Emails have been around longer than instant messages; social media ad websites indeed have taken for granted. Emails have made communication much easier across the globe. Most marketers' believe that, despite being upgraded by technological standards, marketing emails are still wunderkind for engagement, connection and reach, better than social media.
When it comes to B2B customer acquisition and retention, there is nothing better suited than a well-crafted marketing email. It can deliver two significant fronts of increasing traffic and generating leads which ultimately gets high ROI on marketing activities.
The number of email users is expected to reach 4.3 billion worldwide by 2022, which is more than half of people living o our planet now. Also, more than 70% of customers check their emails at least once a day.
Moreover, emails can deliver an average of 4400% ROI and is 40 times more effective at customer acquisition than social media. That is why around 90% of B2B marketers consider email as their primary marketing channel.
Therefore, if you were in doubt before, I am sure you are now convinced that email needs to be an essential part of your marketing practices for 2021. Especially when you are in the B2B market, it is better to keep emails professional.
Let's get to some best practices for the coming year!
1. Build & Clean Your List
To get the most out of email marketing, the first step is to have a clean email list of leads. You may need their names and contacts information that can get benefit from your products and services. Building the list is not enough; you have to keep it clean and updated.
A clean and updated list is required due to a variety of reasons. The most prominent one is that email lists naturally degrade by 22% every year due to staff turnover, abandoned domains, and uninterested recipients.
Moreover, sending emails to obsolete addresses can get you high bounce rates, and you may end up sending spam traps. This will also lead to customer complaints and low subscriptions. All of them will ultimately affect your sender score and deliverability rates which are critical to building for a strong reputation.
2. Segmentize Your Customers
After creating a worthy email list, it's time to segmentize it for personalization. The easiest and fastest way to dip your toes into the pool of personalization is to segmentize. Most marketers make a mistake to send the exact same message to every customer, even if it is personalized to some extent. However, this is a bad practice.
Experts recommend categorizing your email list into small groups based upon common traits such as location, designation or location. By this way, you are already personalizing your content for each segment even before you can add their details into the database.
Crafting your message around the pain points of your customers' can help you to a 31% higher open rates the non-segmented personalized emails along with 100% better click-through rates. Thus, the smaller the segment, the higher the customer values uplift.
3. Personalize Your Content
From the past few years, we rely on digital tools ad channels more thus expect a much higher level of personalization. Don't treat you, customers, as a faceless name as you will not get desired response by this. Every prospect wants to be treated unique and recognized as necessary, therefore put efforts into understanding their needs.
After collecting some basic details, including demographics, dig a little deeper to include more advanced data. This will help you to segmentize ad personalize your content. The more you personalize, the more chances are your message will resonate with your customers. There is much online reliable software to help you create brilliant content. You can also find your ideal prospect by targeting them based upon collected data.
4. Prioritize Subject Lines
"On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar." - said legendary advertising inspiration David Ogilvy.
The above quote is a holy prescription for your marketing email subject lines. The very first sentence in the preview panel decides whether to open an email or to delete it. That is why it is incredibly crucial to get your email a good subject line.
More than 45% of internet users decide to open an email just by reading the subject line, so it is beneficial to keep them precise and concise to your purpose. The practice is best fitted in B2B customer acquisition and achieves high ROI targets.
5. Précised Crafting
"How to write a good email: 1. Write your email. 2. Delete most of it. 3. Send." - Dan Munz
Everyone is busy with their priorities and have no time to read lengthy emails. If you still ramble on, you will miss the opportunity of desired return when your email gets opened. Hence, keep your text concise and to the point.
Most B2B marketers suggest that emails ranging from 50-150 words have a good response rate while 20 lines of text comprising roughly 200 words generate a high click-through rate. Thus, please stick to the point and do mention what is in it for them in the introduction.
6. Get Some Eye Candy
Emails with visuals have a high click-through rate while more than 60% of recipients like to read an email containing visuals, and only 35% like it to be textual. The reason is, humans are visually weird. Sophisticated marketers may not associate emails with visual content. However, they should because emails with visuals (images, videos & infographics) perform better than those without visuals.
7. Use Clear Call To Action
What is the use of all the above efforts if you miss to include an actionable CTA in your email? Don't forget to catch the lower hanging fruit that is a clear call to action. This strategy works best in B2B marketing.
Ideally, it is better to use low commitment CTAs with email invites ad landing pages. Keep them simple and easy to explore. Send the message In the benefit of your client instead of yours to grab their attention.
8. Nail The Follow-Up
B2B marketing is all about a strong follow up. Most marketers make a mistake of putting hands down and giving up too soon with their email efforts. You have to follow your emails consistently. Excellent and successful marketers already know that a strong follow up can increase the rate of responses as well.
You can find several automated email marketing gauges to make follow-ups easy for you. A significant follow-up email adds more value with every new message to keep them coming and add more worthy information with every new email.
Bottom line
"Where we always start is: What's the user's itch? What's their pain point that occurs frequently enough to build a habit around?" –Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Emails may be a traditional method of marketing; however, they are not over the hill. Marketing emails are still leading the charge; they just need time and targeted efforts to get the most out of them. Thus, please give them the respect they deserve and rip the fruit of success.