 (1,000 monthly sends, limited templates)
• Essentials: starts $11.07/mo
• Standard: starts $18.45/mo
• Premium: starts $309.88/mo

MailChimp also offers plans for websites and transactional emails. Here’s its full pricing page for more info.

Mailchimp has a basic integration with Pipedrive, but there’s a problem

Pipedrive’s own native Mailchimp integration is only one-way.

This means that while you can export contacts from Pipedrive to Mailchimp, you can’t simultaneously push information like opens and clicks from Mailchimp back to Pipedrive. Furthermore, it’s impossible to sync organization or deal fields and prevent duplicate contacts in MailChimp if the email addresses change on Pipedrive.

Outfunnel solves these issues.

We offer a Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration that keeps your contacts in 2-way sync and automatically records Mailchimp engagement data back to Pipedrive

Our Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration helps you “complete the loop” and updates your Pipedrive seamlessly with relevant information (like email opens, clicks, website visits) in Notes, Activities, or Custom Field updates.

Sync contacts (or subsets you define with Pipedrive filters) two-way between Pipedrive and Mailchimp. 

3. Brevo is an all-in-one marketing automation platform for SMBs

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a fully featured marketing automation suite. It’s fantastic for small businesses with modest budgets, thanks to its flexible pricing.

Why we like it:

• Relatively affordable pricing incl. a free plan.
• Functionality similar to MailChimp.
• Comprehensive tools under one roof. You can create emails (including transactional emails), sign-up forms, landing pages, SMS texts, etc. all entirely on one platform.

Where it may fall short:

• Recent reviews show support now runs sporadically.
• Medium learning curve. Things like adding new contacts from a CSV file and automating a drip campaign may require some time to get used to.

Pricing:

For marketing platform:

• Free: $0 (300 emails/day)
• Starter: from $9/mo
• Business: from $18/mo
• Enterprise: custom

Brevo also offers plans for its conversations platform, sales platform, and messaging API. Here’s its full pricing page for more info.

Outfunnel’s Pipedrive-Brevo integration syncs contacts and email activity between these two platforms

Our Pipedrive-Brevo integration keeps the two tools in sync seamlessly, as if you had an all-in-one platform. 

Sync contacts you define with Pipedrive filters to Brevo 24/7. Whenever new leads are added into the CRM, relevant email lists are updated automatically (full disclosure: it’s not real-time, but the sync is frequent enough for typical B2B use cases).

This way, your salespeople have full context of leads and sell smarter. 

4. Klaviyo is excellent if you want powerful ecommerce capabilities 

Many eCommerce owners with advanced marketing automation needs use Klaviyo to scale their business. Based on its pricing and functionality, this feature-rich platform best suits brands with a large email list.

Why we like it:

• Seamless integration with Shopify. It’s extremely easy to set up Klaviyo, and the tracking is useful, to boot.
• Best-in-class automation (e.g., automate cross- or upsell emails based on specific conditions like number of placed orders, channel preference, and cart value)
• Powerful segmentation that allows for deep personalization. Klaviyo lets you experiment with multiple attributes and parameters to create new segments (e.g., customers who often use discounts, specific location, or any other kinds of data you integrate)

Where it may fall short:

• Customer support has dipped recently based on many user reviews on G2 and Reddit 
• Pricing ramps fast as lists grow

Pricing:

*Based on 500 contacts

• Free: $0 (up to 250 contacts, ~500 sends)
• Email: from $20/mo
• Email & SMS: from $35/mo

Outfunnel’s offers a deep 2-wat Pipedrive-Klaviyo integration

Our Pipedrive-Klaviyo integration also syncs contacts bi-directionally between the apps. It also syncs sends, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes automatically over to Pipedrive.

5. Drip provides elaborate event-based email sequences (DTC-friendly)

This platform is great for elaborate event-based email sequences—it comes in handy if you have a large list of leads and enough content+tracking to be able to provide complex email journeys.

Drip is suitable for DTC brands, thanks to its eCommerce-focused workflows.

Why we like it:

• Elaborate behavioral workflows (welcome, win-back, retargeting).
• Polished editor and unlimited sends on paid plans.
• Strong eCommerce integrations (e.g., Shopify dynamic discounts).

Where it may fall short:

• Only one-way integration (from Drip to Pipedrive). You can use Zapier as a duct tape between the services or create a custom integration based on the APIs of both products.

Pricing:

Based on list size and send volume. Starts from $39/month for 2,500 subscribers, unlimited email sends. A free 14-day trial is available. 

B. “Cold” email sequence tools – Pipedrive-integrated prospecting tools (that harvest emails in bulk from the wild)

Sending endless cold emails to uninterested people is a bad idea. 

With nearly 45.6% of all emails worldwide identified as spam, contributing to it is just not a good look on your brand.

But that’s only if you send badly written cold emails.

Great cold emails are tailored to recipients and compel them to email back. While this will largely depend on user research, the following tools nonetheless help you reach the right inboxes and increase your chances of getting a response.  

1. lemlist – multi-channel cold outreach platform

lemlist is an all-in-one cold outreach solution. 

Known for its database of 450 million leads, sleek integration with LinkedIn, and “shockingly good” support, it arms you with a complete set of tools to boost your conversion rate in your multi-channel outreach campaign.

Why we like it:

• Fantastic customer support. MANY users applaud lemlist for its amazingly fast response time.
• Intuitive UX.
• Multi-channel: combine cold emails, LinkedIn, and cold calls.  
• Advanced email warm-up tool (called lemwarm).

Where it may fall short:

• Occasional Pipedrive sync quirks (e.g., org fields, duplicates).
• Email finder accuracy and niche coverage can vary.
• Sending identities are capped per plan.

Pricing:

A 14-day free trial is available

• Email Starter: $32/user/mo (1 sending email)
• Email Pro: $55/user/mo (3 sending emails)
• Multichannel Expert: $79/user/mo (5)
• Outreach Scale: $129/user/mo (15)

2. Klenty a more “call-oriented” outreach tool 

A sales engagement platform, Klenty helps sales teams “execute hyper-personalized, multi-channel outreach at scale.”

Why we like it:

• Advanced personalization that goes beyond placeholders. (use images and videos to show your product in action.)
• Multi-channel sequences with a mixture of calls, emails, LinkedIn tasks, and texts.
• Handy Gmail plugin that lets you engage with contacts from within Pipedrive,

Where it may fall short:

• Odd quirks here and there. For example, there’s a lack of contextual information in the dashboard (i.e., here, a user talks about how he was stumped by certain proprietary terms). There’s also a slight 15-minute delay to log prospects’ emails.
• Occasional glitches. A peek at recent user reviews shows spotty call quality, disconnected emails, calls that don’t appear in the Activities tab in Pipedrive, etc.

Pricing:

A free 14-day trial is available

• Startup: $50/user/mo
• Growth: $70/user/mo
• Pro: $100/user/mo
• Enterprise: custom

Klenty also offers pricing plans for conversation intelligence, prospecting data, and dialer. See here for more information.

TL;DR: Your ideal email marketing tool should minimize manual monitoring and repetitive tasks and push useful information seamlessly to Pipedrive itself.

If you don’t have time to read through all the specifics above, here’s what we recommend:

1. If you only send newsletters, perhaps with some sequences, use Campaigns by Pipedrive, Mailchimp, or Brevo
2. If you primarily send B2B drip campaigns, you can’t go wrong with Klaviyo or Drip. Klaviyo is worth considering as well if you require advanced segmentation and automation. 
3. If you send only cold emails, use lemlist or Klenty
4. Want clean data in Pipedrive? Use Outfunnel for two-way contact sync and automatic engagement logging.

Web form integrations for Pipedrive

Your lead capture form is one of the first few things users see on a web page. To boost response rate, you’ll want it to be simple, user-friendly, and friction-free. Here are some of our favorites that play well with Pipedrive.

1. Pipedrive Web Forms: Basic & Hassle-Free, But No Lead Source Tracking

If you’d need a simple web form without any integration hassle, you can’t go wrong with Pipedrive’s own web forms. They’re one of the most basic forms in this list, so you can quickly set one up right away.

Unfortunately, the forms omit source/medium/UTM data, so you have no way of knowing where your leads come from.

Why we like it:

• Zero-friction setup and native field mapping.
• Sends leads straight to your pipeline.

Where it may fall short:

• Requires additional charge. You need to purchase the LeadBooster add-on to unlock Web Forms.
• Very basic customization options (e.g., you can only change the color of the submit button, but not the shape of it)  
• Lacks lead source data. There’s no attribution to inbound leads, so you have no insight into where they come from. (Considering it’s a sales CRM, this is an unusual flaw.)

Pricing: Included in the LeadBooster add-on. Pricing starts at $32.50/company per month when billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available. 

In a nutshell, Pipedrive’s web forms fall short if you want to understand how leads first found your business. Consider using the alternatives below for lead source information and advanced customization.

2. Wix’s built-in forms experience unpredictable glitches    

Is your website hosted on Wix? 

If so, it’s easiest to use Wix Forms to capture leads.

While Wix Forms doesn’t have a native integration with Pipedrive, you can use Outfunnel’s Wix Forms-Pipedrive integration. Sync contacts from Wix Forms over to Pipedrive, recording the submissions on the contact profiles seamlessly.

Why we like it:

• Strong template variety and an easy builder.

Where it may fall short:

• Reviews cite sporadic glitches and slower support.
• Pricing scales with number of forms.

3. WordPress offers multiple web forms — take your pick from Contact Form 7, Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms, or WPForms

The most popular CMS in the world, WordPress offers a variety of tools for web forms. The most popular ones include Contact Form 7 (which we use for some of our forms at Outfunnel), Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms, and WPForms.

Why we like it:

• Works really well on WordPress sites (e.g., Elementor lets you customize your forms down to the granular level)
• Affordable. These forms are priced annually—you can access essential support, unlimited forms and submissions, extensive form fields, etc.   

Where it may fall short:

• Backend speed can run slow, depending on the form builder’s functionality. For example, Gravity Forms, known for its advanced features, tends to slow site speed considerably.

Pricing: Starts from $49.50/year, except for Contact Form 7 (it’s free!). Check the individual sites for more pricing info.

Outfunnel offers integrations with these WordPress forms 

While the setup for each form is slightly different, it’s nothing too complicated, especially if you’re already familiar with using WordPress.

The more complicated part is syncing these forms with Pipedrive. A quick search will reveal several different plugins that offer such connections, but our (not completely unbiased) recommendation is to connect them via Outfunnel’s App connector. 

Here’s why:

• Sync contacts from form fills to Pipedrive as contacts within seconds
• Easily map any and all custom fields you’d like to be mapped to the respective properties in the CRM (note: some alternatives can only map 3-4 default fields)
• Capture lead source (source, medium, UTM, and landing page data).

• One set-up for any number of web forms in your domain (note: many others require a separate configuration per web form!)
• Entire set-up takes 15 minutes

Read more about each Pipedrive-Wordpress form connection and how they work:

4. Paperform is elegant and affordable ($24/mo), but has no native integration with Pipedrive

Paperform is known for its simplicity and design. Users love how easy it is to navigate around the editor. Even creating logic jumps—which usually stump beginners—is fuss-free.

While some of our simpler contact forms (e.g. our B2B email crash course) live on Contact Form 7, we use Paperform for more complex web forms.

Why we like it:

• Works well both on web and mobile
• Lightweight WYSIWYG editor with comprehensive features like dynamic pricing and scoring 
• Intuitive user interface. It’s incredibly easy to create forms within minutes! 

Where it may fall short:

• No native integration. You’d need to send new leads to Pipedrive via Make, Zapier, or a comparable 3rd party syncing tool (note: templates are ready made)

Pricing:

The Essentials plan at $24/month is enough for us, power features are available on higher plans.

Related reading: Pipedrive Forms: A Guide to Web Forms For Pipedrive

Marketing and ROI reporting integrations for Pipedrive

Before you strategize the next move in your marketing efforts, you need to figure out where your leads come from. 

Knowing which lead sources generate these qualified leads will help you improve content, buyer’s journey, and eventually, ROI.

This section kicks off with our very own tool.

1. Outfunnel’s built-in lead source report cuts to the chase

Outfunnel is the easiest way to connect your sales and marketing tools. 

Analyze how your multiple traffic sources impact your sales pipeline. Are paid ads better than SEO? Should you continue investing in LinkedIn? Which is the best-performing channel? Our built-in lead source report’s got all the answers. 

>> Start your 14-day free trial now <<

Why we like it (what users say):

• Clear-cut lead source information. Outfunnel auto-detects the source and medium of a lead, right down to the UTM parameters.
• Deep integration with Pipedrive. Outfunnel boasts easy-to-use filtering that stores the lead source information as a person field in Pipedrive. 

Where it may fall short:

• Channel report is in beta, so analytics are still on the basic side. In future, you’ll be able to view in-depth data directly in Outfunnel (e.g., names and values of deals won).
• No real-time updates. Outfunnel’s channel report only updates at midnight UTC time.

Pricing:

A free 14-day trial is available

• Basic: Starts at $29/month when billed annually for 100 contacts, data sync (contacts, forms, and engagement), and more
• Professional: Starts at $99/month when billed annually for everything in Basic, 1,000 contacts, lead scoring, web tracking, and more

Website visitor tracking integrations for Pipedrive

One perk of running a physical retail store is that you get to watch customer behavior in action. Where do they linger? What do they overlook? How do they navigate the store?

You gain deeper insights, anticipate their needs, and improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Can you do the same with your website? 

Yes, you can, and that’s where visitor tracking comes in.

1. Web Visitors by Pipedrive is a straightforward lead generation add-on

Pipedrive’s Web Visitors is powered by Leadfeeder. It does an apt job at finding new leads and ranking them based on their web activity automatically. 

Why we like it:

• Easy UI with sorting by quality or last visit
• Smooth Pipedrive matching to existing contacts and deals

Where it may fall short:

• Inability to unhide leads. Once a visitor is hidden, that’s it. There’s no way to un-hide them—even if you have hidden them by accident.  
• Requires additional charge. You need to purchase Web Visitors as an add-on on top of an already existing Pipedrive account. Plus, if you want to add these site visitors as leads on Pipedrive, you need to purchase Prospector credits (as part of the LeadBooster add-on) separately. 

Pricing: Available as an add-on. Starts from $41/company per month when billed annually. A free 14-day trial is available.

2. Outfunnel’s web visitor tracking software is simple to use and gives your sales team better context

Our own web visitor tracking software gives your sales team better context. Get a complete view of your web visitors, all the way from the pages visited and forms filled to where they spent the most time on.

Why we like it (what users say):

• Really easy set-up. Add a tracking code, identify your first site visitor, track the web visits of these identified leads on Outfunnel (and your favorite CRM), and set up follow-up workflows accordingly.
• Straightforward integration that automatically records site visits as Activities or Tasks on Pipedrive
• Multiple sites or sub-domains tracking
• Automatically tracks traffic source for all new contacts and visits, which helps you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts quickly

Where it may fall short:

• Lack of advanced tracking. For example, Outfunnel can’t track web visitors that came from a specific Google Ads campaign. Fortunately, a Pipedrive-Google Ads integration is in the works!

Which Pipedrive marketing integrations have you decided on?

We’ve covered the essential marketing tools that integrate well with Pipedrive—email, forms, reporting, and tracking. The right stack depends on your volume, complexity, and team workflows.

If you want less manual work and clean CRM data, give Outfunnel a try to connect it all: two-way contact sync, engagement logging, lead source attribution, and web tracking—purpose-built for Pipedrive.

>> Start your 14-day free trial now <<

Not ready to try yet? We get it. We’re geeks about sales-marketing integrations—our product exists to connect these tools smoothly. Explore more Pipedrive integrations by Outfunnel and build your perfect stack.

The post Pipedrive Marketing: Automation, Tools, Integrations – A Complete Overview appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Today, we’re excited to announce our integration with MailerLite, a feature-rich yet simple-to-use email marketing platform trusted by over 1 million users globally. This integration allows you to seamlessly connect MailerLite with CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Copper, and HubSpot. Whether you’re looking to automate email campaigns or sync your CRM data effortlessly, our MailerLite integration helps you become more productive.

Why MailerLite?

MailerLite has a user-friendly interface and its robust feature set includes tools like automation, A/B testing, and detailed performance tracking—all at a very competitive price point. For all these reasons we’ve received lots of requests for the integration over the years.

What MailerLite Users Get from this New Integration

By connecting your CRM with MailerLite through Outfunnel, you unlock a range of benefits:

1. Automatic Contact Sync: Say goodbye to manually updating lists. Outfunnel ensures that your CRM contacts are automatically synced to MailerLite, keeping your email lists up-to-date without any extra effort. Never export-import a csv-file again!
2. Email Engagement Tracking: Outfunnel captures important engagement data—like opens, clicks, and unsubscribes—and syncs it back to your CRM. This gives your sales team full visibility into which leads are most engaged with your campaigns. (Coming soon)
3. Ultra-Targeted Campaigns, Effortlessly: Define specific segments in your CRM based on behavior, demographics, lead score, or anything else and sync them directly into MailerLite along with information you can use for personalization.
4. Unified Sales and Marketing: Your sales team can now see detailed email interaction data right in the CRM, allowing them to act on the most relevant leads without needing to jump between platforms.

All in all, with this integration you can use MailerLite in combination with your favorite CRM and get the same benefits as if using one of the big (and expensive) all-in-one business suites.

Get Started

Setting up this integration is quick and straightforward. In just a few steps, you’ll have your CRM data flowing smoothly to MailerLite, enabling you to focus on what matters most—engaging with your leads and customers. Whether you’re a startup or a growing business, Outfunnel and MailerLite together offer the tools you need to simplify and optimize your marketing and sales efforts.

Find out more about our MailerLite-CRM connections:

• Pipedrive-MailerLite integration
• Copper-MailerLite integration
• HubSpot-MailerLite integration
• Salesforce-MailerLite integration
• All MailerLite integrations

Ready to experience the power of integrated email marketing and selling? Start your free trial of Outfunnel!

The post MailerLite Meets Your CRM: Streamline Email Campaigns and Boost Sales with Outfunnel appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Here at Outfunnel, we’re big fans of connecting sales and marketing, whether you use an all-in-one suite, mix “best-of-breed” tools, or both. 

In this article, we review some of our favorite marketing tools that play well with Copper, focusing on best-in-class third-party marketing automation tools that integrate with it seamlessly.

This guide shares our personal experience, along with user reviews spotted in the wild (read: G2 and Reddit). By the end of it, you’ll narrow down your options.

1. Can Copper be used for marketing?
2. Email marketing integrations for Copper
3. Marketing web form integrations for Copper
4. Marketing and ROI reporting integrations for Copper
5. Website visitor tracking integrations for Copper
6. Which Copper marketing integrations have you decided?

Can Copper be used for marketing?

Copper started out as a sales CRM with a core functionality built around Google Workspace.

However, recent product releases have shown that Copper’s leadership realizes the importance of marketing-sales alignment. 

So yes, you can use Copper for marketing. But as you’ll see in this guide, it might not be the best option out there.

Before we jump into the nuts and bolts, let’s take a step back and ask: “What exactly is this ‘marketing automation’ that we’re looking for?”

There are three core marketing functions most companies look to automate:

• Email marketing – Marketing newsletters, drip campaigns, and other event-triggered emails
• On-site marketing / lead generation – Forms, chat, web visitor tracking, and the like
• Marketing reporting – Analytics that track your overall marketing efforts. Here, you can see what generated sales/revenue, without having to recreate charts and graphs manually.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but they’re the main things most businesses look to do well. Getting these fundamentals right goes a long, long way.

Email marketing integrations for Copper

By tightly connecting your favorite tools within your Copper-email marketing set-up, you:

1. Auto-update your email segments and save time for more value-added activities 
2. Provide more context for sales (e.g., what emails were opened, what links were clicked), so they know which leads to focus on and win deals faster 
3. Achieve your sales and marketing goals by aligning both departments on joint KPIs, customer journey, workflows, communication, etc.

There’s just one tiny problem. 

Different tools have different “product DNA.” 

How do you pick one that best suits your use case(s)? In the next section, let’s explore which email marketing software platform is the best for the job.

Marketing email platforms – you want to send both one-off and triggered email sequences 

One-off emails are helpful in these scenarios:

• You’ve generated leads over time via your website, exhibitions, or events, and you want to keep them engaged 
• You want to share valuable information with buyers who aren’t ready to buy, so you can stay on top of mind

Whereas triggered email sequences nurture interested leads based on the specific actions they take (e.g., onboarding flow for leads who signed up for a free trial, upsell flow for customers who purchased a product). 

Now that we’ve got the differences out of the way, let’s review the strongest contenders that excel in both regular one-off email and triggered email campaigns. 

1. Campaigns by Copper is a built-in and no-frills email automation tool 

Marketing Tools by Copper is a decent choice if you have simple email automation needs and want to gather your sales and marketing data under one roof.  

Why we like it:

• Tight integration with Copper. Create new emails, automate your email campaigns to segments defined with Copper filters, record email engagement as Notes, and more on a single platform.
• Easy-to-use email builder. Users like how intuitive and straightforward it is to customize the professional templates. Easily drag and drop images, buttons, icons, and more.

Where it may fall short:

• Lacks many popular email marketing features as evidenced by posts in the Copper Community (e.g., limited design templates, no A/B testing)
• Limited number of recipients for campaigns
• Risks your email domain reputation

Pricing: Available on Professional plan and up.

2. Mailchimp is a popular and effective tool for sending email blasts, coupled with a strong template editor and many Copper integration options

Source: MailChimp

MailChimp evolved from a basic email marketing tool to an all-in-one marketing automation platform for businesses of all sizes.

Why we like it:

• Generous one-month free trial for Essentials and Standard plans
• Many beautiful, professionally designed templates across multiple use cases 
• Intuitive despite the sheer amount of features. It’s a snap setting up email campaigns, whether it’s dragging blocks in the email, landing page, and form builder; segmenting contacts with tags; conducting A/B tests; or analyzing campaigns.

Where it may fall short:

• Support for advanced issues is still lacking, though getting help for basic troubleshooting is breezy. Here, a user laments on how it took days to solve an urgent account issue.
• Huge price jump from Standard to Premium plans. MailChimp can get really expensive, especially when there are other similar tools at comparatively lower prices.

Pricing:

A free 1-month trial is available for Essentials and Standard plan

*Based on 500 contacts

• Free: $0 for 1,000 monthly email sends, email support for first 30 days, limited pre-built email templates, and more
• Essentials: Starts from $11.07/month for everything in Free, 5,000 monthly email sends, 24/7 email & chat support, 100+ customizable email templates, and more*
• Standard: Starts from $18.45/month for everything in Essentials, 6,000 monthly email sends, campaign manager, one personalized onboarding session, and more*
• Premium: Starts from $309.88/month for everything in Standard, 150,000 monthly email sends, phone and priority support, unlimited users and audiences, four personalized onboarding sessions, and more*

MailChimp also offers plans for websites and transactional emails. Here’s its full pricing page for more info.

Mailchimp has a basic integration with Copper, but there are several limitations

• Minimal default data syncing: By default, only first name, last name, and work email are synced from Copper to Mailchimp. You can add more fields via Field Mapping—but with limits.
• Custom field restrictions: While you can map additional custom fields, options like multi-select fields and connect fields are not supported.
• Field type matching required: Mapped fields must exist in both systems and share compatible field types—this can complicate mapping.
• Only one Mailchimp audience per integration: You can only sync to a single Mailchimp audience. Although you can manually add contacts to other audiences afterward, the native integration doesn’t support syncing to multiple audiences directly.
• It only syncs contacts, but email engagement gets siloed in Mailchimp

Outfunnel solves this. 

Outfunnel offers a Copper-Mailchimp integration that keeps your contacts in sync and automatically records Mailchimp engagement data back to Copper

Our Copper-Mailchimp integration helps you “complete the loop” and updates your Copper seamlessly with relevant information (like email opens, clicks, website visits) in Notes, Activities, or Custom Field updates.

Sync contacts (or subsets you define with Copper filters) two-way between Copper and Mailchimp. 

This means that you can trigger your email campaigns on MailChimp based on events recorded in Copper automatically (e.g., an SQL-turned-client will be auto-removed from a lead nurturing campaign, a customer who bought add-ons will also be auto-removed from a cross-selling email sequence).

Whether it’s recording engagement for an email campaign, calculating a lead’s score based on site visits, or creating new deals for MailChimp subscribers in Copper, it’s easy-breezy keeping these two databases in sync automatically.

3. Brevo is an all-in-one marketing automation platform for SMBs and can be tightly integrated with Copper

Source: Brevo

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a fully featured marketing automation suite. It’s fantastic for small businesses with modest budgets, thanks to its flexible pricing.

Why we like it:

• The most SMB-friendly marketing tool in this list. Besides paid plans, Brevo also offers customized pricing based on functionality and monthly email volume. 
• Unlimited contacts no matter what plan you’re on—yes, including free users!
• Functionality similar to MailChimp. Many Brevo users initially used the Intuit-owned software but switched due to its pocket-friendly pricing. If you’re looking for a MailChimp alternative, look no further. 
• Comprehensive tools under one roof. You can create emails (including transactional emails), sign-up forms, landing pages, SMS texts, etc. all entirely on one platform.

Where it may fall short:

• Lack of support. Success reps used to respond promptly, even for free users. Users could easily access personalized help for any issue, no matter how minor (like SMTP key length for printers). Recent reviews show support now runs sporadically.
• Medium learning curve. Things like adding new contacts from a CSV file and automating a drip campaign may require some time to get used to.

Pricing:

For marketing platform:

• Free: $0 for 300 emails/day, customizable email templates, drag & drop editor, transactional emails, and more
• Starter: Starts from $9/month for everything in Free, no daily sending limit, basic reporting & analytics, email support, and more 
• Business: Starts from $18/month for everything in Starter, marketing automation, advanced statistics, A/B testing, phone support, and more
• Enterprise: Contact sales for quote for everything in Business, unlimited contacts, tailored onboarding, advanced integrations, personalized support, and more

Additional customized plans are available based on email volume and functionality

Brevo also offers plans for its conversations platform, sales platform, and messaging API. Here’s its full pricing page for more info.

Outfunnel’s Copper-Brevo integration syncs contacts and email activity between these two platforms

Our Copper-Brevo integration keeps the two tools in sync seamlessly, as if you had an all-in-one platform. 

Sync contacts you define with Copper filters to Brevo 24/7. Whenever new leads are added into the CRM, relevant email lists are updated automatically (full disclosure: it’s not real-time, but the sync is frequent enough for typical B2B use cases).

This way, your salespeople have full context of leads and sell smarter. 

4. Klaviyo is excellent if you want powerful segmentation and automation capabilities 

Source: Klaviyo

Many eCommerce owners with advanced marketing automation needs use Klaviyo to scale their business. Based on its pricing and functionality, this feature-rich platform best suits brands with a large email list.

Why we like it:

• Comprehensive features no matter what plan you’re on. Klaviyo offers a drag-and-drop automation builder, hyper-precise segmentation, 300+ pre-built integrations, multi-channel attribution, etc. to help you scale.
• Seamless integration with Shopify. It’s extremely easy to set up Klaviyo, and the tracking is useful, to boot.
• Best-in-class automation (e.g., automate cross- or upsell emails based on specific conditions like number of placed orders, channel preference, and cart value)
• Powerful segmentation that allows for deep personalization. Klaviyo lets you experiment with multiple attributes and parameters to create new segments (e.g., customers who often use discounts, specific location, or any other kinds of data you integrate)

Where it may fall short:

• Customer support has dipped recently based on many user reviews on G2 and Reddit 
• Pricing can get insanely steep for smaller stores and businesses
• New and updated editor is reportedly more buggy than its previous classic template editor. On the bright side, there are improvements in other areas. Back then, you needed to custom code a block to overlay text on an image. Now, all you need to do is add a background image to the section.

Pricing:

*Based on 500 contacts

• Free: $0 for up to 250 contacts, from 500 monthly email sends, email support for first 60 days, and more
• Email: Starts from $20/month for 5,000 monthly email sends, mobile push notifications, email and chat support, and more*
• Email & SMS: Starts from $35/month for 1,250 monthly SMS/MMS credits, 5,000 monthly email sends, mobile push notifications, email and chat support, and more*

Common issues users experience when integrating Klaviyo with Copper via Zapier? Headaches and forking over hundreds of dollars every month. 

Zapier works great for simple one-way ‘Zaps’ like “push contacts from this CRM list to that marketing audience”, but it can get complex, messy, and expensive if you want two-way sync or customized workflows.

Consider using Outfunnel.  

Outfunnel’s Copper-Klaviyo integration ensures your Copper contacts are synced to relevant Klaviyo lists based on your preference  

Our Copper-Klaviyo integration also syncs sends, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes automatically over to Copper. What’s great is that it records a user’s first open or click per URL, achieving a clear and concise representation of their activities over time.

Marketing web form integrations for Copper

Your lead capture form is one of the first few things users see on a web page. To boost response rate, you’ll want it to be simple, user-friendly, and friction-free. Here are some of our favorites that play well with Copper.

1. Copper‘s native web forms are basic and hassle-free but don’t track where leads come from 

Source: Copper

If you’d need a simple web form without any integration hassle, you can’t go wrong with Copper’s own web forms. They’re one of the most basic forms in this list, so you can quickly set one up right away.

Unfortunately, the forms omit source/medium/UTM data, so you have no way of knowing where your leads come from.

Why we like it:

• Ease of use. Since it’s native, you don’t need to switch from one app to another or set up any complicated integrations. 
• Intuitive builder where you can quickly create custom fields and route lead information straight to your sales pipeline

Where it may fall short:

• Very basic customization options
• Lacks lead source data. There’s no attribution to inbound leads, so you have no insight into where they come from. That’s because Copper uses an inline frame for its native forms, so there’s no way to capture UTM codes and save them. Considering it’s a sales CRM, this is an unusual flaw.

In a nutshell, Copper’s web forms fall short if you want to understand how leads first found your business. Consider using the alternatives below for lead source information and advanced customization.

2. Wix’s built-in forms experience unpredictable glitches    

Source: Wix

Is your website hosted on Wix? 

If so, it’s easiest to use Wix Forms to capture leads.

While Wix Forms doesn’t have a native integration with Copper, you can use Outfunnel’s Wix Forms-Copper integration. Sync contacts from Wix Forms over to Copper, recording the submissions on the contact profiles seamlessly.

Why we like it:

• Great variety of form templates such as questionnaire, contact, order, and registration forms
• Intuitive interface that removes the intimidation factor of building forms from scratch. Easily create a multi-step form, reorder and duplicate it, etc. without feeling overwhelmed. 

Where it may fall short:

• Frequent glitches. A quick scroll of Wix’s App Market reviews show many upset users lamenting about malfunctioning forms that affect their businesses.
• Support can run slow, unresponsive, and unhelpful
• Pretty expensive. The cheapest plan, at $11/month, offers only four forms.

Pricing:

• Lite: $11/month for 4 lead capture forms, 10 fields per form, and more 
• Core: $22/month for 10 lead capture forms, 50 fields per form, and more
• Business: $34/month for 25 lead capture forms, 75 fields per form, and more
• Business Elite: $149/month for 75 lead capture forms, 100 fields per form, and more

3. WordPress offers multiple web forms — take your pick from Contact Form 7, Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms, or WPForms

Source: Elementor

The most popular CMS in the world, WordPress offers a variety of tools for web forms. The most popular ones include Contact Form 7 (which we use for some of our forms at Outfunnel), Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms, and WPForms.

Why we like it:

• Works really well on WordPress sites (e.g., Elementor lets you customize your forms down to the granular level)
• Affordable. These forms are priced annually—you can access essential support, unlimited forms and submissions, extensive form fields, etc.   

Where it may fall short:

• Backend speed can run slow, depending on the form builder’s functionality. For example, Gravity Forms, known for its advanced features, tends to slow site speed considerably.

Pricing: Starts from $49.50/year, except for Contact Form 7 (it’s free!). Check the individual sites for more pricing info.

Outfunnel offers integrations with these WordPress forms 

While the setup for each form is slightly different, it’s nothing too complicated, especially if you’re already familiar with using WordPress.

The more complicated part is syncing these forms with Copper. A quick search will reveal several different plugins that offer such connections, but our (not completely unbiased) recommendation is to connect them via Outfunnel’s App connector. 

Here’s why:

• Sync contacts from form fills to Copper as contacts within seconds
• Easily map any and all custom fields you’d like to be mapped to the respective properties in the CRM (note: some alternatives can only map 3-4 default fields)
• Capture lead source (source, medium, UTM, and landing page data). You’ll know (a) where leads visited before arriving on your website and (b) the very first landing page they visited on your site. 

• One set-up for any number of web forms in your domain (note: many others require a separate configuration per web form!)
• Entire set-up takes 15 minutes

4. Paperform is elegant and affordable ($24/mo), but has no native integration with Copper

Paperform is known for its simplicity and design. Users love how easy it is to navigate around the editor. Even creating logic jumps—which usually stump beginners—is fuss-free.

While some of our simpler contact forms (e.g. our B2B email crash course) live on Contact Form 7, we use Paperform for more complex web forms.

Why we like it:

• Over 650 professionally designed templates across multiple use cases (e.g., sales inquiry, quote form, consultation)
• Lightweight WYSIWYG editor with comprehensive features like dynamic pricing and scoring 
• Intuitive user interface. It’s incredibly easy to create forms within minutes! 

Where it may fall short:

• No native integration. You’d need to send new leads to Copper via Make, Zapier, or a comparable 3rd party syncing tool (note: templates are ready made)
• Some templates feel restrictive design-wise (e.g., inflexible page format that ends up looking odd on your website, only two columns for questions side-by-side)

Pricing:

A 14-day trial is available

• Essentials: $24/month when billed annually for unlimited forms, 1 user, 100 submissions/month, 1GB upload storage, and more
• Pro: $49/month when billed annually for unlimited forms, 3 users, 1,000 submissions/month, 10GB upload storage, and more
• Business: $99/month when billed annually for unlimited forms, 5 users, 10,000 submissions/month, 100GB upload storage, and more
• Enterprise: Contact sales for quote for unlimited users and submissions/month 

There’s an option to increase the number of submissions for the Essentials, Pro, and Business plans at additional cost. Check the pricing page for more info.

Marketing and ROI reporting integrations for Copper

Before you strategize the next move in your marketing efforts, you need to figure out where your leads come from. 

Knowing which lead sources generate these qualified leads will help you improve content, buyer’s journey, and eventually, ROI.

This section kicks off with our very own tool.

1. Outfunnel’s built-in lead source report cuts to the chase

Outfunnel is the easiest way to connect your sales and marketing tools. 

Analyze how your multiple traffic sources impact your sales pipeline. Are paid ads better than SEO? Should you continue investing in LinkedIn? Which is the best-performing channel? Our built-in lead source report’s got all the answers. 

>> Start your 14-day free trial now <<

Why we like it (what users say):

• Clear-cut lead source information. Outfunnel auto-detects the source and medium of a lead, right down to the UTM parameters.
• Deep integration with Copper. Outfunnel boasts easy-to-use filtering that stores the lead source information as a person field in Copper. 
• Easy-peasy analysis. View how many created/won deals each traffic source has attributed to without feeling overwhelmed. From here, you can further filter your deals per pipeline, sales rep, time, lost/won, etc.

Where it may fall short:

• Channel report is in beta, so analytics are still on the basic side. In future, you’ll be able to view in-depth data directly in Outfunnel (e.g., names and values of deals won).
• No real-time updates. Outfunnel’s channel report only updates at midnight UTC time.

Pricing:

A free 14-day trial is available

• Basic: Starts at $29/month when billed annually for 100 contacts, data sync (contacts, forms, and engagement), and more
• Professional: Starts at $99/month when billed annually for everything in Basic, 1,000 contacts, lead scoring, web tracking, and more

Additional charge is required to increase the number of contacts for both plans. Check the pricing page for more info.

Contact sales for a custom quote if you have over 15,000 contacts.

Website visitor tracking integrations for Copper

One perk of running a physical retail store is that you get to watch customer behavior in action. Where do they linger? What do they overlook? How do they navigate the store?

You gain deeper insights, anticipate their needs, and improve every aspect of the customer experience.

Can you do the same with your website? 

Yes, you can, and that’s where visitor tracking comes in.

1. Leadfeeder is a straightforward lead generation add-on

Leadfeeder does an apt job at finding new leads and ranking them based on their web activity automatically. 

Why we like it:

• Intuitive and fuss-free navigation. Easily view and sort your leads by quality or last visit time. It’s also incredibly easy to filter them by type and conditions.

Where it may fall short:

• Inability to unhide leads. Once a visitor is hidden, that’s it. There’s no way to un-hide them—even if you have hidden them by accident.  
• Lack of integration with Copper.

2. Outfunnel’s web visitor tracking software is simple to use and gives your sales team better context

Our own web visitor tracking software gives your sales team better context. Get a complete view of your web visitors, all the way from the pages visited and forms filled to where they spent the most time on.

>> Start your 14-day free trial now <<

Why we like it (what users say):

• Really easy set-up. Add a tracking code, identify your first site visitor, track the web visits of these identified leads on Outfunnel (and your favorite CRM), and set up follow-up workflows accordingly.
• Sleek and straightforward integration that automatically records site visits as Activities or Tasks on Copper
• Multiple sites or sub-domains tracking that identifies leads only once (not for each sub-domain separately)
• Automatically tracks traffic source for all new contacts and visits, which helps you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts quickly

Where it may fall short:

• Lack of advanced tracking. For example, Outfunnel can’t track web visitors that came from a specific Google Ads campaign. Fortunately, a Copper-Google Ads integration is in the works!

Pricing:

A free 14-day trial is available

• Basic: Starts at $29/month when billed annually for 100 contacts, data sync (contacts, forms, and engagement), and more
• Professional: Starts at $99/month when billed annually for everything in Basic, 1,000 contacts, lead scoring, web tracking, and more

Additional charge is required to increase the number of contacts for both plans. Check the pricing page for more info.

Contact sales for a custom quote if you have over 15,000 contacts.

Which Copper marketing integrations have you decided on?

We’ve shortlisted the key marketing automation tools that play well with Copper. 

Now that you’ve narrowed down the possible options, give Outfunnel a whirl and see it for yourself. 

>> Start your 14-day free trial now <<

Not ready?

We at Outfunnel are geeks when it comes to integrating sales and marketing—so much so that our product is dedicated to connecting these tools.

If you have more tools you want to integrate with this popular CRM, check out Copper integrations by Outfunnel. 

The post Copper Marketing Automation: Tools & Integrations – A Complete Overview appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Should You Hire a Consultant?

If your marketing team is spending too much time managing email campaigns manually or struggling to integrate your CRM and email marketing tools effectively, a Salesforce consultant could be a game-changer. Consultants are great for businesses with complex workflows, those new to automation (or Salesforce), or companies growing rapidly and needing a reliable setup.

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, there’s a consultant out there to match your needs and budget.

Please note that if you’re budget-conscious you don’t need Salesforce consultant for everything. Getting your sales and marketing apps to talk to each other can be easy with tools like Outfunnel (ahem), and I’ll cover this in some detail at the end of this post.

But first, here are some of the best Salesforce marketing automation consultants who specialize in integrating marketing automation tools.

1. CloudKettle

• Location: Halifax, Canada
• Specialty: Salesforce & Marketing Automation Experts
• Target Customer Size: Small to mid-sized businesses
• Price Level: $$

CloudKettle helps businesses integrate Salesforce with email platforms like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, creating custom marketing funnels and automated workflows. They are perfect for small and mid-sized businesses looking to optimize lead generation and customer retention.

Small to mid-sized businesses seeking high-quality, affordable CRM solutions.

2. Rainmaker Associates

• Location: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Specialty: Salesforce Consulting & Implementation
• Target Customer Size: Small to mid-sized businesses
• Price Level: $$
• Website: rainmakercloud.com

Rainmaker Associates specializes in integrating Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) and Mailchimp with Salesforce, helping businesses automate and personalize email marketing campaigns. They tailor their solutions for small and growing businesses, ensuring CRM and marketing efforts are fully aligned for effective customer engagement.

Ideal for: Small to mid-sized businesses wanting an affordable, data-driven approach.

3. Digital Maelstrom

• Location: Kansas City, Missouri, USA
• Specialty: Salesforce Development & Integrations
• Target Customer Size: Small to mid-sized businesses
• Price Level: $$

Digital Maelstrom focuses on Salesforce integrations with ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp. They offer personalized, budget-friendly services, including setting up drip campaigns and creating advanced segmentation rules tailored to small business needs.

Ideal for: Small businesses looking for affordable, hands-on Salesforce and email marketing solutions.

4. CloudMasonry

• Location: Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Specialty: Salesforce Consulting & Managed Services
• Target Customer Size: Mid-sized to large enterprises
• Price Level: $$$

CloudMasonry offers specialized services in email marketing integrations using Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign. They ensure seamless connectivity between marketing tools and Salesforce for personalized, automated campaigns.

Ideal for: Mid-sized and large enterprises seeking a comprehensive approach to marketing automation.

5. Fluido

• Location: Espoo, Finland
• Specialty: Salesforce Consulting & Marketing Automation
• Target Customer Size: Mid-sized to large businesses
• Price Level: $$$

Fluido is one of the leading Salesforce consultants in the Nordics, providing comprehensive Salesforce solutions and integrations, including email marketing tools like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign. Their expertise lies in automating marketing processes and ensuring that businesses maximize the power of Salesforce CRM to drive customer engagement and sales. With a local presence and a deep understanding of the Nordic market, Fluido offers tailored services that fit the needs of growing businesses.

Ideal for: Mid-sized to large Nordics-based businesses seeking localized Salesforce solutions and marketing automation expertise.

6. Stretch

• Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
• Specialty: Salesforce Implementation & Marketing Automation
• Target Customer Size: Small to mid-sized businesses
• Price Level: $$

Stretch specializes in Salesforce CRM and marketing automation solutions for small to mid-sized businesses. They offer integration with tools like Mailchimp and Klaviyo, ensuring seamless connectivity and automation. With a focus on tailoring solutions to fit the needs of businesses in the Nordics and beyond, they provide support designed to scale with growing companies.

Ideal for: Small to mid-sized Nordic businesses looking for scalable, efficient Salesforce solutions.

With or without a consultant, how do I integrate my apps with Salesforce?

While Salesforce is incredibly capable, we know sales and marketing people often prefer to pick and choose their favorite tools instead of going for an all-in-one platform. 

If you use apps like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign in your marketing efforts you might want to integrate your email marketing platform with Salesforce.

This is where we come in. Outfunnel is basically a Salesforce integration for dummies service. It syncs your contacts’ data across a variety of essential apps. This effective CRM integration solution ensures that your sales and marketing data is connected and in sync 24/7. 

While there are other third-party integration app options for Salesforce (such as Zapier and its alternatives), Outfunnel is the only one designed for connecting sales and marketing apps. Built by marketing and sales pros, the integrations are both deeper and easier to set up.

Conclusion

Whether you’re starting with Salesforce or looking to refine your setup, choosing the right consultant can maximize your CRM investment. The consultants above offer expert services tailored to Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo, and ActiveCampaign users. With the right partner, you can ensure your email marketing efforts are fully integrated with Salesforce, driving better customer engagement and more revenue.

The post The Best Salesforce Marketing Automation Consultants for Small Businesses appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

There are hundreds of words and phrases that trigger spam filters because they’re frequently abused. And some of these words are actually commonly used by businesses like “laser printer” or “email marketing”.

List of 200+ spam trigger words

How can you tell if a word or phrase is spammy? Briskly test if it:

• is anxiety-inducing;
• creates a sense of urgency;
• sounds trashy or cheap;
• is too good to be true;
• contains anything illegal or malicious.

Here are 200+ words that trigger spam filters.

How to A/B test your subject lines for spam trigger words

If you’re not 100% sure whether a word or phrase may trigger spam filters, you can always use A/B testing to trial your email campaign subject line on a subsegment of your list first.

Here’s how you can go about it:

1. Decide on a few (2 or 3) options for subject lines you’d like yo use*;
2. Choose representative groups of recipients from your database (2 or 3 accordingly);
3. Send the same email to the groups of recipients, but with different the different subject lines you came up with in step 1;
4. See and evaluate the open rates for each group: if either is significantly below the standard for your industry or lists, go with the one that performed better. If they’re equally good, you can choose the one you prefer or toss a coin! If both perform poorly, go back to step 1 (or perhaps take a look at more general email deliverability best practices).

*Remember that the point of A/B testing is getting results that you can learn from. Don’t test random subject lines — take time to work out the rationale.

What else can you do prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder?

Avoiding spam trigger words will not guarantee you end up in the recipient’s inbox. So, it’s worth taking a brief look at what qualifies as spam and how you can make sure your emails do not trigger anti-spam tools.

Spam refers to irrelevant emails usually sent to recipients without their consent.

Emails that trigger spam filters typically share a few distinctive characteristics:

• No targeting or personalization;
• Irrelevant business proposals;
• Urgency and scarcity in email subject lines;
• Links to dubious websites;
• No unsubscribe link.

And the scale of junk emails that gets sent out daily is astounding — around 14.5 billion (!) messages per day.

There is no unified criteria for judging what is junk and what is not, as every spam protection service has different algorithms. However, the general criteria can be sorted into four primary categories:

1. Unwanted emails

The most widespread characteristic of spammy emails is that the recipient never signed up for them in the first place.

If you make sure you only email people who expect to hear from you, then you’ll have taken care of the biggest trigger.

2. IP address reputation

If the IP address you use gets many abuse complaints, it’ll be blacklisted by mailing systems.

Be sure to actively monitor your IP’s email deliverability and bounce rates. Seeing the first metric falls while the second raises? It’s high time to pause the campaign and investigate the reason behind it.

3. Code

Fraudsters, especially ones in the Banking & Finance industry, are known for adding malicious pieces of JavaScript in their emails, e.g. rojanDownloader:JS/Nemucod. 

As a result, any external code is now viewed as a potential source of threat — so, it’s better to avoid including it in content.

4. Content

When creating email content, follow simple courtesy rules:

• Include an opt-out option;
• Make visual or branding elements look pertinent;
• Test all external links you include and don’t misuse them.

Tips for writing less spammy emails

A key part of making sure your emails get delivered is simply writing great emails. If you do so, you simply do not give your recipients any reason to mark your emails as spam. Otherwise, it’s bad news for your domain reputation and your delivery rates.

So, here are 5 quick tips for writing less spammy emails.

Tip number 1: write with authentic tone

“Dear Sir or Madam,

My name is Jack Smith, I’m a sales manager of the ABC company.

I’ve looked through your website and think my company has something to offer you…”

Well… This is how phony emails start. A universal formula. You can replace names or titles — with no proper personalization changes. 

However, there’s karma for spammers: even if the mail isn’t caught by spam filters, it will have low CTR. Because people are smart and no one will continue reading what they think to be fake.

The only way to be heard is to write authentic emails, ones that are genuine and personalized. And while authenticity is something that will be unique to you, here are a few ideas you can consider for your emaills:

• Anticipate the needs of your prospects (do your research!)
• Share facts, figures or social proof for your offering (e.g. how many companies trust you with their business or a short testimonial from someone)
• Write with respect (don’t be too formal or too friendly, at least not at first)
• Avoid unnecessary urgency or pressure (this can feel like emotional blackmail)
• Avoid manipulative language (such as “Do something or…”)

Tip number 2: make it easy to unsubscribe

If you don’t add an unsubscribe link and the recipient doesn’t want your emails, what do you think will happen? They will mark your emails as spam or report you.

So, adding a unsubscribe link helps avoid spam complaints and guard your email deliverability, especially if you plan on sending more than one email campaign (which we certainly hope you do).

Furthermore, you should make it easy to unsubscribe—do not hide the unsubscribe link or make it difficult to click on. That defeats the purpose.

After all, if you make it easy for people to opt-out of future emails, even if people do end up unsubscribing, they’re helping you clean your list. Simply puy, there’s no point emailing people who don’t want to hear from you—it’s a waste of your resources.

Tip number 3: create a memorable, non-spammy call to action

If you’ve gone through our B2B email marketing course, you’ll know that all your emails should have a call to action—and just one call to action.

But how to create a good CTA, one that actually works? While there’s no single formula, you can follow these best practices:

Don’t simply describe something — encourage actions

On average, we all receive 25-30 emails daily. Unless it contains something substantial, a long read has almost no chance of being read all the way through. Even if it’s well written. 

For emails — be concise where possible. Try to shorten phrases and leave the essence that will hook the user.

Avoid words like “Click” for buttons; use “Claim offer” or “See the deals” instead. A good idea is to add a preheader that captures the essence of the email — whether this is a new offer, birthday gift, newsletter, etc.

Test email UI/UX on mobile

Too small buttons or too light font color may look good on a desktop; however, on small smartphone screens, these may look broken.

Finish the sentence, “I want to..”

One of the best tips for CTAs (in emails and elsewhere) is that a natural CTA finishes the following sentence: “I want to…” So, use for example, “Start my free trial” and not “Start your free trial”.

Tip number 4: don’t use ALL CAPS

Too many CAPS letters cause almost physical pain when reading the text. This concerns subject lines too!

Tip number 5: don’t use too many emojis

I hate to break it to you, but the golden era of emojis is behind. Nobody is surprised by them anymore. Even if your subject line with emojis looks good, it will most likely get lost in the recipient’s mailbox among similar emails.

This is how your Promotion tab may look like on any day:

If you want to use emojis, make sure they match the message and add value rather than noise.

Avoiding spam trigger words is just one part of getting your emails delivered and read. If you’d like to learn more about writing and sending emails that bring results, sign up for our B2B email marketing course.

The post 200+ Spam Trigger Words To Avoid appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

To say that I haven’t been the biggest fan of cold emailing would be an understatement. Like you, I receive so much spam that my attitude to this channel has been, well, cold. 

Furthermore, I’ve mostly worked with companies where customer segments and price points dictate that outbound sales don’t make financial sense, so I’ve always prioritized inbound marketing. And it has worked, every time.

But in October 2020 I launched my first ever “proper” cold email sequence, and I’m really quite pleased with the results: 

• 1139 people targeted, 2 emails sent to each
• 33-51% open rate (this compares to our monthly, opt-in newsletter)
• 3-6% engagement rate (replies and/or clicks)
• 10+ high-value demos
• 10+ new high-value partner newsletter subscribers
• 1 paying customer (although getting paying customers wasn’t the immediate goal)

So…

Does cold emailing work?

Yes, cold email outreach can work, if done well.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that quite a bit of work went into sourcing and cleaning the list of prospects. In fact, I’m certain it would have been difficult to get these results without such preparation. But there were a number of smaller things at play as well. More on that below. 

Context: what Outfunnel’s funnel looks like, and where does cold emailing fit in

Outfunnel is an automation tool that helps you automate sales-marketing workflows by connecting your CRM with your marketing tools.

Additionally, we offer a simple email campaigns tool for B2B use cases.

And we don’t charge a lot for the tool. This dictates that we’re inbound marketing heavy. Most of our efforts go into making Outfunnel easy to find, either via content, specific online searches, or one of our integration partners. 

Enter our latest integration with HubSpot CRM. (Why build a marketing automation integration with a tool known for marketing automation? See here). We’d seen early interest from HubSpot users but we knew that it’d take ages for our inbound playbook to properly start to work across the HubSpot ecosystem. 

We also knew that HubSpot had a strong partner ecosystem. This just begged the question: what if we sent them an email?

Here’s my cold email strategy, step by step.

Sending a cold email campaign: our process and tools

Step 1. Find a list of target companies

It’s relatively easy to find digital agencies that are also HubSpot partners. If you google “hubspot partner agency” or do a company search for “hubspot partner” on LinkedIn, you’ll easily get a list of companies. This process can be manual or automated, we used a simple scraper.

Step 2. Find a list of target people and their email addresses

I then used LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($99/month) to research the companies discovered in the previous step to identify the exact job titles to target. I landed on the following job titles: CEO, Managing Partner, Managing Director, VP, COO, co-founder, founder, owner, partner.

There are lots of tools that let you find people with specific job titles in target companies. We used Anymailfinder (starts at €29) for this. There are many other tools for finding email addresses, but Anymailfinder was recommended by someone that has tested various tools extensively.

We then had approximately 1300 contacts from relevant companies with a verified email address and another 1000 contacts with an unverified email address. Because a high bounce rate can drag down your email reputation, we only used verified email addresses. 

As a sidenote, we’re now using Voila Norbert ($99/month) for finding the email addresses that Anymailfinder couldn’t find.

Step 3. Manually clean the email list 

We then went through the list manually to weed out people whose job titles were close but didn’t match our target. We also tidied up the company name at that stage to make sure they can be used in the email as the merge field. This included removing any slogans or additions or the acronyms that indicate the type of legal entity. 

This manual cleaning reduced the size of the email list by about 10%. The other way to look at this step would be: cleaning made the list 10% better. 

The result: we had a list of 1139 people ready to be imported into our CRM.

Step 4. Craft effective emails

I broke the list into six chunks to be able to play with different copywriting. 5 of these were similar, 1 included a personalized image. 

This basic email got the highest response rates and engagement (clicks and replies) — feel free to use it as a cold email template:

I was expecting two notably shorter versions of this email to perform better, but this rather long one delivered the best results. (Rather small sample size though.) Here’s the campaign report:

Step 5. Send the first cold email campaign

Unsurprisingly, we used Outfunnel (plans that include the email marketing Campaigns feature start at $49/month) to send the sales pitch.

It’s not really meant to be used as a cold email tool for a couple of technical reasons, the main one being that it uses Outfunnel’s servers and IPs rather than plugging into the email stack of customers. There’s also the fact that each email ends with an unsubscribe link that cannot be removed — this is something that some cold email senders want to avoid.

Sending emails was straightforward: after uploading contacts to our CRM (we use Pipedrive, segmenting with Person filters, but this would have worked equally well with Airtable, Copper or HubSpot) I added a tag to each of the six sub-segments, and I could then access the segments in Outfunnel. Too easy.

Step 6. Send follow-up email

About 10 days later I sent a follow-up email to everyone that hadn’t replied, booked a demo or clicked through to the site. I used Outfunnel’s native Lead scoring software to build a segment of contacts with a score lower than 4. We assign a value of 1 to email opens, 3 to email clicks and 10 to each page visit, so if someone had clicked through to the site, they were automatically excluded from the follow-up email.

27 people had a high lead score after the first email but hadn’t replied or booked a demo. I followed up with these leads with a more personal, hand-crafted email.

This I’d like to emphasize: I could have also sent a third and fourth email but I chose to stick to two. Yes, this potentially left some proverbial money on the proverbial table, but hey, none of these people had given me permission to email them. 

The fact-based case for sending only two emails is that no one reported this campaign as spam (as I’m sure would have happened had I kept emailing). The gut feeling-based case is: it’s the right thing to do.

Here’s one of the follow up-email templates I used to email people with a low lead score:

No longer interested? Unsubscribe

This email was delivered to 922 people, and I received 13 replies. Not bad. Here’s the campaign report:

Step 7. Follow up and do the actual demos.

Nothing special in this step.

10 cold emailing lessons learned

I already mentioned the results above but I’d say that the 35-51% open rate, 3-6% engagement rate (replies and/or clicks) and 1% demo rate were rather good. And this success comes down to 10 things.

Without further ado, here are my cold email tips.

1. It pays to put effort into proper targeting and list building

We spent quite a bit of time defining the ideal recipient (“buyer persona”) and finding a workable way to collect (read: scrape) a list of contacts.

It would have been much more time-effective to just buy a list of ad agency leaders from one of the many contact vendors, but I’m certain we would have seen a poorer success rate.

2. Even when using the best tools, you still need to clean and sense check the data manually

We used AnyMailFinder which was recommended to us by someone who has used different tools extensively. We still needed to manually remove 10% of the contacts and edit the data, so using merge fields would make sense. 

This made our target list 10% smaller better. 

3. Send follow up sequences to prospects (but not too much)

We got more engagement and sales reps got more demos from the follow-up email, compared to the first one. So you’re missing out if you don’t follow up with your prospects.

Important caveat: don’t overdo it if you don’t have explicit permission to email. Otherwise, your unsolicited emails will end up in the spam folder.

4. The fewer call-to-actions in the email content, the better

I was certain that one of my conclusions would be that a shorter email performs better than a longer one, but data suggested otherwise.

What the test did confirm was that optimizing for one prominent CTA (eg. reply or click) and having a “fallback CTA” (eg. hyperlink somewhere in the email) leads to best results.

As a side-note: only two demos were scheduled directly from my Calendly link. The majority of demos resulted from them sending me their scheduling link or agreeing to a demo after getting some more information from me first. In the future, I’ll keep my Calendly link out of the first email. 

5. Lead scoring helps decide who’s ready for a more personalized approach and who needs a reminder

Lead scoring was super useful for defining audiences for follow-ups. It gave me an easy way to exclude the warm leads (who had clicked through to the site and browsed multiple pages) from the cold leads.

The less engaged ones got a second generic email from me, sent from Outfunnel, and the ones with high lead scores got a personalized, hand-crafted follow-up.

(In hindsight, I should have personalized the high lead score follow-up even more by including details from their website or social profiles. One for next time.)

6. Web tracking provides useful context 

A couple of the contacts replied with very specific asks. For example, one lead requested me to “Send info on your partner program, please.” 

When you get a question like this from someone who’s new to your product, do you just honor their request, or do you also add some product details to help them understand the value proposition?

With website visitor tracking software, you’ll know. I was able to see that this particular lead had already seen our features page, so I knew I need not unnecessarily pitch my product.

7. Image personalization needs some more practice

One of the variations of my cold emails included hyper-personalization. Here’s an example of how it looked, with the recipient’s website shown on my screen:

So, the website shown on my screen was customized for each recipient. That’s the magic sauce of Hyperise.

I was surprised to find that this variation of the email with a personalized image performed worse compared to text-based ones. After all, personalization is supposed to be a key to getting good results with email outreach, so I had high expectations for hyper-personalization.

I consulted with Hyperise founder Ian Naylor, and here’s what he advised me to do differently the next time:

I think the angle of the screen and the mismatch with the website makes it look a bit odd. I would suggest retaking with the screen more straight on, to work better from a composition perspective. (or even better, create as a GIF)

The white text at the bottom is lost, I almost didn’t notice it, I would make it bigger and also set an opposing colour shadow, to make the text pop more.

8. It’s good to have something “soft” to sell if you can’t get to a demo right away

I had dozens of briefer or longer email conversations, and some of the replies were “interesting but not right now”. Also, some people I spoke to on demos were interested but didn’t have suitable customers to recommend Outfunnel to right away.

I asked each of them whether I could add them to our partner mailing list and 100% of them said yes. This way there’s a natural way for us to educate leads about Outfunnel without violating privacy laws.

Note to self: make sure to write a damn good partner newsletter soon.

9. It’s good to have an unsubscribe link

With Outfunnel, all emails include an “unsubscribe” link that cannot be removed. So each of the emails we sent out as part of this campaign also sported this link in the footer.

This is great for the recipient because they can silence unwanted senders. It’s great for the sender because if there wasn’t an unsubscribe link, the recipients would simply mark the email as spam, and that can seriously damage your domain reputation and email deliverability.

I didn’t include an unsubscribe link to the 27 personalized emails I’d sent to warmer sales leads after the first campaign, and received this:

Andrus please take me off your mailing list. Also add the unsubscribe option below your email signature to all your cold emails and follow-ups. This will lessen your chances of being marked as Spam….

I would not have emailed this lead again, but after receiving this I even deleted her email address from our system.

10. Meta lesson: don’t discount something for the wrong reasons

I’d been against cold outreach email because there’s a lot of spam out there and I didn’t want to add to that.

But I was also anti-cold sales emails because it was a new if not alien thing for me. And it’s super easy to be anti new things (a fact well-illustrated by many recent political happenings).

Had this cold email strategy failed, that would have been a much better reason to be against the channel. 

So my meta lesson is to write things off because of real experiences, not prejudices or “things you’ve heard from a source”.

Conclusion: cold emailing works, but only if executed well

Our first cold outreach campaign taught many good lessons and gave us a new powerful tool to add to our marketing arsenal. 

But with great power comes you-know-what.

If and when we do cold pitches, I promise we’ll do our homework in targeting, clean lists thoroughly, include an unsubscribe link, and not email more than twice. 

Shout out to all businesses that are already doing this, starting with Chartmogul. A great example of a “cold email pitch”, no?

I hope you enjoyed learning my cold email formula. I would love to hear your comments, thoughts, and questions.

P.S. And if you happen to be a digital agency working with implementing sales and marketing tools, I’d love to tell you more about our partner program.

The post Cold Emailing: You Can Love It Or Hate It, But Here’s How To Make It Work appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

This post is less about this “declaration” but more about email best practices. A somewhat-subjective (OK, a lot subjective) and somewhat-scientific email marketing teardown.

You see, when I added my name to the launch webinar I opted in for receiving marketing messages of the companies behind the declaration. All of these companies got my details at the same time, through the same channel. I may have been on email lists of some of these companies previously too, but even so, my observations and conclusions hold.

The list included the likes of Drift, Amplitude, Iterable and Segment. These companies are not on the cutting edge of growth marketing, they are the cutting edge. So I was quite excited to be learning from the very best. (Spoiler alert: even the very best make mistakes and miss opportunities, so we can all relax).

Before starting this post-event email marketing teardown though, I want to apologise.

To all the marketers out there. People at Amplitude, Drift, Iterable, Mixpanel, Pendo, Segment, and Tray:

I’m sorry for repeatedly clicking on email links (like, a lot) and probably setting off some sort of alarm in your marketing analytics platform (probably Marketo; more on that later).

I broke down this marketing email teardown into 9 sections, all focused on different areas.

Here’s what I analyzed:

• Marketing-to-sales flow
• Content
• Subject line
• Design
• Call-to-action
• Frequency
• Personalization
• Email service provider
• UTM tracking setup

I looked at 69 emails from 7 companies (mentioned above), across 99 days between 16/01/2020 and 24/04/2020. The volume of emails isn’t really enough to make sweeping statements about the overall state of email marketing. That said, there are still some interesting insights to glean from the numbers.

And of course, in the absence of data, there’s always opinion..

If you don’t fancy sticking around for the whole thing, that’s fine. I’ve included a tl;dr at the bottom for the time impoverished.

So, it’s time to glove up and dive in.

Marketing vs Sales: how many emails from each?

Outfunnel’s goal is to bring sales and marketing closer together, so the first thing I wanted to look at is how these titans of the martech ecosystem move leads along the marketing funnel and sales pipeline.

A handful of companies (Drift, Iterable, and Segment) didn’t grace my inbox with any sales emails at all. Everyone else did reach out with some sort of sales-focused message, though. Without seeing behind-the-scenes, it’s hard to tell whether those not sending emails are simply not sending them, or maybe I never triggered them by performing some kind of “high intent” signal action along the way.

There’s a couple of things that stand out to me here.

Firstly: Tray. They really seem to have the marketing flow dialled in. With what looks like a core drip campaign, kicking in after the initial post-event series I received. There’s definitely a “carpet bombing” element going on with Tray (more on email frequency later though), but I can’t help but admire the effort going into it.

Another thing about Tray was that the two core campaigns I mentioned above seemed to have a clear marketing to sales flow defined and, in the case of the second, they really marketed hard. Tray’s “main” drip campaign consisted of 10 emails total, with one of those being a sales email.

At the other end of the spectrum was Amplitude. Amplitude actually sent more sales-focused emails (4) than marketing emails (1). I’m kind of on the fence about this approach. 

In my view, a lead landing in your lap from an event list isn’t going to be as hot as, say, someone signing up for something on your website. It’s a pretty low intent signal, to be honest. Going all-out with sales emails, without spending some time making sure I know what they’re all about seems like a wasted opportunity. 

Plus, two of the sales emails from Amplitude consisted of one sales offer (yay!) and one apology email for sending me the sales offer in error (boo! but also yay for reaching out with a clarification).

Across the whole “experiment”, I received around 4 marketing emails for every sales email.

So, how did they all try and move me along the pipeline? What kind of content did they use to nurture me? What’s the most common sales approach?

Let’s take a look at the content.

What type of content do the very best use in emails

It’s not entirely surprising that “guides” were the most common type of content marketers were using to nurture me along their respective pipelines. These guides ranged from broad “what is x” type of things right through to specific, actionable how-to’s. 

Also, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these emails linked to blog posts. The email itself being a kind of teaser for the main event on the blog.

Again, hardly an earth-shattering revelation. 

A highly unscientific look at the publication info on a handful of these posts points to most of them being older posts, hand-picked for the purposes of lead nurturing.

This makes a lot of sense. Even a cursory glance at Google Analytics should be enough to make you go “hey, these posts are converting search traffic, let’s send these articles to our email subscribers”. Then it’s just a case of packaging them up into an email marketing sequence.

A couple of things that did standout though were how reliant marketers are on video in 2020. A good chunk of these guide emails linked to YouTube or Wistia. It wasn’t just premade video content in email though: webinars by themselves came a very close second behind guide-type content.

Tray even had a weekly demo webinar session, in addition to their core drip campaign.

There were a couple of companies recycling emails, with Mixpanel almost literally sending the same email twice (even with the same subject lines). This kind of makes sense if they are sending ad hoc emails. Want to squeeze a few more opens out of your email? Segment people who didn’t open it the first time around and resend it to them.

There was also at least one instance of a company literally sending me the same email twice, on the same day, within an hour of each other. 

Unlike the Mixpanel emails, there was no difference in design. Literally the exact same message. The only difference I could spot between them though was that one had a personalized from and reply to address, the other used general info here.

My guess is that it was an error.

Even the biggest names in the business screw up, just like the rest of us.

A look at subject lines (it’s all very subjective)

Marketers spend a lot of time analyzing and debating subject lines. After all, they carry a lot on their shoulders. Your email might be polished, the landing page or post might be a shining beacon of marketing excellence.

But all of that is for nought if the subject line is garbage. Even “ok” isn’t really good enough.

Scrutinizing email subject lines is probably worth a post on its own, so I will keep my analysis brief, highly subjective, and mildly scientific.

Looking at averages, character and word counts across all 69 emails were around 40 characters and 8 words.

As this isn’t a scientific experiment, I here are a few subjectively selected subject lines that stuck out to me, for the right and wrong reasons:

How to stay connected and keep the convos going (virtually) – Nice, conversational style. Gives me enough of a hint about what to expect, setting my expectations, but leaves enough unsaid to trigger some interest.

CRM is Not Enough – thoughts? – Not a fan of just using “thoughts” in emails – either in the subject line or when signing off. It’s a lazy, fuzzy call-to-action. You want my actual thoughts? Stop using “thoughts?”.

Don’t be like New Coke – I’m on the fence about this one. It triggered the “hmmmm” part of my brain for a couple of milliseconds longer than the majority of the other subject lines, but it’s maybe a little on the creatively abstract side because it doesn’t give me any idea what to expect on the other side. You may get more opens, sure, but perhaps not by the people you wanted to reach in the first place.

Andrus – We missed you – One of, quite literally, 3 emails that actually used my name in the subject line. Maybe they all have some data that says it makes no difference? Maybe that’s something for some deeper analysis in the future? One thing’s for sure, I was surprised to see so few marketers using personalization in their subject lines.

Not another Covid19 email – Please, stop. You’ve used the c-word in the subject line, thereby making your email about the c-word.

Generally speaking, Drift was one of the companies that stood out here. They were the only one to use emojis in their subject lines and also the only ones to go for an all lower-case subject line. This matched well with the overall tone of their emails: they felt kind of conversational and laid back.

Email design: critique from a Grumpy Martech CEO

Across the board, the marketing emails were very design heavy. The exceptions here were Drift and Segment, sticking with a much more low-key, personal-feeling approach, something we’re fans of at Outfunnel. Sales emails though were much less reliant on design.

I have some mixed feelings on this topic, particularly the use of large header images at the top of marketing emails.

You see, for me, sticking a big image at the top sort of feels like it has become the de facto choice for marketers. Got to get that image in there. Got to define the brand.

But the problem is two-fold. 

From a practical perspective, it pushes the content further down the email, particularly on mobile. So you’re asking your reader to scroll further in order to reach the thing you want them to read/click.

The second problem is a function of the first: in all probability, you want them to scroll past the image. So, if that’s the case, why have the image at all? I can see an argument for visuals that set a tone, or are part of some visual messaging. Marketers want things to be cohesive between emails, landing pages, posts.

But just sticking a stock photo of people waving their pens at a laptop? That’s a pass from me.

Call-to-action: it pays to have one

Although a lot of the call-to-actions in these emails jumped out as the “main” CTA, there were many emails with multiple big buttons all vying for my attention. Similarly, there were also lots of emails where nothing really stood out as the main CTA.

So, for this section I focused on the CTA’s that, subjectively, grabbed my eye first. The ones that made me feel “ok, this is what they want me to do”.

And to further simplify the process, I bundled the CTA’s into 3 main groups: button, text link or image.

Every one of the marketing emails I received during the 99 day window had some sort of call-to-action. So, a good start there.

And as the majority of these marketing emails were heavily designed, it doesn’t come as a shock that buttons-based CTAs were the most common.

Buttons were also the most common CTA type used in sales emails, but text-based CTAs were, relatively speaking, more common here. It was also interesting to note that at least one of the companies sent a sales email with absolutely no clear CTA at all.

Personally, I would include something. Sending “just checking in” or “thoughts?” type sales emails come across as lazy in my view. It’s just more email noise.

Subjectively, there wasn’t anything that leapt out at me as being earth-shatteringly creative with any of the CTAs. For both the marketing and sales email CTAs the emphasis seems to be on clarity rather than creativity.

And maybe that’s the point. If you want your recipients to do a thing, most sure it’s absolutely clear what it is you’re asking them to do.

Frequency: more is not better

Email marketing spam sucks. 

In my view it really is one of those areas where “less is more”. People’s inboxes are already being flooded with sales and marketing messages and adding to that, in my view, just makes you part of the problem.

In my view, one marketing email every two weeks is a pretty balanced level. You’re not being spammy and at the same time you’re making sure your customers know you still exist. And it seems a lot of these companies agree with this.

Very approximately, all of the companies sent me a marketing or sales email once every 2-3 weeks. Granted, that calculation is kind of skewed, because as I mentioned above there were some instances where I was receiving two emails within a matter of hours.

But, generally speaking, the average came to around 1 email every 2 weeks.

All with one exception: Tray.

In their case, they were sending me more than one email per week. The sheer volume of different campaigns (looking at the utm tracking, more on that shortly) is certainly impressive. I mean, they’re clearly putting a lot of effort in.

But I can’t help but feel that by toning it down, ever so slightly, I might feel less like I’ve been psychologically beaten into submission. Having all of these different campaigns happening at the same time gives the impression that there are so many moving parts but those parts are siloed from one another.

Again, kudos for the effort, Tray. But less really can be more.

Surprisingly little personalization

This is one area that kind of caught me by surprise if I am being honest.

You see, as marketers we ask for various bits of personal info from people. That may be basic info so we can contact them, or more detailed stuff, like company size and industry, in order to more accurately qualify leads.

But almost every time, we’ll ask for a name.

So, why not use it?

Less than half of these emails used any personalization at all and those that did only went as far as a simple “Hello Andrus”. Only a handful of emails used my name in the subject line.

Granted, there are plenty of things that may be going on behind the scenes in terms of personalization. I may be in a specific funnel, based on the information they have on me, for example.

I’m a believer in human, conversational marketing (no, not chatbots) and addressing me by name, maybe even dropping in my company name, makes it feel less like I am not receiving a standardised generic email and more something that was made for me.

The same email marketing platform used by all

Although this email marketing teardown isn’t some sort of competition, if it was there is one, clear winner:

Marketo.

It’s difficult to know exactly what marketing automation tools are being used without really, really digging into it, but looking at things like unsubscribe pages and tracking info, Marketo was the one name that came up again and again.

And how many companies were using Marketo at least somewhere in their email marketing stack?

Every. Single. One.

Granted, this sample size is pretty miniscule, but I was still struck by how ubiquitous Marketo has become for mid-market tech companies of certain size.

By the way, if you’re not a mid-market tech company and are looking for an email marketing tool, check out Outfunnel. Our unique selling point is tight integration with sales tools like Pipedrive and Copper

UTM tracking: many rely on tagging by their email platform

In email marketing (or any digital marketing, really) adding UTM tracking to links should eventually become second nature to most.

As every single company I looked at uses Marketo, all of the tracking should be handled there (I checked at least one link in every email and, yes, there was at least one of the marketo tracking tokens added to the link).

But there are a couple, namely Mixpanel and Tray, that went “belt and braces”, choosing to include UTM tracking as well. In Tray’s case it was actually pretty revealing, because it showed just how many different campaigns they were sending as well as how many emails went into each campaign.

Does this signify the death of UTM tracking in marketing and sales emails? 

Well, no. Again, this sample size is pretty small, so I am not going to draw any sweeping conclusions from it.

What does surprise me is that more companies aren’t using both Marketo and UTM tracking in combination. If you have the option, it’s almost always better to have two sources of data, so that you can compare them against one another and, potentially, spot issues in one platform or the other.

Email marketing teardown: In summary (tl;dr)

• Marketing-to-sales flow – most marketers are using around 4 marketing emails to warm up leads before sales steps in. One standout was Tray: their main lead nurture campaign featured 9 nurture emails before I got a sales email.
• Content – most marketers like to combine different types of content in their emails, usually using 2 different content types. The most popular content types were guides (how-to’s and things like that) and webinars.
• Subject line – The average word count for subject lines was 8. Drift stood out here, thanks to their use of emojis and all-lowercase text in the subject lines.
• Design – Most marketers are using heavily designed emails, but there’s still room for the less designed, more personal-feeling style, with Segment and Drift using these to great effect.
• Call-to-action – All of the marketing emails had at least one CTA, with buttons being most common. CTAs were common in sales emails too, but there were a handful missing any call to action.
• Frequency – Overall, marketers were sending 1 email every 2 weeks or so. With the exception of Tray who went all out, sending multiple marketing emails per week throughout the whole analysis period.
• Personalization – Personalization in the email content was widely underused, with <50% of marketers using any personalization, and those that did only went with a “Hello Andrus”. A couple of marketers used some personalization in the subject line.
• Email service provider – Marketo was the one name that came up over and over. Every single company I looked at had Marketo somewhere in their email marketing tech stack.
• UTM tracking setup – Because everyone is using Marketo, a lot of marketers have ignored traditional UTM tracking in their emails, with the exception of Tray and Mixpanel.

It was certainly an enlightening process, going through all of these marketing emails. If I was to do another email marketing teardown, I might focus on one, specific area and analyze a larger pool of companies over a longer period, perhaps.

Thoughts?

PS. Massive thanks to Ben Billson who provided lots of useful feedback and suggestions to this post. I warmly recommend him for content work.

The post The Big Email Marketing Teardown: Learning From The Very Best appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

First, a depressing stat: 15-20% of your email marketing efforts go to waste. This is the percentage of your emails that end up in junk folders or remain “undelivered” on average, based on data from Return Path.

The good news is that there are things you can do for your email deliverability to be way above than average.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability is like the credit score for your email marketing programs. Life is pretty good with a good credit score but you need to make an effort to maintain it, and you have to stay out of trouble.

Deliverability is measured as the percentage of your emails that reach the intended recipients. Simply put: if 10% of your emails get caught by spam filters, your deliverability is 90%.

It is one of the most influential metrics for your email marketing programs, potentially more important than the exact design template or CTA copy you choose. After all, if your email isn’t being delivered, it doesn’t matter how well it’s written–no-one will be able to read it.

Email deliverability rates vary greatly by country and by email platform. In fact, many popular email platforms only deliver 70-80% of the emails you send:

But independent of the email tool you pick and the region you send emails to, there are steps any marketer can take to increase the share of emails that reach inboxes.

How is email deliverability measured?

Unless you’re starting from scratch you may want to establish a baseline on where you stand with email deliverability.

If your “opted-in” audience open rates are 40% and up and click rates 4-5% and up, your email deliverability is probably fine. For cold emails, a good benchmark is around 15-20% for open rates and 2% for click rates.

If you’re an Outfunnel user you’ll find your campaign health stats right inside the app—we call it “Email health”.

Whatever your open and click rate metrics are, it’s good to run a quick deliverability test for your email setup.

A tool like mail-tester is a great place to start testing your email deliverability. You get a quick score and a summary of the key aspects that influence deliverability like email domain reputation, message formatting, domain authentication, and email content. Unsurprisingly, we’ll cover these aspects later in this post.

All good email marketers monitor open and click rates. We’d suggest to also monitor email bounce rate regularly (more on that below) and run a test like mail-tester every now and then, and every time you’ve made major changes in your email templates or tools.

There are some more advanced measurement recommendations at the very end of the post.

But what can you do if you’re facing email deliverability issues? Here’s a lowdown on how you can maximize your email deliverability.

How to improve email deliverability?

First off, here’s the tl;dr version for busy people:

• Only email to people that have given you permission to do so — it’s best practice and, in some cases, literally the law.
• Authenticate your domain with your email service provider.
• Watch your language and avoid spam trigger words in body and subject line.
• Use trigger-based emails in addition to one-off “blasts”.
• Keep your emails simple—avoid complex HTML or too many links.
• Include an unsubscribe link.
• Be mindful of text-to-image ratio—aim for 70% text to 30% image.
• Include conversational emails in the mix.
• Clean your email lists regularly.
• Give recipients more control over the emails they receive.
• New domain? Start with smaller campaigns and gradually increase the volume.
• Target, and segment as accurately as possible, especially if you’re going to cold email.
• If you have to buy a list, clean it before using.
• Avoid using contests and giveaways to build your list.
• Send great emails that readers engage with.

(Scroll down for further recommendations to technical pros).

And now, let’s go deeper into each of the areas mentioned.

#1. Only send emails to people who expect to receive emails from you i.e. get permission

This first tip is more of an attitude or approach than a technical tip, but it has a really big impact on deliverability. If you only send emails to people that expect to hear from you, your need to follow the rest of this article gets dramatically smaller.

If people are expecting your email, they’re less likely to report it as spam, which is a major contributing factor to your delivery rate.

There are also good legal reasons to get consent before you send a campaign.

Ideally, you’d want “double opt-in” before you start emailing someone ie. new subscribers are sent a confirmation email. This way you can make sure people who are not actually expecting to be emailed are not maliciously or accidentally added to your list.

#2. Authenticate your domain with your email tool

Inbox providers (sometimes also called internet service providers or ISPs), like Outlook, Yahoo and Gmail, use DKIM and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to verify that the email sender has permission to use this domain and isn’t a spammer.

Every email marketing tool typically has its own steps you’ll need to follow in order to authenticate your domain. The two main ways to email authentication are setting up DKIM and SPF verification.

Often, custom domain authentication is also recommended, to help align your domain to Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).

These steps typically involve adding or updating DNS records. You’ll need to have access to your DNS account (usually, this is provided by your web hosting provider).

Once you’ve set everything up you can use a tool like MX Toolbox to verify that you’re good to go. Many email tools have also built-in verifiers. (We at Outfunnel have one).

#3. Avoid words that trigger spam filters in subject line 

Remember the time when you used to see a lot of emails trying to sell viagra and laser printer toner refills? You may have noticed these emails now almost always land in your Junk folder instead of inbox. That’s because spammers have trained spam filters to know that certain words correlate with spam.

There are hundreds of words and terms that trigger spam filters because they’re frequently abused. And some of these words are completely legit business terms you wouldn’t know to avoid. For example: lose weight, laser printer, or email marketing. Here’s a good list of spam trigger words.

The same applies when WRITING YOUR SUBJECT LINE IN ALL CAPS or including too many exclamation points!!!

When it comes to the body copy, similar rules apply: avoid spammy words and using text in red.

It’s also worth double-checking your email for any spelling errors. Not only do mistakes make you look less professional, but they’re also a hallmark of spam email; spammers often deliberately misspell ‘trigger’ words to try and get past the filters. 

#4. Send triggered and event-based emails, not just blasts 

Trigger-based emails have higher engagement rates than one-off, mass email blasts.

As engagement is a positive domain reputation signal, you should use trigger-based drip emails to reach more engaged people.

You can, for example, send an automated email campaign when people sign up for your newsletter or make their first purchase. You could also send a follow-up email once they’ve downloaded certain content from your website.

In addition to better timing, triggered emails also tend to be much more relevant. Sending an email relating to the page they’ve just visited is much more likely to get a positive response than a seemingly random message that they don’t care about.

Done well, your marketing automation setup will combine automated email sequences with one-off marketing campaigns, keeping your audience happy and deliverability high.

#5. Avoid attachments and unreasonably complex design or HTML

Avoid sending very short (or very long emails) if you don’t want to get grabbed by spam filters. Email service providers will also check to see whether the code is suspicious (either deliberately malicious or just plain garbage-looking).

If the email doesn’t look and feel like an email, it isn’t going to make it to the inbox.

Keep formatting basic, avoid adding loads of tracking and keep things as clean and simple as possible.

It’s also best practice to avoid attachments and link to services like Dropbox or Google Drive instead.

#6. Offer a way to unsubscribe 

This one perhaps splits email marketers.

People coming from the sales side say that an unsubscribe link makes emails appear less personal and can trigger filters that land an email in the Promotions tab or even Junk folder.

We disagree, vehemently.

People need a way out that doesn’t involve them having to jump through hoops, so including an unsubscribe link is the ethical thing to do. Not only that but in many parts of the world now you’re legally required to add a link.

Even more importantly, adding an unsubscribe link is good for email deliverability in the longer term. Why?

If you don’t add an unsubscribe link and the recipient doesn’t want your emails, do you think they’re going to email you back, kindly asking you to stop emailing them? No, they’re going to mark you as spam or report you.

So, add the unsubscribe link to avoid spam complaints, particularly if you plan on sending more than one email or campaign.

Don’t try and hide the link either, making it too small to see or otherwise burying it where no-one can find it. When you make it easy for people to opt-out of future emails, even if people do end up unsubscribing, they’re helping you clean your list. There’s no point emailing people who don’t want to hear from you — it’s a waste of your resources and will only succeed in upsetting them further.

#7. Keep a healthy text-to-image ratio

Always keep in mind how many images vs text you use in an email.

Looking through the emails caught in my spam folder, I was amazed how many of them are mainly images. It turns out that, in an effort to bypass spam filters that scanned for suspicious words, crafty spammers started using images of those words. As a result, messages that are mainly images are picked up as spam, even if the images are completely innocent. 

If your email content is more than 50% images, it can set off spam filters. Same story if your images are too big.

Aim for at least 60-70% text to 30-40% images.

#8. Get conversational aka optimize some emails for replies instead of clicks

It’s a good idea, almost a B2B best practice, to use real people as senders for some emails. This way you’ll introduce real salespeople or account managers or support people — or even the company’s CEO.

It’s a good idea to turn some of these emails into a conversation. Ask a question, in other words.

If you get someone to reply to an email (instead of clicking a link, say), that sends a strong signal to email service providers about you as a sender. And this helps to improve the email deliverability of all your future campaigns.​

#9. Clean lists regularly 

Email bounces can really hurt your sender score, so remove anyemail addresses that are “hard bounces” ASAP. (If you’re an Outfunnel user, you’ll be glad to know this is something we handle for you automatically.)

Circumstances change and people who sign up to hearing from you a year ago may have moved on. Also, many email service providers now use machine learning to monitor at scale whether recipients engage with emails.

So, if you see someone isn’t opening your emails anymore, remove them from your list. That way you can head the robots off at the pass, avoiding damage to your sender reputation by sending bouncy emails.

It’s also important to consider volume over time.

Say, for example, you send 5 emails in one week, none of which have been opened. In this instance, you can safely assume that this person may be on holiday. Conversely, if someone hasn’t opened an email in 4 months, but you’ve only sent one, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear from you.

A good rule of them for this situation is this:

If you’ve sent at least 5 emails over the last 6 months and got 0 opens, it’s time to remove those addresses from your list.

And, of course, you don’t have to remove them straight away. You can always move them to a “dormant” segment and try to warm them back up with an email list reactivation campaign.

#10. Give email recipients more control

Talking about unsubscribe rates, a common reason why people report messages as spam (and damage your delivery rate) is that they’re receiving more emails than they want. This doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear from you at all. 

By offering your email recipients a preference center, you give them the power to choose what emails they do want to receive from you. For example, superfans may want to hear from you every day, while others may be much happier with a monthly newsletter. Some will want to hear every detail about your plans for the future, while others only want to know if there’s an offer on.

Let people decide how they want to hear from you and your email delivery rates will benefit.

#11. Warm-up your domain before sending big campaigns

If you’ve just switched to a new email marketing platform or have just started sending email marketing emails, then you should take the time to “warm-up” your domain.

Also known as IP or reputation warming, this is a way of improving your reputation profile when you start out. Your list should, ideally, be small and active in the beginning.

The reason being is that engagement, like opens, clicks, and replies are all positive reputation signals – so a smaller list of more active recipients is going to give you a better ratio of active, interested parties.

If you kick things off with a 10,000 email blast to people who’ve never heard from you, your deliverability is going to be terrible and you’ll risk trashing your reputation. Instead, take that list of 10,000 contacts and break it up…

Week 1: 250 recipients
Week 2: 500 recipients
Week 3: 750 recipients
Week 4: 1300 recipients, etc…

Another thing to keep in mind for new email domains is to keep a healthy ratio of incoming and outgoing email. A quick way to establish a reputation is to generate incoming emails by signing up for reputable newsletters (think NY Times or our own email course) and services like LinkedIn or Facebook that generate notifications.

#12. Segment your lists and avoid sending the same message to everyone

In an ideal world, prospects will have visited your website or event booth and given you consent to keep them warm via email. As we all know, the world is not ideal.

While we’re firmly against spamming at Outfunnel, we’re also realists and know that in most situations prospects haven’t self-identified themselves.

The difference between smart cold emails and spamming? Segmentation.

If you’re self-assembling your list, put extra effort into defining your criteria. Test assumptions on a small number of contacts before blasting tens of thousands.

This might mean reducing the number of emails you send to your least active subscribers. On the flip side, you can run campaigns specifically for your most engaged users; by targeting leads who’ve previously opened and clicked links in your previous emails, it’s a safe bet they’ll do the same again and engage with your next email.

#13. If you have to buy email lists, clean them before using

When it comes to buying lists, my first advice would be: “Don’t buy lists.”

But I do exist in the real world.

Email lists are going to be bought and sold and this article is about email deliverability, not the merits (or lack of) of bought subscriber lists. And many list providers are reputable and sell good-quality data, perhaps even with contacts having given consent to be contacted.

So, let’s say you’ve already bought that list from a reputable source…

Before you put those addresses anywhere near your email tool, run the whole list through a list cleaning service (or, maybe even several). If you don’t, best-case scenario, you end up with a very low-quality list.

Worst case scenario, your email gets caught by a spam trap address and you end up on some kind of blacklist (more on those later).

#14. Avoid lists built from contests

One common tactic for getting people to sign up for your email list is to run a competition or contest. It sounds great in practice—people get to win a prize, and you get a list of email addresses. Surely that’s a win-win situation?

The reality is very different. For starters, you need to make sure it’s crystal clear what people are signing up for. Under GDPR, people have to be informed exactly what you’re doing with their data, so people would have to specifically opt-in to receive marketing emails.

Additionally, people who sign up because they want to win a prize are unlikely to engage with your emails. They don’t care about you or your brand, they’re just here for the giveaway. 

Finally, even if there are some sign-ups who do genuinely want to receive future emails from you, many more will have tried entering multiple times to increase their chances of winning. That will likely mean plenty of duplicate, invalid, and non-existent email addresses in your list. 

This will translate into a high bounce rate and will damage your sender reputation. If you are set on running a contest, be sure to clean your list as thoroughly as if you had bought it. 

#15. Write great emails that people want to read

At the beginning of this post, I explained how email deliverability is one of the most important factors in your email campaign, even more so than the email itself. While that’s completely true, the reality is that the quality of your email is still vital and affects your delivery rates. 

As we’ve seen throughout these tips, a key part of keeping delivery rates high is not giving your recipients any reason to mark your message as spam. If that happens, it’s bad news for your domain reputation and your delivery rate. 

The good news is that when people react positively to your email, the email provider notices. High open, click, and reply rates send positive signals that this message is good and that it’s okay to keep delivering emails from this sender. 

If you take the time to write a clear subject line that gives the recipient a reason to open your email, if you write a value-packed email that’s relevant to the reader, you’ll be boosting your deliverability while nurturing leads or closing sales.

Bonus technical email deliverability tips

Bonus Tip #1. Set up feedback loops

If you’re sending a lot of emails, people are going to complain at some point.

So, it’s important you have access to that feedback so you can pick up problems and fix them before you end up with a dent in your domain reputation.

This is where email feedback loops come in. In short, a feedback loop allows you, the sender, to receive notifications when someone complains about your emails, say by marking them as spam.

Many mailbox providers have different procedures for setting up feedback loops. In the case of Gmail, there’s Google Postmaster Tools plus ReturnPath offer a Universal Feedback Loop that allows you to monitor complaints from lots of different providers.

Please note that if you’re using Outfunnel’s simple email campaigns tool, we’ve set up the necessary feedback loops and, should your account generate lots of complaints, we’ll proactively let you know.

Bonus Tip #2. Test and monitor email deliverability

If like us, you send a lot of emails, or if email forms part of your core product, you should really be testing and monitoring your email deliverability.

At Outfunnel, we use Glockapps to provide us with constant email deliverability monitoring (not surprising, given email is a key part of our platform). GlockApps give us deliverability stats by ESO and country and provides recommendations.

Bonus Tip #3. Check your sender reputation

If you send a lot of emails and want to make sure that there are no reputation gremlins that could be lurking, there are some tools you can use to track potential issues.

For example, Talos Intelligence allows you to check your domain or IP and see whether it’s been flagged as spam, legitimate email or malware.

If your email reputation is anything other than ‘Good,’ you’ll need to do something about it. Sometimes, it’s easier to start over with a fresh IP address/domain than to try and fix your domain’s existing reputation. Obviously, you’ll still want to know what hurt your reputation, otherwise, you’ll likely end up in the same situation down the line. 

Talos Intelligence also checks to see if your domain/IP is on any of the popular Spam Blacklists. If you find yourself on a blacklist, it’s bad news, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Many of the blacklists have a removal process, where you can easily contact them and request your IP is removed from their list. Others can’t be contacted, but are automatically updated when they see the IP is no longer a source of spam.

It’s important to take action as soon as possible to prevent further issues down the line. Get yourself on the list and follow best practices to ensure you don’t end up there again. 

A big part of getting your emails delivered is using the right tools for the job. Outfunnel connects sales and marketing tools to make sure all your contacts data is in sync. Try it for yourself with a free 14-day trial!

The post Email Deliverability: The Ultimate Guide & 15 Ways to Improve Deliverability appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Last updated: Mar, 2025

Outfunnel is designed to bring sales and marketing efforts together seamlessly. Let’s explore the top benefits and use cases of this platform for new users:

1. Increase productivity by automating contact syncing

• Keep your sales and marketing contact lists in sync 24/7 – save time and never export-import .csv files again.

2. Provide salespeople context about leads, so they can sell smarter

• Record marketing engagement data (email opens, clicks, unsubscribes, web visits, scheduled Calendly meetings etc.) in your CRM, so sales has full context and can sell smarter.
• See what leads do on your website with web visitor tracking software

3. Prioritize leads

• Build lists of qualified opportunities with Lead scoring, or by building call lists of people who clicked or opened a particular email, or visited your website.

4. Simplify reporting or create custom workflows with our Google Sheets sync

• Sync contacts and other information from your CRM to Google Sheets

5. Trigger email campaigns or workflows across all your tools

• Launch workflows straight inside Outfunnel, or create triggers for your CRM and marketing tools for sending campaigns to defined segments

6. See what drives revenue

• Automatically capture lead source data in your CRM.
• See which channels and pages lead to new deals and sales revenue.

7. Sync new web leads and meetings to your CRM

Capture new leads from your website, lead ads, and scheduled Calendly meetings, and have the right information appear in your CRM.

All of these steps take minutes to set up and help drive results almost immediately.

1. Sync contacts

Often, when you’re setting up a marketing campaign, there’s a bit of last-minute scrambling to extract the list.

For example, you may want to…

• Add recently joined customers;
• Exclude people that you’ve parted ways with;
• Exclude very VIP customers that Account Managers keep up-to-date;
• Be sure to remove people who have unsubscribed from your marketing emails.

With Outfunnel you can define such lists in your CRM once and then forget about the need to ever extract another list. Your campaigns will be sent to the right segments based on data changes in the CRM.

All you need to do is define recipients for your marketing campaign in the CRM and use Outfunnel’s App connector to keep these in sync with lists in your marketing automation tool.

Once this is done, any new people that start matching the relevant segment in your CRM will be added to your email marketing tool’s lists or audiences, along with key fields. And you can then either send regular campaigns to an always-up-to-date list or trigger automated campaigns.

2. Record email marketing engagement in your CRM

As a salesperson, wouldn’t it be great to see which emails people that I want to speak to have received, opened, and clicked?

With Outfunnel you can have all email engagement data (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, etc,) recorded in your CRM. In this way, your salespeople have the full context for the leads.

The best part? Setup takes just minutes. All you need to do is set up an app connection between your CRM and email marketing tool, and configure how you want email engagement to be recorded. For example, you can:

• Have a custom activity “Campaign sent”, “Campaign opened” or “Campaign clicked” recorded in your CRM when people engage with emails. 
• Have unsubscribes and even bounces recorded in your CRM, so you can plan follow-up activities.

Whenever emails get sent out, all the engagement will be visible in your CRM.

Use web tracking to see which pages and content your leads visit on your website

Our Web visitor tracking software feature, or simply Web tracking as we call it, shows you which of your leads are visiting your website, and which pages of your website. This way you’ll know who appears more interested in your products and services, and more ready to buy.

You can have this information automatically synced to contacts in your CRM. Here’s how:

3. Prioritize sales-ready leads

If you’ve configured Outfunnel to record email opens/ clicks or website visits as Custom activity in your CRM, you can later use its segmenting/filtering functionality to build call lists.

Simply navigate to the Activities tab in your CRM, define the date range, and choose either “Campaign Opened”, “Campaign Clicked” or “Website visit” as the activity to be filtered.

Smart salespeople find ways to qualify leads even before having a conversation, and email clicks or website visits are great proxies.

Alternatively, our Lead scoring software feature auto-calculates a score for each contact based on how they’ve engaged with your emails and what they’ve done on your site. This score is then recorded in your CRM.

Read how to set up and use our Lead scoring feature

4. Simplify reporting or create custom workflows with our Google Sheets sync

Our Google Sheets integration lets you:

• Automatically sync contact data from your CRM to Google Sheets
• Choose which fields to sync—custom fields, deal data, tags, labels—you name it
• Set up recurring syncs so your Sheets data is always fresh
• Use synced Sheets for reports, dashboards, or as a bridge to other systems.

In other words, it’s now easier than ever to get CRM data into a spreadsheet without copy-pasting, CSV exports, or duct-tape automations.

5. Trigger the next campaign or sales action

Using elaborate workflow automation in your CRM for planning the next action with each lead? Outfunnel can provide the right triggers for following up with leads based on new engagements recorded in your marketing tools: 

• Update content of custom fields/properties 
• Create Tasks and Activities 
• Update labels and tags

Read how to create follow-up activities in your CRM for engaged leads

6. See what’s driving sales

If you’re using our Web tracking functionality, Outfunnel will automatically record source and medium data of that contact’s first visit in your CRM. This way you can use lead source data in the built-in reports of your CRM, or export it for further analysis in your favorite neighborhood spreadsheet or BI tool.

Furthermore, our channel report shows an aggregate view of contacts that web tracking has identified, split by traffic source. The report also shows you new deals/opportunities that have been created and won for every channel, as well as the conversion rate.

Find it under Web > Channel report.

7. Capture new web leads in your CRM

Among other marketing tool integrations, we’ve made it easy to connect your web forms and lead ads with your CRM, along with custom fields. So, you can use our App connector to set up the lead capture integration with your CRM. Learn more:

• Connecting Calendly with your CRM
• Connecting WordPress forms with your CRM
• Connecting Wix forms with your CRM
• Connecting Facebook Lead Ads with your CRM
• Connecting LinkedIn Lead Ads with your CRM

Ready to connect your data and start executing sales and marketing workflows across tools?

All of the above features are quick to set up and we’re happy to assist if you’d like someone to help get things up and running.

The post 7 Major Benefits of Using Outfunnel appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Last updated: May 5, 2021

If you’re wondering what is a drip email campaign and how build one, I’m here to help.

Below, you’ll find a handy list of 12 drip email sequence triggers that you can use to move your leads closer to a sale and stay in touch with customers once they’ve converted.

For each trigger, I’ll share some pointers and email drip campaign best practices, as well as a handful of email drip campaign examples.

But first, let’s review the basics.

What is a drip email campaign?

We’ve consulted the Bane of University Lecturers (Wikipedia) regarding this, and found the following description for the drip marketing model:

Drip marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. These messages often take the form of email marketing, although other media can also be used.

Drip marketing is distinct from other database marketing in two ways: the timing of the messages follow a predetermined course; the messages are dripped in a series applicable to a specific behavior or status of the recipient. It is also typically automated.

Wikipedia

So, according to Wikipedia, a drip email campaign:

• consists of pre-written messages,
• is user action or behavior based and
• is automated.

Drip campaigns are usually created for one of three main use cases.

What are the main use cases of drip marketing?

The three main use cases of automated email campaign drips are:

Onboarding emails or welcome sequences. So, let’s say someone signed up for your tool, service or list of subscribers. An onboarding or welcome drip campaign sequence will be helpful to initiate or welcome them, or show otherwise get them primed for more of what it is they signed up for.

Lead nurture emails. Drip lead nurturing campaigns have the primary goal of nudging the prospect to buy whatever it is you’re offering. This is most common in the B2B setting, and what exactly counts as a “lead” will depend upon your business. The main point in the context of drip email campaigns is that you have a list of people who are listening to you, but haven’t made a purchase. Your drip campaign’s goal will be to lead them to convert or abandon, with help from marketing automation.

Abandoned cart emails. These drip campaigns are a killer tool for direct-to-customer businesses, especially eCommerce. Most typically, when a subscriber meets the triggering criteria for an abandoned cart (e.g. they added a product to the shopping cart, but never checked out + 10 hours has passed), an automated abandoned cart email will be sent out. DTC brands recover some of such cases with drips that remind them to come back and complete the purchase.

A well set up drip email campaign will help you automate and scale your processes, whatever your use case. Done well, drip marketing campaigns will grow your revenues, while you’re mostly hands-off.

Sounds good?

Well, as with a lot of things, the idea itself is worthless. It’s the execution that matters. So, how do you actually integrate drip campaigns into your marketing strategy?

Onboarding email examples and cart abandonment drip campaign ideas have already been documented well elsewhere. So here, we’ll take a look at 12 potential triggers for drip campaigns, with a focus on lead nurturing email campaigns.

Nurture leads with triggered drip emailing

The most common drip email trigger is a newsletter subscription. But if that’s the only thing your using automated, trigger-based emails for… Well, you are missing out.

In fact, along with things like email drip campaign frequency and the content of your message, the right trigger can impact drip campaign effectiveness.

While, yes, signing up to a newsletter is the simplest way to trigger a drip email campaign, by being a little creative with your email automation and workflows, you can lubricate the lead nurture process, so you can guide the leads down your sales funnel and keep your existing customers happy.

<< Sign up to our free crash course on B2B email marketing >>

Here’s a rundown of my top email drip campaign ideas and email templates that you can start using today.

Drip email trigger #1: Signing up to a newsletter

Yes, yes.

I know I said using a newsletter as a trigger for a newsletter drip campaign is obvious (and if that’s the only trigger you’re using, maybe even a little bit lazy), but we all have to start somewhere.

Right?

So, what should you do once you’ve got someone to hand over their precious contact information?

Start with a warm welcome email, even if it’s just a confirmation

Sending a confirmation as the first email is kind of optional, but can really help if you’re struggling with hard bounces or very low engagement from your newsletter subscribers. The reason I say “kind of” is because in some parts of the world you have to be particularly careful about how you obtain permission to send marketing emails.

Thank them for subscribing

Not only is it common courtesy, but “thanks” is one of the most powerful words you can use in an email to customers or new subscribers. This is also a good time to drop in some personalized touches – but don’t expect to see a huge boost in performance just because you added their first name after the greeting.

Say who you are and what you’re about

I don’t buy into the whole “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” idea. Getting to know someone is a step-by-step process. And in my book, the welcome email is a second chance to tell them who you are and connect with them.

Highlight a few benefits, include a link to your very best content, tell them the story of how you ended up doing what you’re doing or share your mission.

Signing up to a newsletter: Drip campaign examples

The best email newsletter that is sent out daily (in our humble opinion), Morning Brew, welcomes you with a need to know, some steps to make sure their email deliverability is tip-top and a nice little nudge for you to share with friends.

Purveyors of quality tech news, BizarroDevs, like to keep it safe with a tidy double opt-in approach, good for keeping bounce rates low and making sure you’re subscribers are not robots.

Here’s step 1…

Then step 2 gives you a nice warm welcome and sets expectations for how often you’ll be getting emails from them as well as the content of the next newsletter.

Slick!

Trigger #2: Downloading an eBook or whitepaper

When “done right” eBooks, whitepapers, case studies and other content marketing collateral can be a vital part of an effective lead nurturing strategy. But again, as with newsletter sign-ups, the conversation shouldn’t end at the point of you sending them an email with the content.

Don’t just throw a book at them and walk away.

They’re engaged, they want to know what you have to say, so take the opportunity to keep talking.

Remind them what you’re sending

Consistency is key.

If someone wants your PDF eBook on “The 10 Most Hilarious Anecdotes of a Door-to-Door Widget Salesperson: 2020 Edition”, tell them that’s what you’ve sent. Say it in the subject line, the copy, and CTA. That’s the best way to assure a great conversion rate.

Oh, and make sure it’s accessible – a dead download link is never a good look. If you do catch a dead link after the email has been sent, always send an “oops” email, don’t just give up and move on.

Break it up

While your eBook drip campaign strategy might be to just keep sending them new, relevant eBooks and whitepapers every month, breaking up a single eBook over 5–10 days is a great way for both parties to get the best value from it.

Most people are too busy to sit there and trawl through pages of content. They’ll skim it and move on to the next thing. By breaking it up, you’re giving them a chance to digest all the most important morsels along the drip campaign timeline.

Essentially, you can take a single eBook and turn it into a fully-fledged educational drip campaign, including elegant upsell to whatever it is you’re selling.

Remind them to download

If you’re sharing a downloadable piece of content, it’s a good idea to track it so you can see who has (and who hasn’t) downloaded it. If they haven’t, then create a reminder telling them to download it and again, remind them what it is they’ve forgotten to download.

eBook or whitepaper: Drip campaign example

A nice, clean example from the folks at Intercom. A clear image showing what I’ve signed up for, and several (very tracked) links to download the eBook in various formats.

Trigger #3: Registering for a webinar

Webinars can be a killer tool for businesses and for some, they can be the leads’ entrypoint into the sales cycle. So, putting a webinar at the center of your email drip campaign strategy really makes a lot of sense. Yes, you could just send the standard “thanks for signing up” email, but you’d be missing a trick.

Send a follow-up if a lead visits, but doesn’t register

If you’re able to track and link web visits to your contacts, you can use this as a trigger to send out an invite. All you’ll need to do is wait a few hours, check whether or not they have registered in the meantime. If they haven’t registered, send them an invite.

Tell them what your webinar is about

Once they’ve registered for your webinar, follow up right away with a thank you email, plus:

• Time (and timezone)
• Duration
• Date
• How to access it
• Who’s going to be talking
• What they’ll be talking about

Make sure you’re talking about the content of the webinar in the context of what value you can give to your leads and customers.

I highly recommend looking at using a calendar link, so they can have the event added to their calendar automatically and be reminded. Speaking of reminders; your drip campaign timeline depends on when they signed up, but 3 reminders can work well: 14 days before, 5-7 days before, and 24 hours before.

Trigger #4 Attend (or missed) a webinar

So, once you’ve broadcast your webinar and the attendees have gone away having learned something new, what next? And what to do with all those people who signed up, but could make it or maybe left partway through?

Say “thanks” and ask for feedback

You should be saying thank you whether or not someone was able to attend: if they did make it, say “thanks for joining us”, if they didn’t say “thanks for your interest and we missed you”. Being warm and human goes a long way.

If they were able to attend, the follow-up email is also a good time to ask for some feedback or suggestions for future webinars. How was the audio quality? Did you learn something new?

Share a recording and questions

One of post-webinar drip campaign emails should include at least a link to the webinar recording, and that should go to all of the people who registered. Pro tip: segmentation will help make these emails more relevant. Just tweak the messaging a little for the different segments.

Another thing that I’ve done with post-webinar follow-ups is to type up and share any questions and answers that came up during the session. Initially, I did this all in one email: a link to the recording then a list of Q&As in the below it.

Then, later on, we created a landing page that had the video embedded, the Q&As and a registration form for the next webinar in the series.

Keep them in the loop about future webinars

Someone attending one of your webinars is a strong signal that they’re your target audience and that they’ll be keen to rock up for another one. Particularly if you’ve got some good feedback from them – you… you did ask for feedback? Right?

Capitalize on that strong signal. Keep them up to speed on future webinars and cross-sell to them by sending them invites – although don’t go the route of spamming them with notifications otherwise, you’ll quickly exhaust those positive vibes.

Trigger #5: Following up after events

Events can be a mixed bag when it comes to securing leads.

Often, after the chaos and exhaustion have worn off, it’s hard to remember who you spoke to. So, the leads that you do manage to get should be part of a lead nurturing process to reengage them after that all-important first meeting.

Introduce yourself and reengage

If you have a handful of business cards, making the personal connection via email (or Linkedin) post-event definitely works.

But if you’ve been on a roadshow and ended up with a fat stack of cards, you’re going to want to rely on some automation to make a dent.

Open up with an introduction, treat it almost like a cold email and don’t assume they remember anything about you. Try and remind them by mentioning what event you met. Give them a short and sweet summary: who you are and what benefit you can provide them. It’s the one thing great marketers do well: build relationships.

Your drip campaign timeline here really depends on so many variables.

For example, I am still receiving monthly follow-up emails from an IT services rep I met at an event 2 years ago. I don’t need his services at the moment, but you bet he’ll be the first guy I call when I do. 

Trigger #6: Not interested, yet

Any salesperson should expect to be told “no”. The more no’s you get, the closer you are to a yes, after all, so being turned down is all part of the process. But it shouldn’t have to be the end.

Build up rapport

Being rejected by a prospect often means the relationship wasn’t ready for them to take the leap. And that is absolutely fine.

It’s a perfect example of where harmony between sales and marketing can work wonders. If you’ve had to move a few steps back up the pipeline, marketing can step back in with a lead nurturing process that warms them back up with relevant content.

A “no” doesn’t mean the end of the road. So long as one person in the equation sees value in pursuing a relationship, then it’s not over. It’s on them to convince the other that the offering meets that need, and build rapport.

Trigger #7: Viewed a specific page on your website

Monitoring your visitors and leads with web visitor tracking is no longer some kind of marketing voodoo. It’s easy to set up, and if you make sure your web tracking tool logs data in your CRM, then your sales team will know which of your prospects are giving you a closer look.

Reinforce the benefits

If you can see they’ve viewed a page for a product or service that they offer, follow-up with something that really drives home the benefits of what they’ve just looked at. Break the benefits into digestible chunks, and then ask them if they want a demo of this particular thing.

Play with pricing

If you have a pricing page on your website, chances are it’s one of the most important and viewed pages on your entire site. If someone visits this page and then keeps looking at other pages, it’s pretty likely that they’ll be interested in parting with some cash.

Send a follow-up that outlines the benefits of a particular plan you offer, then if they don’t convert right away, send a follow-up offering them a discount on the price you shared, just to try and help them past the finish line.

Viewed a page: drip campaign example

Here’s a juicy example from the good folks over at Pipedrive: Whilst putting together this very article, I briefly viewed this page about sales lead generation on the Pipedrive blog.

Being a Pipedrive customer, they fired up their email big guns and sent me this to peruse at my leisure. Lovely stuff.

Onboarding new customers with drip email triggers

Congratulations! You’ve converted your lead into a customer. Time to kick back and let the money make itself. No. Not a bit. Now’s the time to make your drip campaign strategy work to keep on delighting them, now they’re a paying customer.

It is cheaper to retain or reactivate an existing customer than it is to get a new one, so if you’re going to pick a stage in the sales pipeline to focus all your love and attention, this is it.

Trigger #8: The welcome email

If you’re running a SaaS-type business, chances are you’re already using some sort of welcome email, for example when someone signs up for a free trial. But it’s not just software companies that can use this as an opportunity to engage customers.

If you’re selling widgets – physical or digital – sending a welcome email is a chance to present your brand and products. Agencies aren’t alone here, either. If you’ve automated your agency’s quotes, when a customer approves the quote, welcome them aboard and tell them what the next steps are.

Roll out the red carpet

Your welcome email needs to make the customer feel special and is a perfect time to work some creativity into your copy. Use some clever examples of how your product works, share your brand’s story and present your vision.

And don’t just leave it at “hello”. Check-in after a few days to see if they need a hand, ask them how they’re getting on or keep them up-to-date with the latest happenings. We’re also big fans of addressing key pain points with your onboarding emails, especially if your onboarding involves trial users.

Combine designed and plain emails

Everyone says that they prefer image-heavy, sexy emails, but, well the numbers say otherwise. There’s plenty of data that shows plain-text emails work better than designed emails. They feel more personal, more conversational.

That said, I totally understand the desire to use designed emails. They let you be more creative and showcase your brand’s visuals, which is important.

So, try A/B testing plain-text and designed messages to give both a professional and personal feeling. Then measure the click-through rates to see what works best for you. And only then look into optimization, based on results.

Welcome email: drip campaign example

The team at Segment, jump with joy when their customers connect. Bonus points for the animated gif. Nice.

This example lays what the next steps are the new users, as well as offers them the chance to schedule a call with one of the team. It’s concise, friendly and lets you know there are people on the other end – all the things we’re fond of at Outfunnel.

Drip email trigger #9: High activity

Social proof is one of the most effective ways to build trust and if you’re able to identify your most engaged, active customers, automatically reaching out to regular customers and asking them for some positive feedback is a great way of taking the manual labor out of the process.

Ask them for a review

Your most active customers – be it SaaS users, regular purchasers or consistently agency clients – are prime candidates for providing you with some solid social proof. By sending out an automated email that asks a client to leave you a review on an app marketplace, crowdsource software review site or even social media you’ll be able to cultivate some public positivity in no time.

And it’s not just positive feedback you should be on the lookout for. Your most regular customers are also good candidates to survey as they’re more likely to provide honest, actionable feedback, plus it’s a good opportunity to sound out potential roadmap plans.

Invite them to your affiliate program

Time and again, affiliate and referral programs have helped some of the biggest names in tech blow up in a relatively short space of time.

And, yes, there’s certainly a case that every one of your customers should be invited to your affiliate program (hint: they should), using high activity as a signal to pay special attention to a specific segment makes more sense than potentially wasting your time on someone who’s used you only a handful of times.

High activity: drip campaign examples

The guys and girls behind social media automation tool MeetEdgar invite you to step inside their inner circle, the Edgar HQ Facebook group.

Another neat tip here is that each of the 2 main paragraphs repeats the link to the focus content. One at the beginning and one at the end. Personally, I like to focus on a single link, distributed 3-4 times throughout the email copy, but this can be just as effective.

Cross-platform integration specialists, Zapier, send out this perfect example of asking for a review. Zapier knows what integrations you’ve used and, when you do, sends a targeted, plain-text email, asking for a review.

In this case, they can see you’ve used the Mailchimp integration and, you’ve guessed it, sends you a link asking you to leave a review on the Mailchimp Integrations Directory.

Drip Email Trigger #10: NPS or feedback score

While we’re on the subject of feedback, using the feedback itself to trigger an automated drip campaign of some sort is another way of both gather social proof and nipping potential problems in the bud.

And it’s not just the big boys that hunger for customer feedback. At Outfunnel, we send a “rate your experience” email whenever we support ticket has been closed.

Flag for follow-up

Negative feedback is a vital part of doing better in pretty much anything. What really matters though is how you respond to it. Using negative feedback as a trigger for an automated drip campaign is probably not the best way to go, but it should definitely be a trigger for action.

Using a neutral or negative score to trigger an automated follow-up is definitely a solid move. Ask your customers what you could do better or what they feel you’re missing and offer them the opportunity to speak to you directly, either on a call or by responding to an email.

NPS or similar feedback score metrics: drip campaign examples

Top tip: if you’re sending a survey, don’t send it from a noreply address. You’re literally asking for feedback after all.

In between Outfunnel and family, I’m a pretty avid gamer (feel free to hit me up in the comments if you want to connect on Steam, Xbox Live or wherever; always happy to meet a fellow gamer).

I get sent a lot of requests for feedback and the like, including one recently from Ubisoft.

Problem was, the survey was bugged on one of the questions, then, when I tried to report the issue by replying to the email, this is what I got back:

Not a great look.

Asking for feedback after a “bricks and mortar” store visit makes perfect sense and presents a great opportunity to gather actionable ideas.

Ussing triggered drip email marketing to deal with churn

Like it or not, customer churn is an inescapable reality of business. You simply can’t win them all, all of the time.

Using churn as a trigger for automated campaigns means you can, scalably, reintroduce yourself to customers who’ve gone dark and, potentially, understand why they left once they bid you farewell.

Drip Email Trigger #11: A period of inactivity

If a customer goes dark, don’t despair. It could be seasonal inactivity, a common headache for both SaaS and agency businesses.

Or maybe they’ve straight-up forgotten about you?

Well, now’s the time to say “Hello, nice to meet you for the first time again”.

Jog their memory

First step is to remind them who you are and how you can help them. Once you’ve got the reintroduction out of the way, take some time to highlight a few things that they’ve missed in their absence.

Got new features? Tell your customers why they should care. Restructured your pricing? If you’re saving your customer some money, show them how much. All of this will help you stay top of mind.

Don’t overdo it and be ready to move on

I’m a firm believer that there’s no point in clinging on to zombie accounts.

So, after a few attempts to reactivate them, be ready to close their account. Constantly spamming customers who haven’t taken the time to hit “Unsubscribe”, pleading with them to come back wastes your time and increases the chances of you ending up getting marked as spam.

We live in a post-GDPR world, so be fully prepared to purge their information from your database and let them know that you’ve done so because you value their privacy and data security (you do, right?).

Inactivity: drip campaign example

This example from MindMeister leans heavily on a reactivation incentive, then finishes on a reminder of what you can do with MindMeister

Drip email trigger #12: When they cancel their account, leave your platform or take their business elsewhere

Breaking up can be tough, but as in life, it’s an opportunity to learn something. An optimized exit survey can get you a response rate of around 10% so taking the time to craft your survey and ask the right questions is definitely worth it.

Be open-ended

In a past life, I worked for a large bank/credit card company and one of the first things we were taught was “never asked closed questions”. Asking a “closed” question gives the respondent the opportunity to say “no”.

By asking an open-ended question, like “Why did you leave?” is much more likely to get you a response than “Was there something we could have done better?” or a page of prefilled tick boxes.

Say goodbye

When you get the feedback you’re after, whether it’s viscerally tearing you to shreds or gently hinting that something might be amiss, thank them for it, it’s time to say goodbye. If they left because you’re missing a feature.

Goodbye: drip campaign example

Low open rates on your email lists are something that could prompt you to say goodbye. Here’s an example of a company being proactive when it comes to keeping their email list neat and tidy.

Framebridge noticed that their newsletters haven’t been opened for a while so, they took the step to preemptively say goodbye.

Testing out these drip email campaign triggers

Outfunnel already uses several of these triggers for our own automated email sequences. 

But several is not enough. We’re always experimenting with different email triggers. We’re also experimenting with segmenting our audiences and email drip campaign frequency (we recommend reading up on it, as it’s one of those topics that’s often shrouded in confusion and misleading information). 

Oh and if there any email drip campaign ideas or email drip campaign best practices that you think I’ve missed, be sure to let me know in the comments.

Pipedrive, Copper or HubSpot CRM customer? Make sure your drip emails are in sync with your CRM.

The Outfunnel vision is all about bringing sales and marketing closer together. Giving salespeople easier access to actionable info, and closing the feedback loop between the two disciplines.

With Outfunnel, you can:

• Connect your sales and marketing data, deeply and easily. For example, sync contact lists and share marketing engagement data automatically.
• Highlight sales-ready leads with Web tracking and Lead scoring.
• Use our simple email campaigns tool to create and send single and multi-stage email campaigns to recipients defined by your CRM filters.

Ready to try it out? Register for a 14-day Outfunnel trial, no credit card or other nonsense required.

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