If you want to guarantee your message reaches a potential client, then email is the way to do it.
No other marketing method will see your message land on your target’s virtual doorstep in quite the same way. That’s a benefit that should never be overlooked, especially in the B2B space, where leads are likely to have their email inboxes open for at least eight hours a day.
That said, any B2B leads are going to receive a lot of marketing emails across those eight hours, so businesses need to make sure their B2B email marketing strategies produce results that stand out. ScoreApp is here to help with just that.
What makes a B2B email marketing strategy effective?
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of what makes a B2B email marketing strategy effective, it’s worth noting there’s groundwork to cover first.
For any email marketing strategy to be a success, you have to set goals. Without goals, it’s impossible to measure how effective your campaign is. Email marketing can be incredibly versatile and support different business goals, but those goals must be well defined.
For example, email marketing can:
- Increase sign-ups to email lists and webinars
- Bring in more sales calls and inbound leads
- Increase sales
- Improve customer retention
While goals and the target audience should be set in stone before starting on the practical side of a B2B email marketing strategy, the content itself needn’t be. In fact, tweaking and A/B testing across your campaign is by far the best way of ending up with an optimised campaign. No CTA, copy, subject line, or workflow schedule is so good it can’t be improved.
With that in mind, let’s look at a few ways you can make your B2B email marketing strategy effective. Seven ways, to be precise.
1. Efficient audience segmentation
You can’t talk to everybody all of the time and expect strong results. Strong results only come from splitting your audience into specific segments and speaking to them individually.
Your email list can be split into any number of targeted groups based on specific criteria. You might split your list by industry, past interactions and behaviours, or company size.
Segmenting your list is easy with ScoreApp quizzes. By answering specific, pre-qualifying questions, leads will be automatically segmented in your CRM. From there, the sales team can see which leads should be sent what content – and who needs further nurturing down the sales funnel. This is why quizzes and email marketing go hand in hand.
Having access to this information is key to personalising the content of your B2B emails and increasing their efficiency.
2. Send personalised emails
Impersonal emails are an easy way to turn leads away. Nobody likes a message that doesn’t speak to them directly, that doesn’t understand their problems and desired solutions.
It doesn’t take much to personalise emails. Including the recipient’s name and product or resource recommendations based on their data is enough to start with.
By personalising your marketing (including your emails), you can expect to see benefits such as:
Greater engagement – Because personalised marketing talks to customers directly (or at least their segments), engagement is more likely. It’s been said that as many as 72% of customers only engage with messages that are tailored to them.
Higher conversion rates – Because you’re making a recommendation based on good data (the kind you get from ScoreApp quizzes), personalised emails with special offers or incentives are 20% more likely to be effective.
More loyal customers – By providing customers with a better, more relevant experience, you’re showing them how much they’re valued. That comes back to you in the form of better customer perception and increased brand loyalty.
Stronger insights – By nurturing potential leads with personalised emails, you’re more likely to harness their data through further quiz or survey responses. The more data you have, the better the insights and the stronger your personalised marketing.
3. Use automated workflows
Manual intervention kills efficiency. If your sales team have to respond to purchases or sign-ups with freshly written emails, they honestly won’t get anything done. Especially if you’re using automated lead generation to increase conversions.
Instead, ScoreApp will help you develop automated workflows by integrating with email marketing platforms. From there, you can set up email sequences triggered by specific actions – signing up for a webinar from a landing page, downloading a resource, or completing a quiz. Automated responses will free up your sales team to work on other tasks.
Not only that, but it provides an immediate touchpoint that keeps a lead moving down the sales funnel.
4. Create engaging content
The content businesses create can be used more than once. Webinars can be split into smaller videos, or written into blog posts, both of which can be linked to in an email to retarget leads. If it’s engaging, viewers and readers are likely to seek out more on your site. Embedded videos alone have been shown to increase click-through rates by a staggering 300%.
Linking to further content is a great way to show you understand your audience’s pain points and priorities. And with the segmentation data in your CRM, you can find the right content for the right leads.
5. Use responsive design
So, you’ve created some great content. You’ve taken the effort to segment and get to know your leads, to make sure it gets in front of the right eyes. But have you made sure they can read it?
Not everybody will be reading your marketing emails on a PC or a laptop. They could be on any number of mobile devices.
A responsive design, optimised for mobile devices, is essential. Without it, you’re sending out a frustrating experience that will actively turn leads away. The easier it is for leads to read and interact with your content, the better. A better user experience, a better chance of clicking through, and a better conversion rate.
6. Always include a clear call to action (CTA)
Every email has a purpose. They’re precision tuned, with a singular purpose. Sometimes it’s to remind people about an abandoned cart, provide a link to a downloadable resource, or encourage sign-up to the latest webinar. Whatever the reason for the email, you have to be specific.
A call to action (CTA) is a small sentence or two that sets out exactly what you want the reader to do, and why it will be beneficial to them. If you want an example, you can find one at the bottom of this article.
A good, clear CTA will significantly lift conversion rates. With ScoreApp’s automated A/B testing, you can try variations until you get it just right.
7. Review your analytics and continue to optimise
Analytics are your friend. Only continuously reviewing your analytics and making adjustments will lead to a truly effective B2B email marketing strategy.
Some essential email performance metrics include:
- Click-through rates – How enticing are your content and links? Are you targeting the right pain points?
- Open rates – Are leads seeing your emails? Are they going out at a busy time? Is the subject line engaging enough?
- Conversion rates – How many conversions are coming from your email lists? Are your CTAs clear enough?
Keeping track of these metrics is crucial to improving future campaigns. With the real-time data fed into ScoreApp’s dashboard, businesses can refine their strategy and mix things up to increase conversions instantly.
Implement these B2B email marketing strategies easily with ScoreApp
Following these seven steps will lead to stronger and more effective B2B email marketing strategies. They’re not one-and-done techniques – businesses have to implement them as rolling best practice, but the results are worth it.
Using ScoreApp to complement your email marketing makes what could be daunting simple. We’ll give you the tools to make and maintain a B2B email marketing strategy that grabs attention and nurtures leads through to sale. Even better, ScoreApp is free to try.
Transform your B2B email marketing strategies today, with ScoreApp.
