Top 5 Email Marketing Tips to Maximize on Profits in 2020
Email marketing, if done right, can shift your business’ economic paradigm in a never-seen-before way. Here are the top 5 b2b email marketing tips.
For every email marketing dollar you spend, you stand to make $38 back. Are you comfortable losing that level of return on investment (ROI)?
Email marketing has one of the highest ROI rates in digital marketing. In the past, B2B email marketing would be a dry affair compared to B2C. However, marketers are learning that valuable B2C marketing lessons can help revolutionize B2B marketing for more significant results.
Let’s look at five vital lessons you can use to make marketing to businesses more productive.
How Is B2B Marketing Different From B2C?
B2B, selling to businesses, comes with different dynamics than a B2C context, which is selling to customers.
Probably the most salient difference about B2B versus B2C is that the former’s sales cycle can often take longer.
Take the example of selling an umbrella to a customer versus selling gutters to a company for their building. Both are looking to help protect from the effects of rain.
It takes less time and is a shorter process to pitch an umbrella directly to a customer. On the other hand, an organization will need to process a pitch for gutters through several decision-makers before making a determination. Even after an organization decides to purchase, it takes time to process that order and pay for it.
Selling to businesses involves a longer sales cycle, and for email marketers, that implies a more extended client nurturing process.
B2B sales cycles also involve more people across various departments in the company. As such, you will need to identify which stakeholder to target so you can tailor your pitch appropriately.
At times you may even be required to develop different email marketing campaigns to target several stakeholders uniquely.
How to Rev up Your B2B Email Marketing
Once you understand the prevailing differences between selling to other businesses and pitching to customers directly, you can correctly identify the best strategies to leverage. Let’s look at a few tactics you can use to deliver outsize results when marketing to businesses.
- Study Your Target Audience
Every effective email marketing campaign delivers relevant messaging to the right audience at the right time. A crucial step to shipping such a campaign is to understand your audience deeply.
Your beginning point when seeking to learn your customers is developing a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a representation of your target audience, reflecting their characteristics and other relevant information.
Through a buyer persona, you can better understand where your target customer lives, the work they do, and their aspirations. A well-researched buyer persona will help you uncover the problems your target customer faces and how you can help solve them.
If you want to create a strong buyer persona, you must talk to the clients you plan to target.
Thus, make it a point to approach people in your circles who work for organizations similar to the one you plan to pitch.
Find out what issues their firm struggles with in your area of interest. Don’t forget to ask about what stop-gap measures they are using and what they would like to see different.
Widen the circle of ideal customers you interview to include people you don’t know and existing customers if any.
- Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
As you collect more data points on your target customer, you need to develop messaging that is relevant to them. If you don’t, you are leaving 6x higher transaction rates on the table.
Never send out an email that doesn’t address the subscriber by name. The perception that you know your customers alone will lead to better open rates.
If you’ve collected enough data to help you connect the dots on relatable offers, you can give recommendations that speak to the customer’s unique needs.
Furthermore, don’t forget to use a real reply-to email address. No matter the email client your customers use (more on that here https://setapp.com/lifestyle/the-best-free-email-client-for-mac), you will look more professional. When the purchase officer at the business you’re targeting notices they can’t reply to you, they will discard your pitch instantly.
- Grow Your List Organically
Permission-based marketing delivers more quality results. In this case, if you buy subscriber lists from vendors, you won’t know who you are targeting.
However, when you invest in growing your email list organically, you will generate leads that are interested in your offering. Therefore, each campaign that goes out meets pre-existing interest, which makes it easier to convert leads.
You can develop a B2B email list by reaching out to contacts in your network who you think might be interested in your offering.
Deploying sign up forms on your site can also help capture organic leads.
Since they are coming to your site to learn more about your offering, they signal a level of interest. From there, you can market to them with better odds of conversion.
- Customer Segmentation
It’s not all your leads that will want the same thing. Placing your customers in designated (and clearly defined) categories helps you avoid sending irrelevant messages.
B2B customer segments may look slightly different than those you’d typically rely on with B2C.
You can classify the customers you target based on the position they occupy in the organization, the budget the company has, and the industry size.
The information you collect through your buyer persona will come in handy here to enable you more accurately classify the customers.
- Leverage Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns occur in response to a specific action that a customer takes. For example, you can schedule a welcome email to a new subscriber to help them feel more comfortable.
Using drip campaigns, you can successfully keep B2B customers engaged during the length of a sales cycle.
The key to success with drip campaigns is to develop engaging content that isn’t all in your lead’s face. You want to nurture a relationship and not push prospects away.
Make Your Email Marketing More Effective
Email marketing delivers one of the highest ROI rates in digital marketing. If you’re in B2B email marketing, there are valuable B2C lessons you can leverage to improve the productivity of every campaign.
Are you looking for ideas on how to sharpen your digital marketing edge? Check out more of our articles to pick up valuable tips that can grow your top line.
