3x CMO Shares Pennies-to-Profit Email Marketing Insights

Email marketing ROI is at the opposite end of the spectrum from set-it-and-forget-it automation. Personalization based on engagement metrics is the right place to start.

Are you getting results from your email marketing for just pennies on the dollar?

Join host Steve MacDonald as he delves into the world of email marketing with renowned expert Chip House. As a three-time B2B SaaS CMO and the CMO of Insightly, a leading marketing automation CRM tool, Chip brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table.

Chip House, 3x CMO & current CMO at Insighlty – Follow Chip on LinkedIn

In this interview, they explore successful email marketing strategies, the importance of measuring ROI, and the role of engagement metrics in campaign evaluation. Discover how to create quality content, build trust with your audience, and leverage post-click engagement for optimal results. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting out, this podcast will provide valuable insights to enhance your email marketing campaigns.

“I’ve heard marketing automation touted before as a time saver—just set it and forget it. But I think if you’re approaching marketing that way, you’re doing it wrong. You need to be looking at the engagement metrics at every area of the journey and using it to personalize more and more.” – Chip House

Read on to learn from all of Chip’s top email marketing insights.

Listen to the full podcast or watch it on YouTube.

Introduction to Chip House

Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone! We’re going to be talking about something that we probably all should know a lot more about: email marketing, deliverability, and the truth about open rates and clicks and just what we should be tracking, what we should know in order to make decisions, whether those are decisions for how do we set up more automation based on engagements, what we should be sending over to our BDR team. We’ve got Chip House on today.

And Chip is not only a three-time B2B SaaS CMO, but he is also the CMO of Insightly, a marketing automation CRM tool. And Chip, you’ve overseen the email team, the deliverability team, and so I think you’ve got a lot that we should probably be listening to here today.

Chip House: I hope so. I’ll try to shed a few kernels of wisdom if I can.

Measuring the ROI of email campaigns

Steve MacDonald: Well, then, let’s move a little bit out of the technical stuff. It’s just data that lets us make better decisions. When it comes down to measuring the ROI of our email campaigns, what are some of your thoughts in terms of what are the things that you prefer tracking and you like to track and how you like to make decisions when you put it all together?

What are your thoughts on that? What’s your point of view?

Chip House: We send a lot of emails ourselves, whether it’s for general nurtures for prospects that are visiting our website and engaging with or downloading our content, that type of thing. Or people that take it at trial. They go on a 14-day email journey that’s automated through our system.

We tend to look at every point in the journey and open rates and click rates. And I think that many marketers if they haven’t done that, should do that because since I’ve been at Insightly, which is only a year and a half or so, we’ve redone our trial email cadence twice after analyzing metrics and optimizing the content, partly because we’ve produced more content.

But we’ve also learned about what emails are working and what aren’t. And so it’s never static. It’s never static. And again, I lean on click rates heavily throughout the journey.

But then, secondarily, we also market to our customers, right? Generally, a customer will buy a CRM from us, and then we’ll market our marketing automation app to them, or Insightly service, which is our customer service application. Or AppConnect, which is our middleware integration tool.

And so we’re actually looking for clicks and engagement once they get to the website also to be the ultimate determination of: is this campaign working or not? And then we go even further, Steven, and go like any other channel. How many opportunities do I now have in the funnel from this campaign, and what’s the value of those opportunities?

And email is still amazingly low cost when you compare it to other channels, provided that you’ve done the work to build a strong list, and you’ve maintained strong hygiene, and you think about it like a valid channel rather than, hey, we’re going to do some email blasts. That phrase drives me crazy because it is not a blast. It should be thought about as a targeted campaign.

I think that mindset makes a difference.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah. And it’s interesting when you bring up the kind of ROI, the cost of email marketing. I mean, it’s relatively inexpensive, right? Yeah.

Chip House: Pennies, yeah.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah, exactly. And you control for all the deliverability and everything you’re talking about as a brand control.

A hundred percent what you’re saying. And what you’re asking your audience to engage in, and that’s the part that I think really needs – when you talked about you’ve been redeveloping the cadences and the content within the free trial sequences and things like that, it’s because I would imagine you’re trying to increase the value of the content.

So that it actually gets more clicks to get to the next stage in the trial process, right? And that’s iterative, right? That right there says it’s not a blast. It’s a campaign that’s developing a relationship, unfolding levels of value that you can provide that all of a sudden gets you out of a, Hey, we have a three-day weekend coming up. Let’s do a blast and let’s get some clicks, and let’s get some free signups.

And all those things have a role. Absolutely, for sure. But, one of the real values of a campaign or email service like Insightly, in the automation that you provide and what we all use, is how we are fostering relationships over time, especially in the B2B world.

Creating quality content to boost your campaigns

Steve MacDonald: So when you’re thinking about your content and the evergreen content that you create because of your role as a CMO of a SaaS company, but also the CMO of a marketing automation email marketing tool, what is your thought on the antithesis of blasts?

These campaigns and how you measure over time what you are doing and how you evaluate that. Because at the end of the day, you’re going to look back at the team and you’re going to say, we did some things well, we did some things that didn’t work as well. How are you evaluating that and then giving direction back to the team on what you then do in the future?

Chip House: Yeah, I mean, I think it varies depending on where somebody exists in your prospect funnel or versus your customer funnel, right? But generally, it’s not that dissimilar to how you would run a LinkedIn campaign, right? If you’re going to do a set of paid advertising, you target an audience, and the first set of communications and ads are probably going to be based on awareness, right?

Creation for that audience. Just the fact that you exist in positioning you as where you exist in the world, and then you’re providing more sort of benefit statements or thought leadership as they progress down the funnel. And once they start engaging with your content, that’s when you get truly trying to actually capture that lead or retarget them, that type of thing.

So, I mean, in an email sense, whether it’s a new business or it’s to an existing business, I think generally you’re doing it similarly, right? For an ad, or if we’re going to advertise our marketing automation products to our CRM customers, because, shockingly, some still don’t know that it exists.

Because frequency matters, but also how you say it matters. And so, the initial emails have to focus on awareness and high-level benefits and sort of competitive comparisons. Maybe objection removal. Why might they not choose you? And I think marketing is at least 50% education as part of the communication process, even before you get to the feature function, right?

Steve MacDonald: Those are really big words of wisdom that you’re saying there. Because we all want to think that if we just say we’ve got a better widget, people will buy, but they have to trust. They have to understand who you are. They want to believe, especially in the B2B world, that you are experts in the industry and you have a consultative sell that comes along with it.

Building trust with your audience

Steve MacDonald: These are all really important things, and that trust factor, that emotional factor, is extremely high in the world of B2B in terms of who you were going to be considering. Because most companies operate in an environment not unlike Insightly, where there’s a decent amount of competitors.

And sometimes, it can be very hard to differentiate between the different competitors. So the ones that have been helping and educating and adding value along the way, that’s proven to be meaningful, and that’s proven to get you into consideration when you weren’t.

It accelerates purchases, cross-sells purchases like you’ve been talking about that you’re doing. So I think that’s really wise, and I just wanted to kind of accentuate that point in the conversation here.

Chip House: Yeah. Thank you. And a piece of it, because you talk about trust and one of the biggest objections in the customer’s mind is, Okay, prove it to me.

And it’s like, what? What is an acceptable way to prove it to them? Show me some examples of people like me that you’ve helped. And so that’s why, again, campaign versus blast. Because in a campaign, I can talk to an industry, a persona, and I can talk to, here’s how we solved this problem for other CMOs.

Here’s how we’ve solved it for other manufacturing companies or solar companies. And that social proof is critical nowadays in a B2B world.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, the decision-making is, you’re helping customers frame, is this a problem? Is this a problem that I have? How have others dealt with this problem?

How have you helped people deal with that problem? Nobody wants to be in the boat alone, right? So, yeah, when you’re helping them, they want to know that they’re on a team that’s been there, done that with others like them, and helped them achieve success along the way.

But it is framing their problem up front. Helping them actually determine what is the problem. Is that something I need to worry about? So, justifying that this is a big enough problem that you need to pay some attention to it, and here’s some validation on that. Everything that you and I’ve now just been talking about is not a feature benefit.

Chip House: Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing about this structure, too, for marketing or selling something, is that it’s the same process you’d use to go raise money from some venture capitalists if you’re going to start a company, right? It’s like, why is this a problem? What is the problem?

Define the problem. Why is it a problem? Why do I need to solve it now? And then how am I going to solve it uniquely? It’s no different. It’s the same. It’s the same thing.

Steve MacDonald: Right. And if you think about it in any aspect of our lives, we want people that are helping us solve problems, that are good at what they do, that are experts at what you do, right?

If you’re having problems in your marriage, you may want to find somebody that’s been doing marriage counseling for a while. Right? I mean, if you apply that analogy to what we’re talking about here, then we’re far from open rates and deliverability here, but there’s a lot that makes an email marketing campaign successful, and hopefully, what people are taking away here today is, there’s a lot that goes into this in terms of establishing yourself as an expert and the understanding of your buyer personas and their pain points, and how you uniquely approach that if you miss that stage.

You’re probably not going to get good open rates. You’re not going to get good clicks, right? You’re not going to get people at the top of the funnel, the awareness stage, that is thinking, oh, you’re helping me frame my problems and what I need to be doing. And that’s first and foremost more important than any individual metrics because you have to get that campaign right.

Chip House: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I’m going to get geeky again just to dot an exclamation point. Because that, in effect, is what Google does when they decide what email to put in the inbox, right? They will actually cycle some emails. When it comes from a new IP, they’ll cycle it to the spam folder, and they’ll look for some percentage of the recipients to take it out and say, no, that should be in the inbox. I wanted that mail.

And so that’s another engagement metric that a lot of people don’t know about that sort of indicates, am I sending content that’s resonating with my users? Not only is that good marketing, it leads to good deliverability.

Takeaway metrics to know the campaign is working

Steve MacDonald: So, as a takeaway here, the value of the content that you’re sharing is way more important than the metrics because the metrics are a reflection of the value of your campaign.

Chip House: A million percent.

Steve MacDonald: But then when we get to the point where it’s like, okay, but we think we’re doing a good job, we can always do better. We’re iterating. We’ve got good quality content that’s going out.

I think one of the big takeaways that I have is from what you’re talking about here is that people going to the next step. In other words, clicking is one of the most important metrics that you’re looking at.

Certainly opens, but if you could prioritize, I don’t want to put words into your mouth. If you could kind of put into a priority of what you like when somebody’s coming to you and they’ve, on the team, they say, Hey, here’s the results of our campaign.

What’s the first thing you want to know? What’s the second thing? What’s the story you’re telling yourself that you need to know about judging that campaign as just kind of a wrap-up to what we’ve been talking about here?

Chip House: Sure. Yeah. I still look at unique open rates, and then I look at click rates in aggregate. And then sort of by content area, and after that, I’m off the email, and I’m onto where I sent them?

Then I’m evaluating the engagements of the landing page or the video, depending on, you might be sending them to a Vimeo link, and you can tell how much of the video was watched. And so you’re into a whole other system. So unique open rates clicks, I could survive on that as a marketer, I think

Steve MacDonald: Because, as marketers, we’re looking for ways to make our lives simpler, right? Because there just seems to be, with technology, there’s another thing we’ve got to pay attention to, right? Another thing that we’ve got complexity into our job. So that’s refreshing to hear that.

Best practices for metrics

Steve MacDonald: How much do you look at in terms of the post-click? Do you advocate assigning, like in a lead scoring system, greater value to somebody who ultimately goes to a landing page and maybe they go to a pricing page, or whether they’ve clicked on a demo link? Maybe they didn’t fill it out right, but they clicked.

There are these soft measures in terms of how they engage post-click that we should be looking at. Are those best practices, or what are your thoughts on some of them?

Chip House: Well, I think you have to make the decision as to what’s important to you. Is the person that clicked on the form but didn’t fill it out going to be worth your follow-up or not?

And that’s going to be between you and your sales team and whether or not it’s worth calling those people, right? But I think that’s the best way to determine that, and I think that’s another thing that’s not static. Because I think that changes over time depending on the lead volume you have or the economy you’re in.

And so I would generally say that what you’re talking about, about post-click engagement? I think it’s highly important, and tracking multiple pages on a website is important, and that certainly indicates somebody that’s been to the pricing page and then the CRM page on our website, and then read some blogs and then read some case studies.

That is a valuable person I want to engage with. Yes.

Steve MacDonald: May not have clicked on a demo link, or they may not have reached out to somebody yet, but you know by their actions, they’re digging in, and they’re looking for more. Yeah, absolutely.

Chip House: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I think the engagement shows that you’re doing a good job.

Steve MacDonald: Well, that’s fortunately like the post-click engagement. How reliable is that information? We’ve been talking about the reliability of opens and deliverability and things like that. How much can we trust on that post-click engagement when they’re going to our site?

Chip House: Well, I think you can trust it. It’s going to depend on what your Google Analytics setup is or what other tools you’re using. Again, a lot of people are moving towards content platforms that are where the content exists within a platform so that journeys of engagement can be tracked into the depths of the content.

And if you’re lucky enough to be paying for and using and getting value out of those tools, then you can get that data super easily, right? But a lot of us we’re struggling with converting legacy Google Analytics to GA four, which is not nearly as user-friendly as the old one.

And so if you have it configured and you understand how to get conversion set up correctly, I think it’s pretty reliable.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah. It’s reliable. So I think that the takeaway that I wanted to have here is that email marketing, the way that you track and measure, isn’t brain surgery. And there is a limited number of important metrics to track and help develop a lead scoring system and create automation off of those. I think that’s one of the biggest.

You run an automated marketing tool, right? And so one of the biggest things that I think you can do, but I’d love your point of view as we kind of wrap this up here, is we set a campaign and then we track engagement.

Enhancing campaigns with behavioral-based engagement

Steve MacDonald: But there are all kinds of automated trees that we can create off of that campaign based on what people did. So let’s say somebody clicked and opened up an ebook, right? And we know that they wanted to read that ebook. There might be a set of automation that we want to send to them, in particular, because we know they’re in our ICP, and we know that they took the time to click and view a specific piece of content.

Right. So, I guess you would call that advanced use, right? Where really it shouldn’t be, but we should be taking time to set up these automation trees and sequences off of our original campaigns as well.

Chip House: Well, I think you’re looking for behavioral-based engagement, right? So the behavior of not only opening an email but clicking on an email is an indication that something else should happen, right?

And so that’s the point of building a workflow or a journey, is that you’re trying to predict what you’re going to do if somebody takes that next step and indicates from the behavior that you should do X, Y, or Z. So a behavior could be they ignore you entirely. Right? After multiple emails and at some point, it should hit a dead end or an unsubscribe. But all cadences should have ended.

I’ve been the recipient of some email spam that seems like, when is this going to end? When is your cadence going to end? I’ve received 50 emails from you, but I’m a firm believer that if there’s not a heartbeat, you shouldn’t keep hammering on the door.

Hopefully, that’s helpful. But I think, yeah, pre-build the journeys, think through the flow. The behavioral engagement is a strong predictor of future behavior.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah, and I think that it points to where you need more content, where you can iterate on content, where you can extend content themes that you know are getting clicks, getting engagement.

And we always need a lot more focus and direction on what content’s working and what content isn’t. And we’re always looking for feedback on where we should be developing more and digging deeper.

Chip House: Agreed. Yeah, that was well said, actually, Steven.

Steve MacDonald: Well, maybe we’ll put that into a transcript somewhere.

Chip, thank you again for coming on and sharing here, because I think there is an agreement that it’s one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing. It’s not brain surgery, but it takes time and some thinking to get in, set it up right, set up the metrics, set up those behavior journeys that you’re talking about to get the most out of it, and that it would be a shame if we kind of got 30% of the value of what we could out of our marketing campaigns, where we could up that quite a bit more if we were using some of these flows and journeys and the metrics and the triggers in order to take advantage of all of that.

Is that a good takeaway?

Chip House: I think it’s a great takeaway. You know, I think I’ve heard marketing automation touted before as a time saver. Hey, you can just set it and forget it.

But I think if you’re approaching marketing that way, you’re doing it wrong. Because you could do that, but it’s not wise to do that. You need to be looking at the engagement metrics at every area of the journey and using it to personalize more and more.

Steve MacDonald: Yeah, that’s the way you’re going to get even better engagement, and you’re going to get into conversations. Well, thank you. As usual, it is always good to have you on and the conversation, and we’ll look for additional insights in the future.

Chip House: I appreciate it. Take care, Steven.

Next Steps

One of the things Chip stresses is that marketing is at least 50% about education and adding value to the industry over and above selling features. To learn more about efficiently creating the type of valuable content that educates, opens doors, and creates greater ROI from all angles, CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.