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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
One CTA in Email
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[00:00:00] Hey guys, Matt here, Marketing Manager at Exit5. I'm going to start doing this thing now. Every time I learn a cool B2B marketing lesson from Dave, Dan, or someone from the Exit 5 team, I'm going to do a short little episode like this and share my learning.
Think of it like showing how we make the sausage. I want to show you the behind the scenes learning that I'm getting so that you can learn and level up too. And if you like this format, I'm going to keep doing it. Okay, let's get into it. So this first lesson is around Email marketing in b2b. So the exit 5 team meets every Monday to discuss the things that we're working on and This past Monday we were discussing an email that Anna our ops person Was going to send out to our list to let them know that we've just opened up ticket sales for our upcoming event in Austin And Dave had some feedback for [00:01:00] that email that I thought was a great lesson every B2B marketer should know.
And it's that every marketing email excluding newsletters should only have one call to action. So for example, if your goal is to get people to buy tickets for your event in Austin, then that should be the only thing that you're asking them to do in that email. I thought this was a great lesson for B2B marketers because I feel like we have a tendency to put multiple links in an email or multiple asks or to talk about multiple different things that are somewhat related, but kind of unrelated and confusing.
I even see a lot of marketers use the PS part of the email, you know, at the bottom they'll say PS, Something, something, something. And they'll use that to actually bring up a different point. Even I used to do this when I first started at exit five. And I remember sending my emails to Dave for feedback and he was like, No, [00:02:00] the PS in the email, if you even need to use one at all, is there to reinforce the call to action, not take away from it.
So this was a great lesson by Dave, but I wanted to look into it deeper and understand why this is a better strategy to increase conversions on email. And I found a couple things. So the first thing is something called Hick's Law, which is an important concept for marketers. It states that the time it takes for an individual to make a decision increases with the number of choices.
So if you want someone to make a decision quickly on your ask, You need to reduce choices, which leads to the next psychological reason why one call to action works better, and it's something called decision fatigue, which we've all felt. It's why at the end of the day, it's hard to make decisions because your brain's overloaded, right?
The more [00:03:00] decisions people have to make, The more mentally exhausted they get, and the more mentally exhausted people are, the less likely they are to make a decision at all. So as marketers, we need to reduce decisions so that we can reduce fatigue. And increase decisions made by users. Okay. And the last thing that I found, there's so many reasons why this works better than multiple call to actions, but it's something called fogs behavioral model, which states that clear, simple prompts increase likelihood of action when combined with motivation and ease of execution.
So having one call to action. And having copy that compliments that one call to action is simple and clear. Therefore, it's more likely that the reader is going to take action. So more clarity leads to more action. [00:04:00] Cool. So now that you understand what the lesson is and why it works, let's quickly talk about how you put this into practice.
So first. Before you write any email, start by being crystal clear on the goal. So instead of just getting into writing and getting into a Google Doc, what's the goal of the email? You need to really stop and pause and think about that part. Because that's gonna inform the copy, and that's gonna inform the call to action.
Everything stems from there. So if you don't get that part right, your email's gonna suck. Well, the next thing is, how do you define a goal? Well, that's pretty easy, right? If the goal of the email is to sell tickets to Exit 5's event in Austin, then that's the goal, right? Yes, but also no. The goal in that case is to get people to click the link to the event landing page, [00:05:00] which the landing page's goal is then to get people to buy tickets.
So the goal of the email in that case is actually to get people to click the landing page. So in order to get people to do that, you need to make people aware of what the email is. But you also need to build enough intrigue and interest so that they want the details on the event, like the cost of the tickets, the venue, the speakers, etc.
You don't need to include that in the email. You just need to build interest and intrigue so that they want to find that stuff out. So you just have to fulfill the goal of getting them to click that link to get more information. That's the goal of the email in this case. Okay. I hope that you like this podcast format.
If you do email us, let us know. Uh, you could DM me on LinkedIn or the community. You can share it on LinkedIn. I don't know, whatever you want, but let me know you like it so that I can keep doing it. All right. See ya.
[00:06:00]