B2B Email Marketing: How to Maximise Your ROI
When done right, email campaigns can be quite an effective means of B2B marketing. It’s a way of reaching prospects and maintaining contact with them to the point where they, hopefully, become a loyal customer. But how can you ensure your B2B email marketing is maximising return on investment? In today’s blog, we’ll be providing tips on how to make the most of your email campaigns.
Educate Your Audience
If you’re immediately going for the sale in your email copy, the chances are far higher that your audience will immediately lose interest. Business buyers and consumers alike are constantly being bombarded with products and services to sell, and there’s very little chance a 75-word email is going to lead to an instant conversion (unless you’re selling the secret to eternal youth, or something).
Educate. Give your audience the means to think, ‘Do I need this product?’ You can achieve this in a number of ways: blogs, whitepapers, guides, case studies, or videos.
Don’t Ignore the Challenges Staring Your Business in the Face
There are problems that are likely to rear their head in just about any marketing campaign. Become familiar with those problems so you can quickly adapt if they appear. How can you prepare your content in a way that reflects what your company has invested? Could click-through rates actually lead to conversions? Considering these questions both before the campaign is launched and while the campaign is ongoing could save you a lot of headaches in the long run, headaches that often plague B2B marketers who haven’t done their homework.
B2B Email Marketing: What Not to Do
We covered this in more depth back in Email Marketing Guide: What Not To Do, so for an in-depth guide on what to avoid when it comes to email marketing, be sure to check that article out. It’s still well worth reiterating here, though, particularly one thing we actually didn’t mention before: avoid calling your newsletter by its actual name. Why? Well, statistics show that most of your audience are likely not to click it if this is the case.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be sending newsletters- it’s a great, easy way to communicate with your audience- but even just making the subject line something like ‘Quick update from [Company name]’ is likely to get a higher open rate.
Take Time to Ensure that Your B2B Email Marketing Campaign is Targeted
If you’re in no way experienced with B2B email marketing, you might assume that the best course of action, at least in some cases, is to send emails to as many people as you possibly can. Throw enough out there and you’re bound to get a lead eventually, right? Nope.
Think about how many times you’ve received a marketing email that clearly wasn’t targeted at you. Were you receptive? Probably not- in fact you probably unsubscribed as soon as possible, or at the very least ignored it.
Make sure you’re only sending marketing emails to businesses that may actually need your product. Otherwise you’re just wasting everyone’s time, and likely ending up in your audience’s spam folders.
What Should My B2B Email Marketing Content Consist Of?
When it comes to the actual content of your emails, it mostly depends on what you’re actually selling. Our advice in brief? Keep it short and to the point, and make it look nice. There really doesn’t have to be much more to it. Don’t pack your email with tons of links and pictures and attachments. Some of these elements can be effective, but if you overdo it, the email will not only take longer to load, but it’ll also be far more likely to end up in spam.
Be Careful Not to Mislead with Your Subject Line
Often the only way to actually get a high percentage of opens on your email is with a creative subject line, but it’s important you’re not overpromising. Misleading your audience could lead to them unsubscribing from your campaign altogether.
Generally, it’s quite a bit harder to come up with a good business-to-business subject line than a good business-to-consumer subject line. But that doesn’t mean you need to get desperate. It’s all about trial and error, really- test enough subject lines and eventually you’ll know what works, and what doesn’t work. It just takes time.
B2B Email Marketing: Avoid Looking or Sounding Like Spam
If you don’t have much experience in email marketing, it can be hard to know what sort of things will send your emails straight to spam. That being said, there’s a few factors you should avoid at all costs.
Writing your subject line in all caps, for example, is likely to be flagged as spam by most email providers. There are also quite a few words you should be avoiding, namely words that come across as pushy or manipulative. Even words or phrases like ‘clearance’, ‘increase sales’, or ‘limited time’ can be flagged as spam. Subject lines can be a bit of a minefield, which is why your email address’s reputation needs to be as strong as possible.
