Are you struggling with understanding the value that email marketing can bring to your business? Are you confused with the plethora of marketing jargon out there? Or are you simply looking for strategies to do a successful B2B email marketing with your customers?
In this article we will try to answer precisely these questions, so read on to know more…
HOW TO GET STARTED WITH B2B EMAIL MARKETING?
As a business, you have probably already discovered that without a good marketing campaign even the best product or service is doomed to fail. You can have the best service offering, which can save your B2B customers plenty of time and effort, but if they have never heard about your company, chances are your sales will not go through the roof any time soon.
It is therefore important to know who your customers are, what their needs are, and what their typical customer journey is, to be able to deliver a personalized marketing experience and content. And although adopting a multi-channel marketing approach is a must, email is still a primary method to reach your customers and is as effective as ever in delivering a truly customized experience and converting customers.
A study shows that email marketing is still the second channel used by marketers to interact with their prospects and customers.
So let’s recap:
- There are multiple marketing channels a business can use: social, email, mobile, display, ads,…
- Email is still one of the most relevant and effective marketing strategies
- Email is estimated to be 40 times more effective in acquiring customers than social media
BUT WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?
Before we dive any further, it is important to remove some anticipated confusion and explain the difference between email marketing and marketing automation. These two are often confused and rightly so: they just sound so similar, don’t they?
So let’s start with a basic definition:
- Marketing automation is a technology that allows you to automate your marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including email, and interact with your customers and prospects
- Email marketing is only one aspect of marketing automation, whereby you use a tool to send emails in bulk, track open rates, click rates, replies, and run subsequent reports
Email marketing should be central in your B2B marketing strategy as it is the easiest way to get to know your customer, collect data about their behavior, interests, engagement patterns, etc.
SO, WHERE DO WE BEGIN?
GET YOUR CUSTOMERS’ OPT-IN
The first thing to do to get started with email marketing is to get your customers’ opt-in, i.e. customers should give you their permission to receive emails from you. This means that they are in a way agreeing to start a relationship with your brand or with the product or service you provide.
As a business, you should avoid sending unsolicited emails or spams that have not been agreed on by the recipient. This is the fasted way to get blacklisted by your contacts and lose any opportunity to develop a long-term relationship with them.
Therefore, avoid sending junk and spam emails to lists that you have purchased for example, as these do not constitute lists of customers who have granted you their express permission to solicit them. Instead, focus on creating your own lists with subscribers who have opted-in. Yes, it sounds time-consuming and even daunting. It will take time to create a long and healthy list, but the patient always pays off, and in this case, this is even more relevant.
COMPLY WITH LEGAL GUIDELINES
Furthermore, you should comply with legal compliance guidelines. For example, in the US the CAN-SPAM guidelines stipulate that:
- You shouldn’t use false or misleading information
- You shouldn’t use deceptive subject lines
- You should disclose that your message is an ad
- You should communicate on your location
- You should tell recipients how to opt-out of the communication
- You should honor opt-out requests in a prompt manner
- You should monitor what your sub-contractors are doing on your behalf (e.g., the email marketing agency you have hired), as you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law
In Europe, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive defines the means of gaining permission to send email marketing, and they are the following two:
- With consent
- To existing customers or those in negotiation for a sale or service
Now that we have briefly covered the importance of complying with legal rules, let’s have a look at how to establish your audience. This is a very important step as after that you will be able to create personalized and customized marketing communication, which is the key to a successful B2B email marketing campaign.
WHO IS MY B2B AUDIENCE?
It may seem quite obvious, but identifying the right audience is crucial. Ask yourself questions such as: “Who within my target company will be interested to read this email?”, “Which department/business unit am I targetting with this email”, or ‘What problem can my product or service alleviate?. Once you have the answer to these questions, you will be able to segment your customers or prospects to ensure you get the right message to the right person.
A recent report shows that top B2B marketers are 2.9 times more likely to extensively use segmentation. Furthermore, according to the same report, 60% of B2B markets say they have been more focused on improving audience segmentation and personas over the past 18 months.
Segmenting can ultimately help you maximize your return on investment (ROI), because you can have a more targetted approach, increasing the chance of reaching out to the right person with a messaging that will resonate.
So let’s hope this serves as an incentive for you to dive a bit deeper into the importance of audience segmentation.
WHAT ARE SOME WAYS TO SEGMENT MY AUDIENCE?
Segmentation is necessary as it allows you to create more targetted lists. You will then be able to target your customers or prospects with a more relevant, specific, and timely manner, to get their attention and incentivize them to interact with your message.
There are many ways, in which you can segment your audience. Some examples are:
- Behavior patterns: what are they clicking on?
- Interests: what interested have they shared with you when creating their profile/signing up to your newsletter?
- Purchase history: what have they bought recently?
- Channel preferences: are they using more your website, email, social media pages? Or maybe they are viewing your content mostly on their mobile phone?
- Interaction: are they active users or not?
- Email behavior: have they opened your email? Have they clicked on your Call-T0-Action (CTA)?
- Gender
- Age group
- Location
What is important to remember is that you can always change your segmentation criteria, based on the data you collect. However, it is crucial to have a lot of data, which will allow you to identify patterns and tailor your messages accordingly.
HOW TO CREATE A PERSONALIZED EMAIL?
The next step would be to personalize your email. A recent report shows that 65 percent of B2B buyers are likely to switch brands if a vendor does not personalize communication to their company. As we mentioned above, personalized and tailored content is key to successful email marketing. Furthermore, segmentation can allow you to be even more effective, as you can base your communication on, for example, the subscriber’s past purchase.
So how do you personalize your email? It is very simple: you can use dynamic content or variable tags.
DYNAMIC CONTENT IN AN EMAIL
A variable tag is simply a bit of code that you can be added to an email, which pulls content from customers’ records and creates thus a more personalized messaging. The possibilities for personalization are illimited and will depend on the level of data you have gathered throughout your interaction with your customers or prospects.
Some examples of variable tags could be your customer’s first or last name, their job title, the company name, etc. You are using the information you have collected in your subscribers’ records to display content according to rules that you have pre-defined.
CONCLUSION
In this short article, we laid out the foundations of why your business should be using email marketing and why email marketing is so important. Emails should be central to both your business strategy and your marketing automation strategy, as they are still the primary way to reach out to your desired audience.
Next, we will dive deeper into how to build B2B marketing email lists.
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