Good B2B email marketing sends the right message to the right person at the right time and delivers positive action as a result.
Aside from face to face business development, email marketing is the most effective marketing we do – when it is done right. According to BtoB Magazine, email is the most effective marketing channel in lead & revenue generation - it is more likely to generate action and results than any one other digital marketing channel. This is largely due to audience behavior - at every level in an organisation, people spend much of their working day “in their inbox”. Email gives you direct access to an active audience, you can easily customise it for that reader and integrate it with other channels, it is easily measured and it is relatively low cost.
So far so good, but how often have you received emails that aren't relevant or don't give you clear next steps? In B2B organisations, email campaigns are often driven by an event or a development which customers need to be informed of. They are not necessarily in the marketing schedule and content needs quick turnaround. I have seen the purpose of many an email campaign get lost in the urgency to proof, edit, get a list and hit send.
So how do you get the most out of it email marketing and make sure it is “done right” whether planned or unplanned?
8 essential elements of effective email marketing
Clear goal - be clear about what you are hoping to achieve with this email /campaign
Targeted audience list – know who your ideal recipient is and use a segmented list, updated regularly
Valuable content – cover topics that the people on your list interested in, written in an engaging style and/or taking a different point of view
Easy to read - adopt a user friendly article style, language, design & format - across desktop and mobile devices. Set up templates and guides to manage this
Well timed – understand the optimal times/days to send/receive marketing emails. Be disciplined about these and stick to a regular schedule of publication
Consistent with other marketing campaigns – cross-link to your website, ad campaigns, articles wherever possible and reflect your organisation’s overall brand, tone of voice & messaging about itself and about topics being covered
Drives action – use clear design & specific functionality to actively move recipients towards the goal
Measurable – regularly review specific actions taken by recipients and use analytics in order to measure outcomes against goals
Think before sending
Sending relevant emails to a short list of interested people wins you more mindshare and delivers better results (50% more clicks) than sending emails to long indiscriminate lists.
Of the 8 steps, the first two (Goal setting & Audience definition) underpin everything else.
Frankly, this is true of any marketing activity. Your goal may be generating leads, increasing website traffic, event RSVPs, positioning as experts on a topics, client education, or simply regular communication to stay front-of-mind.
Sending relevant emails to a short list of interested people wins you more mindshare and delivers better results (50% more clicks) than sending emails to long indiscriminate lists.
To define the audience, ask yourself, what sector, role type, seniority, location or behavior that defines the ideal recipients?
Sending relevant emails to a short list of interested people wins you more mindshare and delivers better results (50% more clicks) than sending emails to long indiscriminate lists. In addition, 4 out of 10 people report that they mark emails as spam simply because they were irrelevant to them, so having a targeted list and relevant content means its less likely recipients will remove themselves from your circulation entirely.
Identifying your goal and your audience for each marketing email or email campaign series helps you decide what that email should look like - in terms of content, design, timing, etc - and gives you a basis to measure outcomes and determine “success”.
Note: To really get the most from email marketing, some investment is required in subscription based email marketing tool such as Mailchimp, Newsweaver or Concep. These have different price-point depending on your requirements. They provide a range of design templates, content management, automated event RSVPs and analytics tool to allow you to see how campaigns are doing.
If your marketing lists are out of date, it is also worth dedicating an internal or hiring a data temp to update and clean your lists to suit your marketing needs & make sure they include all the information you need to really “slice and dice” your master list by sector, job type, location, etc. The average contact database churns at a rate of 25-30% per year. If you aren't replenishing your list with new, interested contacts each year, your database will never be fit for purpose.