EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing has been around for a long time and is part of the digital marketing playbook. It’s still the preferred channel of communication for many individuals across countries and industries. And it’s relatively easy to measure the success of email campaigns which means you can easily evaluate and optimize your campaigns. But make sure you stay relevant to avoid ending up in a spam or junk filter.
GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION
All organizations operating within the European Union must comply with the GDPR legislation. This means that an organization can’t send marketing communication without having prior consent from the recipients. This has made email marketing slightly more challenging, but organizations use different digital marketing tactics to obtain consent from relevant subscribers. All organizations are required to keep proof of consent on file.
TYPES OF EMAILS
We generally talk about three different types of marketing emails. They all serve different purposes, but the critical thing here is to stay relevant for the subscriber at all times:
- Building relationships through emails
- Content emails
- Promotional emails
EMAIL MARKETING BEST PRACTICE TACTICS
Search the internet, and you’ll find a large number of articles with tips on how to manage email marketing. Some will provide advice on how to write subject lines. Others will suggest the best time to send those emails. Here we give you 10 hands-on and easy-to-implement B2B email marketing best practices that will help you grow your business.
PERSONALIZE EVERY EMAIL
Every email you send should have an element of personalization. The bare minimum includes the recipient’s name and organization or industry sector. You can include it in the body of the email or in the subject line – as long as it makes sense together with what you’re communicating. This will likely increase engagement with the campaign. It is also critical that the sender identifies themselves by including the sender’s name in the email body. Personalization possibilities are endless, but it depends on how granular an organization is willing to segment its contact list.
SEGMENT YOUR CONTACT LIST
Once contacts have subscribed to your list, you can segment them and thus enable targeting them with the right content through timely campaigns. Better segmentation increases the chances your contacts will take the actions you want them to with your emails. Most CRM and Marketing Automation tools provide comprehensive options for segmentation. Categories such as geography, persona, organization type, and industry are the most commonly used for optimizing email campaigns. You should segment both old and new contacts to stay as relevant as possible. Being relevant increases, the chances contacts will engage with you.
WRITE WITH THE BUYER’S JOURNEY IN MIND
Your subscribers will be at different stages in the buyer journey. B2B marketers know that most contacts won’t be ready to buy just yet. The content used for each stage of the buyer’s journey must be different if you want to achieve your objectives. And the objective should always be moving the contact closer to a sale. Content should always be sent out with a clear purpose and connected to the buyer’s journey.
ADDRESS THE INDIVIDUAL, NOT THE CROWD
It is not unusual that marketing emails, specifically the content and the written copy within the email, are written for a group of people rather than an individual. The sender may include the subscriber’s name, but the content has no personal feel. Writing campaign emails is hard. We recommend you always write the copy like you’re writing a personal email to a colleague. Not a group of people. Write it with the decision-maker or an influencer in mind to give the email a more personal feel.
USE MARKETING AUTOMATION
After you’ve done the segmentation, you should create rules within the segments. You can send automated emails to those subscribers by creating triggers by an activity. Email marketingand automation will help you qualify and nurture contacts into leads. And eventually sales. To help you get the best results, you must have good automation software to help you stay relevant and send the emails at the right time.
BE RIGOROUS WITH YOUR FOLLOW UP
Timing is vital when sending emails. It’s not unusual your marketing emails aren’t opened or acted upon. The reason is often that the email was delivered at a busy time. It’s rarely due to the quality and relevance of the content. One way to help this is by sending a short follow-up email to remind the contact of your email. Doing this can significantly improve the performance of your campaign. So, sending a reminder can reap huge benefits and increase your open and engagement rate.
LESS IS MORE WHEN DESIGNING YOUR EMAIL
Email design is crucial for the success of your campaign. And it’s easy to get this element wrong. Most experts recommend including only a few design elements and avoiding a complex email structure. Stick to the point, be concise and focus on the actual content. It’s easy for B2B marketers to forget their subscribers aren’t B2C subscribers. Clarity should be at the top of your mind when designing an email.
GET YOUR SUBSCRIBERS OUT OF THEIR INBOX
With the new privacy options enforced by Apple and others, it is critical your email has a clear CTA to get your subscribers out of the email and onto a web page. That will allow you to track their activity better. Don’t be afraid to repeat your CTA several times in each email. Keep the text in your emails short, possibly within blocks, and have clear CTAs to get your contacts onto a web page.
CLEAN YOUR LISTS REGULARLY
Design is essential, but if your emails aren’t being delivered, everything else is irrelevant. Did you know having a long list of subscribers who never open your emails can harm the success of your campaign? Remove inactive contacts, or check if they are interested in different content than what you’re currently sending them. Cleaning your list will increase your credibility on the global email servers and ensure those you’re sending to are actually interested in hearing from you.
TESTING 123
Testing is a critical part of every marketer’s to-do list. This is a way we can optimize and improve the performance of our campaigns. Sometimes even tiny changes to the wording or design can improve open rates, increase click-through rates. This can be the difference between a mediocre and a successful campaign. Picking one or two elements to test at a time will give you the best results.
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