When marketing teams find out sales teams have been writing and been sending out their own email marketing, it’s usually followed by groans of despair.
“Is it full of a bunch of typos?”
“I bet they used our brand in the incorrect possessive tense.”
“Did they just share a product update that’s not ready for prime time?”
Marketing will then dictate that all email must be created or approved by marketing first. Sounds straightforward on paper, and maybe it works for awhile. But invariably marketing teams get busy, no one wants to do it, yet sales’ need for new content continues. And there’s another problem that emerges too.
“These marketing emails are too polished. They don’t sound like me”
Polished emails can work fine when they’re coming in an HTML template and from a marketing email alias, but they look and feel awkward when you try to shoehorn that same approach into what is meant to be a personalized, 1:1 email.
If you’re not going to take the time to write templates one-to-one, then the middle ground I’ve found works is to build templates with personalized sections. Perhaps the first few sentences are customized to the individual lead, while the remainder of the message is stock content. Not as nice as a handwritten letter, but certainly more scalable.
The Basecamp guys have this concept of “Don’t scar on the first cut”. Don’t build policy because of one minor issue. Just because one sales email is a little rough around the edges doesn’t mean marketing needs to completely turn the process upside down.