7 ways to improve your B2B email marketing
Is your business maximizing the power of e-mail marketing – or are you still underestimating the most powerful medium of today? Many companies miss opportunities that are referred to as the “undisputed king of B2B marketing”. Meanwhile, other companies are making incredible marketing profits thanks to their well-designed, multi-layered email programs, which typically include a variety of email types.
Here are just a few statistics about the power of B2B e-mail marketing today:
E-mail marketing , according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), provides $ 40 in revenue per dollar spent.
According to Campaign Monitor, businesses are six times more likely to click one email than a tweet.
According to McKinsey, the email is 40 times more effective at attracting new customers than Facebook or Twitter .
Over 72 percent of people prefer promotional content via email, compared to 17 percent who prefer social media, according to MarketingSherpa.
With these benefits, companies use emails to achieve many goals that cover the entire range of the buyer’s travel, such as:
- Better lead generation. According to a survey using 87 percent of B2B marketers e-mails to new lead generating s.
- More effective lead care. According to 73 percent of survey respondents, email is the leading channel for Lead s.
- Increased engagement of subscribers. A study found that 34 percent of businesses state that e-mail marketing is the top priority for subscriber engagement.
- Revenue generation. A survey found that 31 percent of B2B marketers refer to email marketing as the channel that has the biggest impact on sales.
Achieving these and other business goals requires a common e-mail goal: to attract and retain buyers’ attention. This means creating e-mails that directly address the vulnerabilities, needs and ideal solutions of those who are interested.
1. Welcome emails
Welcome emails are typically the first email a lead receives from a company, usually after subscribing to a blog or newsletter, or signing up for a free online class or lesson. Rather than just send a bland impersonal email – or, worse yet, not send a welcome email – why not take the opportunity to deliver a more meaningful message?
The first impression counts, and welcome emails are the perfect opportunity to make a good impression. In addition, respondents’ response to your welcome email may add important behavioral profile information that you can use to conduct behavioral email marketing .
Here are some ideas on how to make the most of your welcome emails.
- Use the right tone. Welcome emails should be as warm and inviting as you would be if someone would greet you in your office.
- Introduce the company. Start building a strong, informal relationship right from the start.
- Offer added value. Welcome emails do not just have to provide a welcome message. You can add value, such as links to customer service, social media sites, and relevant whitepapers or eBooks. All these options help you to build and deepen your relationships.
2. Thank you emails
Not only should you welcome new contacts in your business, but you should also remember to say thank you at every opportunity. Thanks emails show courtesy and appreciation for your lead s and prospects. A typical reason to send a thank-you email is to download content such as whitepapers, success stories, and ebooks. This can also have the added benefit of giving you insight into behavioral email marketing by incorporating more action into your prospect profiles.
Here are ideas to make the most of your thank-you e-mails.
- Send a message every time someone performs an action on your site. Thanks E-mails should not be a “nice to have” aspect of your e-mail program. They should be standard features that are used generously.
- Consider using plain text. When you use emails in plain text, HTML-based templates become more authentic and serious.
- Add a link to the content. Even if your system contains an automatic download of your documents, you should also include a link in the e-mail. This will accomplish some goals, including the ability to give your lead s a second opportunity if they forget to download the document for the first time. It also gives them an easy way to share the email and link it with others.
3. Newsletter emails
Newsletters are ideal vehicles to reach different marketing goals. This includes engaging with potential customers, sharing company news, building a larger brand awareness, and building relationships with people who are interested in what you sell. Your clicks on your newsletter give you important insights into your behavioral profile.
Here are some ideas on how to get the most out of your newsletter emails.
- Think short. Ideally, the content of your newsletter should consist of digestible pieces that contain long blocks of text. The short bites may contain links to more information on your website. To break up your messages and make them more readable, add pictures, headlines, subheadings, and bullets.
- Think simple. Have you ever opened an overloaded newsletter email, feeling overwhelmed, and just given up? This should not happen with your emails. To avoid this disaster, keep your design as lean and clean as possible. Use basic fonts. Use only a few colors. And keep the layout simple.
- Think value. It makes no sense, your Lead s, prospects and customers an e-mail newsletter to send when you do not have something interesting and valuable to say. Every tidbit of information in your e-newsletter should have a common value, such as giving your subscribers something unique about your business, business, or industry.
4. Promotional e-mails
Promotional e-mails are usually the driving force of companies on their way to new revenue because they provide prospects with direct product and service offerings that lead them to a purchase. Use promotional e-mails, if you a concrete offer for your every time Lead have s, prospects and customers. Promotional emails do not require much explanation; All you have to do is explain the deal and let prospects know how they can redeem the offer.
Find ideas on how to make the most of your promotional emails.
- Make your offer crystal clear. People usually give each email just a few seconds before ignoring, deleting, or taking action. So use this time with a clear and direct offer. Add a descriptive headline, a relevant image or graphic, and a button or link. If you need to add some text, make it short and put it to the point.
- Submit the offer in the subject line. The subject line decides on success or failure. Be sure to tell your customers that you have something new and valuable for them that they should look at.
- Create a sense of urgency. Your potential customers tend to leave your promotional emails in their inboxes, unless you give them a reason to act quickly, such as: B. a deadline.
5. Visual emails
An increasing number of companies are achieving their marketing goals through an educational approach (or inbound marketing), including online courses, lessons and tips. The purpose of educational emails is your Lead to convey s and prospects valuable industry knowledge to your company or product. This method of outreach helps lead to win s and strengthens relationships and trust. For example, the job search site Monster.de sends useful information about life at work.
Here are some ideas on how to get the most out of your educational emails.
- Brainstorming. Your educational emails must deliver real value while building your corporate brand. So, before you start an educational email series, dig deep to create something that is both valuable and different from your competitors.
- Provide content in manageable steps. As with other forms of content marketing, educational tools should be broken up into small, manageable chunks. If you have a lesson that is long and detailed, think about how you could divide it into smaller lessons.
- Add a (friendly) advertisement. Although your educational emails are free, they can help you sell products or services from companies. For example, you can include links to web pages containing products, services, or memberships.
6. Testimonial emails
Properly done, Testimonial emails can be among the most powerful emails in your repertoire, as they bring customer feedback to the value of your business or product.
Find ideas on how to get the most out of your testimonial emails.
- Create a simple design. The goal is to be eye-catching and easy to read, so that your emails will stand out from other emails that fill your potential customers’ inbox.
Represent customer quotes of happy customers prominently. People love to hear what others have to say about a company. - Add a picture. No matter what you sell, pictures are strong. The most effective images in testimonial emails are photos of the talking people. If that does not work, look for the most interesting image you can find to tell your client’s story.
- Offer more information. A testimonial is great, but you should also offer your customers a next step. A good idea is to add a link to more testimonials. You can also link to interesting company news or a demo offer.
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7. Poll emails
Surveys are becoming more and more a part of many companies’ marketing programs. This is not surprising, because they can provide incredible insights. Businesses have the opportunity to gather helpful information to enhance their customer experience, products, and marketing.
Here are some ideas on how to get the most out of your survey emails.
- Explain the purpose of the survey. One way to increase participation is to explain to prospects and customers why you want the information and why they are valuable to participation. Examples include: better understanding of the market, developing products that others need, and improving current products to better serve customers’ needs.
- Ask the right questions. Make sure the questions you ask provide helpful results. Stay tuned and reformulate questions as needed to make sure they are understandable.
- Offer incentives. Some companies offer a variety of rewards for conducting their surveys. This can significantly increase participation. Typical rewards include gift cards from Amazon or Starbucks, an action discount, or a copy of the finished report.
According to several studies, e-mail is today the most powerful form of marketing for the entire range of the buyer’s journey – from lead generation to customer care to sales and customer loyalty. If you have not already done so, consider expanding your email repertoire with a wider variety of email types so you can maximize your marketing program and get the many benefits.
- Create a simple design. The goal is to be eye-catching and easy to read, so that your emails will stand out from other emails that fill your potential customers’ inbox.
Emojis in email marketing? Can this work?
To anticipate one thing: yes, it works, and how! Last year, emojis usage in email campaigns increased by 775 percent, compared to trigger mails by as much as 7000 percent¹. Two percent of all subject lines now contain emojis or special characters². Emojis are no longer only at home in private communication, but are also finding their place in e-mail marketing . But how are they used properly and what benefit do they have for communication?
What are emojis anyway❓
Emojis were invented in 1999 by the Japanese Shigetaka Kurita and are Unicode-based pictograms. These differ significantly from the emoticons introduced in 1982, which typographically represent facial expressions and can be used in text-based formats only. Originally, these were invented to distinguish between jokes and serious remarks in a digital language. In 2015, Oxford University Press voted the Emoji “(Face with Tears of Joy) Word of the Year due to its increased use and development into a nuanced form of expression .
Remember:
Emoji = ? ? ?
Emoticon =; -)
Why the use makes sense
“Anything that does not trigger emotions is worthless to our brains,” says German marketing expert and brain researcher. Hans-Georg Häusel. And that is also what we are trying to do in marketing everyday: to arouse emotions and to arouse enthusiasm for our products. Emojis are a great way to express emotions on the one hand and trigger the same on the other hand. Because in addition to being able to highlight a topic, emojis in a subject line also humor, cheerfulness and creativity can be transported. Branded emojis can also be effective. If you have Emojis developed for your brand, for example, you can use this logo in the subject line replace and now go other ways. These then offer themselves in other forms of communication for use and increase the recognition value of your brand.
The context matters
Just because emojis arrive well does not mean that they also offer themselves at every opportunity. Especially with serious messages should be more likely to refrain from a use. It is also important to know your target group. If the messages are aimed at a young group of recipients with many millenials, emojis will certainly work better than other groups. Also temporally or seasonally there are differences. A Santa Claus can certainly help in the winter to improve the opening rates. Whether this also works in the summer, however, is questionable.
How are emojis integrated into an e-mail? ?
In fact, nothing is easier than that. From databases such as getemoji , emojipedia , or facebook symbols , the glyphs can be easily selected via copy and paste and pasted into the subject line. The use is theoretically nothing in the way.
Pay attention to the compatibility with e-mail clients
Before you send emojis, you should check which operating systems and email clients your recipients are using. For not all support the icons. Among the common operating systems, Windows 7 is an exception in particular, as no support is provided. Among the clients, Outlook 2003 takes a special position. With a few exceptions, however, there is almost universal support for emojis.
A / B tests are also indispensable for Emojis
As with other e-mail campaigns, you should take advantage of e-mail marketing: memorability. Again, use A / B or multivariate testing when sending to the entire group of recipients to find out which subject lines are working best and what will give your users the best opening rate.
Internal communication can also be enriched
Emojis can be enriching not only for communication with your customers, but also for internal purposes. Emojis and emoticons, especially on critical content news, have a positive impact and improve work performance, according to the study ” The Effects of Different Emoticons on the Perception of Emails in the Workplace “. Emoticons can weaken negative associations on a personal level, change the perception of the recipient and thus contribute to a better working atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is important to always use positive and happy signs.
Wrap-Up
Emojis have also found their way into marketing and ‘serious’ communication. They are a great way to convey emotions, humor, and creativity and to stand out from the crowd. Furthermore, branded emojis can be an additional unique selling point of your brand. But here, too, it is important to know the target group and to use the pictograms in the right context. Ultimately, however, as with any good email campaign. Test to see what works best for your audience.
? + ? ➡ ? = ?
Source: Appboy
² Source: Salesforce
Case Study: 575 percent uplift through multivariate testing at RTL Interactive
As already mentioned, testing is one of the most important success factors in email marketing. In a comprehensive case study we show how RTL Interactive achieved a result of 575 percent through multivariate testing of an e-mail marketing campaign.
5 Errors to avoid in your email marketing strategies
The email marketing is one of the most powerful available to us today to reach consumers in a more direct way and offer our products or services tools. However, planning this type of strategy is not easy and there are many mistakes we can make that can end up ruining our campaign, making the conversion rate is not what we expected.
Keep in mind that users receive many emails daily in their inbox and if we do not want our message to end up in the trash bin without even opening it, we must be creative and know how to call their attention to obtain a good return on investment. . Therefore, today we bring you some of the most frequent mistakes that are often made in email marketing strategies so you can avoid them.
DO NOT SEND ADVERTISING ABOUT PRODUCTS THAT YOU HAVE ALREADY PURCHASED
One of the most common mistakes in email marketing strategies is to make a generic campaign with a product and send it to all customers who have already bought us. Check your database well and do not send emails to users with products they have already purchased, especially if it is an offer with a considerable discount.
DO NOT SEND OFFERS THAT ARE NOT SHOWN ON THE WEB
Do not promise things that do not exist, since this bothers users a lot. If you enter the web in search of the offer that you have shown them and then do not find it or the conditions are different from what they seemed to be, you will only damage your corporate image and the campaign will fall on deaf ears.
DO NOT SEND PROMOTIONS THAT ARE NOT ACTIVE
Many times companies program emails to be sent before the date it ends. The problem is that if we do it too soon to create expansion, we must do it very carefully and with a lot of left hand. And there is nothing more frustrating for consumers than clicking on an offer and that the page gives an error because it has not yet been created or that the offer is no longer active because stocks have run out. With this, not only will it not be useful, but you will also be able to burn the users and may not open up your emails in the future.
BE CONFUSED OR LITTLE TRANSPARENT
Many times information is omitted or it seems that what is advertised is something else to make the offer look more attractive, but playing catch-up and confusion will only cause consumers to perceive your brand in a negative way. Simplify things and be transparent in the information you give so as not to mislead consumers and end up disappointed when they come across reality.
SEND ONLY INTERESTING CONTENT
It does not make any sense to send emails that do not fit with the tastes, preferences or circumstances of the person who receives them. For example, sending makeup offers to men is much less effective than sending them to women. Also, you will be bothering him with advertising that he does not want to see. Segment the audience well and create personalized messages with content that may really interest you so that your conversion rate is higher.
