Poor performance of your Email Marketing Plan can be frustrating. With the amount of time and money spent on such campaigns, you hope to see positive results and expect considerable ROI’s to follow once you put these plans into action.
Poor email marketing leads to a number of challenges that companies and brands have to go through, which includes, but is not limited to High Bounce Rates, Meagre Open Rates, Low Click-Throughs and frequent unsubscribes. Considering the fact that all these can be avoided by planning and strategically maneuvering yourself through the do’s and don’ts of email marketing, you can achieve results that match or even exceed your expectations.
When we discuss strategical changes to adopt in a marketing campaign, a clear direction is required as to what needs to be achieved and how process will flow, thus making planning an integral part. This planning on how to renovate and overhaul your B2B Email Marketing, doesn’t necessarily have to be a difficult one. Nonetheless, it is always advisable that these plans be flexible enough where changes can be made, when required.
Let’s get started on how a systematic approach can go a long way by transforming the performance of both your inbound and outbound campaigns.
B2B Email Marketing Campaigns – Make Them Stand Out!
- Ultra strong subject lines“Your subject line directly affects people either opening or deleting your email.” When you receive emails, the subject of the email is all that matters! It can mean the difference between you either opening the email or deleting it right away. The fact that nobody clicks on an email is a clear sign that the subject doesn’t evoke any call to action or isn’t interesting enough for you to pursue the content of the email and take out time to read it.The entire purpose of an email is lost if the recipient doesn’t open it. To avoid such wasted efforts, it is imperative that subjects be gripping, since a person working in an office receives an average of 121 emails per day, showcasing how easy it is for emails to get lost in the bulk of data and making it inevitable for people to hit the delete button.Personalization is one such tool with which you can increase your open rate by 17%. This means that subject lines feel that you are talking to the recipients on a personal level and must have a conversational approach rather than having a conventional sales pitch. For help on how to make your subject lines better, you can test them with online available evaluation tools.
- Segmenting for maximum penetration
Most of the companies have adopted some way of segmentation for emails. It is the most basic strategy, which is both effective and cost-efficient. By this way of approaching B2B clients, you are able to send messages which are targeted towards your intended market. This increases content relevancy, click-through rates and open rates since it is being targeted towards people who would be more understanding of what is required.Various segmentation strategies can be used:- Basic
Involves highlighting a few main criteria, such as demographics, age, gender, industry and role. - Rules-Based Personalization
Such segmentation is usually customized based on user data and historical preferences. - Layered & Personalized
Includes basic level segmentation with the added advantage of lead scoring and assessing asset value.While segmenting, it is important to understand that emails should be relevant to the reader, otherwise they risk being sent to spam folders. Your email list should be divided for relevancy.
- Basic
- List health & quality
Your list of emails should be regularly updated and to avoid any bounces or bad email addresses. And since the quality of your email campaign rests on the fact of how good your list is, it should be your top priority to make it relevant to your business.For this you can use a number of tools, easily available online, that help validate emails. Few of which are:- Syntax check
This tool is particularly useful as it checks for any errors or mistakes that might have been missed. It checks email addresses for spelling, domain names and whether characters are correct or not. - Domain check
Checks for domains, whether they are working properly or not and whether the domain name of email address really exists. - Email ping
Pings each email address and waits for a response in order to confirm the user is on the system and active.
- Syntax check
- Content relevancy
Now that you have gone through the basic way to lure clients in and click on your email, the real starts with developing content. One of the top reasons why people unsubscribe from mailing lists and delete them right after reading the few lines, is that is it not relevant to them and bears of no interest to them. Personalization is key when it comes to content; it should be recipient-focused, using the clients first name and briefly explaining the business as to what the reason for email is. Make sure that it is clutter free, avoid wasting their time on irrelevant data. Be friendly and ensure the content is to-the-point.Keep your content short, crisp and valid. Try to focus more on product or company information than just bragging about other stuff to close a sale. Sale is important, but not at the cost of losing a potential customer. Since this is a B2B strategy, you should not try to sell them directly, like in case of many B2C campaigns. - Be Transparent and Honest
Businesses are becoming increasingly suspicious of anything that sounds like an advertisement and try to avoid such, as much as possible. Your product might be able to do things that other brands couldn’t, but it is important that you don’t make promises you can’t keep! - Split testing (A/B testing)
Split run or A/B testing determines which two variants are better. This can be used to compare a wide variety of stuff, including, but not exclusive to subjective lines, opening sentences, the body of email, length of email phrasing and other relevant elements.
A/B testing allows businesses to base their decisions on real-time behavior of target customers, negating the use of assumptions, whose certainty is questionable.
Email campaign software’s like Campaign Monitor, Active Campaign and MailChimp, all have such tools built-in for A/B Testing.To run an email A/B test, few pointers are indispensable to ensure success:- Larger the test sample, more accurate the results.
- Gather empirical data rather than gut instincts.
- Use tools mentioned above for quick and easy A/B testing.
- Measure only one single strategy at a time.
- Mobile friendly
With increasing mobile penetration, it is necessary to keep up with the modern trends. Therefore, it is necessary that your emails are easily viewed on mobile devices and are displayed correctly; otherwise they might be deleted even before your client reads them.To ensure your emails are mobile-friendly, tools like Litmus can be used to test emails viewed in different clients and across different platforms.
Do you need help with email marketing campaigns?
At BizWell we help our clients reach their target audience with extreme precision which is very important. We can help you target your audience based on several data points to ensure that you’re targeting a relevant audience.
If you think that the steps mentioned in this article are hard to implement in your email marketing campaigns we would love to help you with your entire email marketing campaign. Just contact us and let’s discuss your needs and goals.
Melissa Simpson
Email marketing expert
