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Email marketing is the most influential source of information for B2B audiences. That’s not surprising considering within the first 15 minutes of waking up, 4 out of 5 smartphone users check their phones before doing anything else.
Yet while the average professional has more than 200 emails in their inbox and receives 120 new ones each day, only 25% of those emails gets a response.
How do you cut through the noise? It all comes down to being engaging – with the right message, the right audience, at the right time. Here are four tips to create a winning B2B email marketing strategy.
Build your audience – the right way.
While purchased lists have their benefits, more often than not they can lead to more hassle than they are worth – driving up bounce rates and filling your list with disengaged, uninterested users. Instead, grow your email lists the old-fashioned way. Offer great content, connect digitally and include a sign-up form on your website. Don’t ask for more information than you need, and offer incentives for signing up.
Once subscribed, set expectations and build trust right away. Send a welcome email to all new subscribers with information on what to expect from your emails, how often they can expect them and the benefits of being a subscriber.
Clean up your email lists.
Beyond actively recruiting new subscribers, scrub your lists of people who are disengaged. Set up a simple reengagement campaign asking users if they still want to receive your emails. If those are ignored, it’s time to delete. Dead subscribers hurt your numbers and limit what you can learn from a campaign. The good news: you can always add a subscriber back in the list at a later date.
Write a killer subject line.
Subject lines are the most important factor for getting emails opened. Personalize your subject lines with subscribers’ names, use emojis (when relevant), add urgency and keep them short and sweet – ideally between six and 10 words to avoid being cut off.
You’ll also want to A/B test your subject lines, sending two sample groups two different subject lines. Let the emails sit for 24 hours and then whichever one performs the best is your winner. You can then send the remaining subscribers the email with the winning subject line.
A/B testing is also a great strategy for testing various images, content, messaging and email layouts.
Segment your targets.
According to DMA, marketers have attributed a whopping 760% increase in revenue to segmented email campaigns. At the very basic level this means segmenting your active versus inactive subscribers. But given that not all subscribers are going to engage with the same types of content, it’s also smart to segment subscribers based on where they fall in the sales funnel, geographic location, demographics, psychographics, vertical and behaviors. The best way to get this type of data is by surveying email subscribers and cleaning up your email lists.
Implemented together, these recommendations will measurably improve email marketing performance and ensure you are reaching the right people, at the right time, with exactly the content they are looking for.
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