With various communication channels flooding the market, email marketing remains a popular way for B2Bs to connect with interested parties.
Done right, the strategy may help attract and retain consumers, provide value through educational content, tackle pressing problems, and share special deals and company updates.
The ROI is also commendable too, earning $36 – $45 per dollar sunk. This ROI is not exclusive to big brands but applies to every business out there that’s willing to put in the work and follow industry best practices.
So, how do you package and present information to encourage engagement rather than unsubscribes or spam labeling? We look at the top email marketing practices below:
1. Ensure Compliance
Before you send out marketing emails, it’s worth ensuring you’re complying with the current CAN-SPAM Act. This act was put in place to protect recipients from unsolicited emails.
A great way to maintain compliance is by emailing recipients who’ve actively subscribed to receive your emails. In this case, a double opt-in form is highly recommendable when signing up new members.
It sends confirmation emails to new subscribers with a link they will need to click to confirm their subscription. New members are only added to your mailing list after they click the confirmation link.
The added step ensures that only people truly interested in your offerings will receive your emails and helps reduce spam complaints. It also minimizes deliverability issues that arise from email address typos.
Another aspect of compliance is providing easy opt-out. The unsubscribe option needs to be easily accessible and the process seamless.
2. Build Your Email List
There are two main ways of building an email list—through a sign-up form or with lead magnets. Adding opt-in forms to high-traffic areas on your website and on social channels may help attract eager leads.
Lead magnets are valuable free assets such as ebooks, checklists, webinars, calculators, tools, etc, that you share with audiences for their benefit. Ask for minimal information to encourage visitors to take up the offer.
Bonus tip: You can also work with a professional agency to build custom lists based on your total addressable market and other needs unique to your brand.
3. Determine the Emails You Wish to Send
The below email types may help build stronger relationships and sustainable revenues:
- Monthly newsletters: newsletters serve to maintain regular communication with subscribers. They are great for shedding light on your business, and offerings, nurturing prospects and sharing company news and new product launches.
- Lead nurturing emails: through a series of emails you share useful information to target audiences to guide them through conversion. These emails help warm up relations, so when your team gets down to making cold calls, the conversations won’t be so cold.
- Promotional emails: deals, offers, new product/service launches, and business events warrant promotional emails. You can send a series of promotional emails leading up to the sale, launch, or event to give your audience time to promote a higher uptake. Consider segmenting the recipients to ensure relevance.
- Survey emails are critical for businesses that want to collect customer feedback about their products/services. Add a clickable survey link, embed a form, or send open-ended emails that recipients can respond to directly.
- Transactional emails: these have high click-through rates since the recipients are expecting them to complete a specific action. This gives you the opportunity to throw in additional but relevant information. Order confirmations, shipping confirmations, and invoice generation are part of transactional emails.
4. Add Visuals
Amid daily pressure and distractions, it’s becoming increasingly tough to put together campaigns that draw in attention and retain it long enough for audiences to act.
Incorporating visual elements may help improve readership and the likelihood of people taking desirable actions. The right visuals may help increase email engagement while the wrong ones may turn off your readers.
This means knowing your audiences’ preferences and continuous testing will help you pick u the right mix. Here are top examples of visuals B2B vendors use:
- Product images. These are perfect for sales emails, onboarding emails, product launches or updates, and promotional emails. Rather than throwing in a bunch of product images in the emails, show them in use. It may help audiences visualize your products in their environment, working for them.
- From promotional emails to welcome emails, and feedback emails, GIFs are popular and catchy. They are easy to design, digestible, and take up less space compared to regular video formats. While their fun aspect is great for capturing attention, they may not work for a marketing approach that’s serious and professional.
- They are a great choice for imparting complex or large pieces of information clearly. When it comes to learning about products or services, 73 percent of consumers surveyed preferred videos over 11 percent that go for text-based articles. Why not add them to email sequences, outreach emails, promo emails, and sales emails.
5. Work on Your Design
An attractive design that’s visually appealing, and more importantly resonates with your audience is critical.
Consider the following:
- Strengthen your subject lines. This brief statement can literally make or break your email campaign. Unless you don’t mind your emails sinking into the unread mail realm, make them catchy, and ensure the recipients can discern value upfront.
- Be concise. Offer your readers the info they came for without making them read through tons of other “unnecessary” information. It shows you have regard for their time and improves engagement.
- Brand your emails. Let your tone remain consistent across all outreaches. Include your logo and use your company’s predetermined fonts and colors. It will help users readily associate the campaigns with your brand and improve awareness.
- Enhance the user experience. Cluttered, slow-loading pages and visuals may overwhelm readers and lead to abandonment. Consider layouts that have your users’ experiences’ best interests at heart. Have loads of white spaces, an easy flow of information, a single CTA, and optimized visuals.
Conclusion
The email marketing strategy offers plenty of benefits from reaching new audience bases, to improving retention, driving sales, and learning consumer preferences. The techniques we’ve mentioned above may help you maximize this strategy to ensure you derive true value from it.
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