Emails have always proved themselves as one of the strongest assets of B2B marketers. Despite emails being amid constant conversations around their efficacy, marketers have used them to communicate with their current and existing buyers.
However, the email game has always challenged beginners with these questions:
- Is email marketing really effective?
- How do I begin with email marketing?
- What steps should I follow to align my email marketing techniques with the goals of my organization?
- What if my emails land in the spam folders of my potential buyers?
To answer these questions and to give beginner marketers confidence, guidance, and a way forward with email marketing, below are the five expert techniques that will assist you in your email marketing journey.
Emails do work!
Let’s take a look at the stats (source: HubSpot) establishing the fact that emails do work effectively for marketers and businesses of all sizes.
- There are 3.9 billion daily email users.
- 78 percent of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.
- 80 percent of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention.
Emails have a bright future, say experts
- There are 3.9 billion daily email users and the number is expected to climb to 4.3 billion by 2023 (Source: Statista, 2020).
- Marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760 percent increase in revenue. (Source: Campaign Monitor, 2019).
- 81 percent of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
Here are five effective techniques and steps that can help you build better and desired email marketing campaigns:
Technique 1: Build your list
Determine target segments
The first step to build your email marketing strategy is to build your email list, which begins with understanding your potential buyers. Identify the most significant buyers for your products. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is the purpose of my email marketing campaigns?
- Who is my target audience?
- What are their pain points?
- Does my product address these pain points?
Once you have the answers to the above questions, define your target audience in segments. Understand certain criteria that can help them make a buying decision such as:
- Their age groups
- Their geographical locations
- Their buying journeys
Embedding all the above information, you can start building and categorizing your email list.
Follow email marketing laws and data regulations
It is equally critical to consider the email marketing laws and data-related regulations as building an email list.
There is certain data regulation across the globe such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM laws and various others that regulate data usage and consumption. Ensure that all the data you have gathered in your email lists is permission-based and complies with the local and global data regulations.
Technique 2: Invest in the right content
Once the list is ready, building the right content and deploying it the right way is requisite. Here are a few steps to follow when doing this:
Step 1: Don’t start selling right away
That’s the thump rule for B2B marketers! One key to successful B2B email marketing is that you need to sell without being too salesy. Your initial emails to your target segments should work as an introduction to your brand rather than as a sales pitch.
Tell your recipients about your brand, how it started, its common ethos, and then introduce your products or services subtly in your content.
Step 2: Provide information, instill credibility
Let’s accept that your potential buyers want to deal with the experts in the industry. They want to ensure that the person sending them emails knows how to address their points and understands the industry scenarios.
Add stats with sources to provide credible information. This will help your messages reach the buyers and convince them effectively.
Many B2B and B2C brands are moving towards newsletter emails that work as a wholesome communication package for them: tells them what’s new, establish them as thought leaders, target new customers, and strengthen existing partnerships.
Here are a few ways to make your email newsletter work:
- Mention new awards, recognitions that your brand received recently
- Add link and crisp promos of thought leadership pieces and videos that are there on your company website
- Give a theme to your newsletters, such as inclusion and diversity, strengthening partnerships, etc.
- Add a column with CTA about the upcoming events, such as webinars, conferences, and roundtable
Step 4: Personalize it
Which one of the above email lines would appeal to you the most?
A personalized touch would always take you ahead if you do it right. Of course, don’t go overboard as that might take your email to the spam folders of your target buyers.
Step 5: Email automation
Automation adds ease to your email marketing campaigns. It helps you automate feedback requests, send customized offers to high-spending buyers and send engagement campaign emails to inactive leads.
As email automation reduces manual tasks, it allows you to reduce cost flows too.
Step 6: Don’t overdo it
Too many sales emails from any brand would upset the recipients. Nobody wants their email folders to get swamped with such emails very frequently.
Keep your buyer’s buying journeys, preferences, segments, and pain points at the core, and send email messages accordingly. Choose what suits them the most – emails that are sent weekly, bi-weekly or monthly.
Step 7: Leverage an email service provider
Email service providers (ESPs) can handle the large volume of emails that you wish to send so that you can focus on other core aspects of your business. They can:
- Help you manage your customer relationship management (CRM) data
- Assist you in tracking your emails
- Help you personalize your emails
- Provide customized HTML designs to your emails
- Help you automate your email campaigns
Technique 3: Grow your list with a lead magnet
Only building your email list is not sufficient, you need to keep growing and refining it.
Sometimes, B2B marketers consider their inactive leads and dead leads and tend to remove them. However, it is always better to tap these inactive leads before removing them.
Lead magnets work as a powerful asset to tap them. These lead magnets also work wonders when it comes to customer retention and acquiring new customers.
A lead magnet is a free service or product that is given to potential customers to collect their contact details.
Lead magnets could be:
- Trial subscriptions
- Email newsletters
- White papers
- Thought leadership papers
- Latest industry research
- Product samples
- Free consultations
You can leverage these lead magnets to gather the contact details of your target audience and grow your list.
Technique 4: Improve your email open rates
Has it ever happened to you that even with the smartest and well-researched email campaign, you miss achieving the desired outcomes?
Despite having the expert sales and marketing teams in-house, applying all the possible data and metrics, you fail to improve your email open rates? If yes, here are a few key areas you should focus on:
Don’t let your emails land into spam folders
Your emails might be landing into the spam folders of your prospects, which might be the reason they are not being opened. To avoid this situation, you should:
- Always ask permission to send emails
- Focus on the spam filter words when writing subject lines – use a spam checking tool
- Keep your emails and the content in complete compliance with data regulatory laws and regulations
- Don’t send too many emails – start with a low frequency and volume
- Keep your contact database updated
- Proofread your emails – check spellings of your buyers’ names, their email addresses
- Don’t send deceptive subject lines
A/B tests
This practice will help not only help you avoid your emails getting spammed, but will also improve the email open rates. Run precise A/B tests on your email campaigns – test the subject lines, email addresses, length of the content, and personalization factor in the content.
Mobile optimization
As per the data pulled by HubSpot, 35 percent of business professionals check emails on a mobile device.
Make sure that your emails are well optimized for mobiles so that you never miss an opportunity to connect with your most potential buyers.
Technique 5: Analyze, improve and repeat
Building a robust email marketing campaign and rolling it out strategically is not enough for the long-term gains of a successful email campaign. Marketers need to analyze the outcomes of their email campaign:
- Did it serve its purpose? If yes, to what extent?
- How many new customers were acquired?
- What is the new data about existing customers?
- Did it help increase brand loyalty among customers?
- What are the improvement areas found?
- Which target segment gave the least response to emails?
- How did their buying journeys proceed?
Based on the above analysis, bring in substantial improvements in your next email campaigns.
Gloria Hayes is a content and marketing strategist having 6+ experience at APAC Leads (https://www.apacleads.com/). She is passionate about covering topics like lifestyle, marketing, start-ups, and entrepreneurship.
