Email Marketing Strategy Part 2 — 5 Best Practices for B2b Sales

Email Marketing is the essential marketing tool for b2b sales. As I mentioned in the last post on email marketing, email is the only channel which a user owns; Google, Facebook or any other online platforms can change their algorithms to display content and advertisements. Also, with email you maintain 1:1 relationship with your audience. And thus it has proven to be the best tool for b2b sales. Many expert marketers have spoken a lot about various email marketing strategies such as Inbound marketing, sales funnels, etc. The most important reason, many CMOs bet highly on email marketing is that if done right, it offers as high as 4300% ROI.

To achieve the best possible results from email marketing, here are five best practices that every marketer should follow -

1. Content +Context = Success

For a b2b marketer, the primary function of email is to nurture leads into customers. And nurturing is all about sending right content to right set of audience at the right time. If you send them content that helps them do their jobs efficiently, they will be more open to speaking to your sales team. Generally, a buyer’s journey has three stages — awareness, consideration and decision. The content of your emails should follow the journey and should have a call to action to push the lead to next stage.

2. A clear objective = right communication

The most challenging thing I ever faced in my marketing journey is to write a great email without knowing why I am writing that. Though defining a clear objective is the most challenging thing and it entirely depends on the nature of your business and interests of your audience. First, let me tell you what cannot be the goal of email communication — To stay top of your audience’s mind, to promote your company or to increase the click rate. An example of a right goal can be — to get more people to download the white paper you wrote, to get more registrations for the next webinar or to collect feedback. Always define a clear objective before sending any email to your audience.

3. Personalize at the right places.

Personalised emails have 14% more conversion than those which are not personalised. Marketers should remember that it’s a communication tool and thus it would be great if the emails sound like direct communication with them instead of a random message about your company. The impression should be that you are speaking directly to your lead instead of making them feel like one of the hundreds or thousand people receiving the same thing. Any email marketing software your company is using will enable you to personalise the emails however you want to.

4. Engagement is the key

Every objective of email communication is for your user to take a specific action. So, all the email communications you send should be clear and compelling, clear enough that your audience understands your point and compelling enough that they act how you want them to act. This applies both to your email content and the subject line. None of it should be misleading. Also, to boost engagement, allow your audience to share the email content. You can achieve this by including social sharing buttons right in the email.

5. Test, Analyse and Improvise

Few things that are must for an email marketer to measure are delivery rate, open rate, click rate and contact churn. Each data point gives you an insight. Delivery rates let you know the number of active contacts you have; open rates let you know how many of your contacts are interested in your emails, click rates let you know the effectiveness of your content and contact churn are the people who are unsubscribing from your emails. You can split test to learn more about your audience. With the help of the tests and data points, you can improvise your content to fit the interest of your audience.

Following these practices will not just improve the chances of success of your email marketing efforts, but also help you to increase your brand perception. This is part two of three of email marketing strategies. If you have any queries or anything you can add, do add them in the comments or shoot me a mail on yog@11d.co