Before you hit send: best practices in B2B email marketing.
Executive summary
All brands, regardless of size or geographic reach, have the same challenge: Making sure that prospective customers know they exist and former clients don’t forget that they do.
Social media, content and influencer marketing have all become go-to methods for staying in front of the audience. But in a marketplace overrun by sponsored posts, this approach lacks the precision of email marketing. Well-crafted email marketing delivers the right messages to the right targets at a time when they are most interested in receiving them.
With over 205 billion emails sent every day, it isn’t easy to pique someone’s interest enough to open an unsolicited message. However, with the right strategy and execution, an integrated email marketing campaign remains a cost-effective option for generating quality leads.
A five-step process using the right practices will not only improve your open and click-through rates, but also boost the overall success of your next lead generation campaign.
A step-by-step process for a successful B2B email marketing campaign
Know your target
Craft the message
Be strategic with design
Focus on the day of the week over time of day
Follow-up or risk being forgotten
Know your target
Start by identifying a specific target market. The key to a successful email campaign is aiming for the center of the bullseye to ensure your message is viewed. Otherwise, you’re headed for the trash bin.
Taking aim
To identify your target audience, look at the titles of your previously-converted prospects. Were they decision makers? You may still end up working with subordinates, but you’ll want to aim your emails at both decision makers and mid-level employees; it’s best to avoid junior and entry-level representatives.
Hint: If you aim too high—at a CIO or CFO, for example—you may miss your mark. Instead, aim for mid-level decision makers.
How this works
By examining the characteristics of each successful client relationship you’ve had, you’ll also be able to build a better persona for your campaigns. Knowing who you are writing to, and what they need to hear from you to get to “yes,” helps you to replicate your success.
While knowing how companies in your target industry are structured can help in targeting decision makers, the better you know the subject matter—and the issues and challenges your targets face—the more relevant you can make your message. It also helps your target audience recognize you as the solution to whatever problem they are dealing with currently.
As you gain traction with messaging that resonates, you’ll be refining a process you can use to repeat your success in other industries.
Buy vs. rent
When it comes to prospect lists, leverage your CRM and internal resources by buying high-quality lists from reputable sources. Industry association lists are a good starting point. They are focused and already contain verified information regarding current employers and titles. Having clean lists helps ensure you are communicating only with the people who need your service, which can keep your messages from being confused with spam.
Craft the message
Once you have a clear target audience and a clean contact list, the next step is to draft the email.
First, decide on your call to action (CTA). What do you want the recipient to do? Click through to a blog? Register for a webinar? Visit your booth at a trade show? Connect with your subject matter expert?
You want to craft a clear and concise CTA, with a hook. It shouldn’t take more than few seconds to recognize what action is required and decide whether to engage.
Hook first, reel second
Engagement occurs in two places: the subject line, which gets them to open the email, and the first few characters of the email itself. Both should address a solution to a relevant problem your target audience may face.
By showing that you recognize this “pain point,” understand their industry and are offering a solution to a common problem, you dramatically increase the likelihood that you will spur your audience to take action.
Leave the subject line for last. Why? It should clearly and concisely summarize what the email says, so it’s best to leave this until the email draft is complete.
When writing the body copy, get to the point quickly. The first 100 characters create the “5-second impression” that determines whether your prospects read on. The objective isn’t to sell them on your company or a specific product or service upfront, but to pique their interest in learning more by clicking through to your site for a download, responding to the email, or picking up the phone. Keep the tone positive and welcoming.
Make your message count
Subject line
Teaser / intro
Body copy
Don’t presume — While technology enables a greater degree of personalization, research shows that when you use someone’s name without any prior relationship, it can evoke distrust. Instead, opt to personalize through the relevancy of your offer until you’ve established a connection with your target.
Be strategic with design
Emails are read across a variety of mobile, hand-held, and desktop devices; therefore, the email’s design must be responsive to a variety of screen types. That means before hitting “send,” you’ll want to test your message on multiple devices and across different operating systems to make sure it loads properly each time. We’ve found that tools like BrowserStack can be extremely helpful in ensuring such consistency.
Layout choices
When designing your email’s layout, position the logo in the upper left corner where it is highly visible. This will help establish your legitimacy and create awareness for your brand if the recipient is unfamiliar with your company.
Direct links to your social media channels and your addresses—both virtual and physical—should also be visible, as well as an unsubscribe button. Legally, recipients must have the option to opt out of future emails—and you will likely receive a few unsubscribe requests per campaign. But don’t panic. When people take the time to opt out, it provides you with valuable information and assists you in further narrowing your target audience. Use this information to help identify the prospects you are most likely to convert.
Rather than links, utilize buttons throughout the text to provide clear opportunities for going deeper. When choosing the language for those buttons, be concise and precise. “Click here,” for example is too vague. Copy that reads “Get started” or “Download now” is more likely to get clicked.
Be visual
Images are seen and understood much faster than words can be read. Consider making the imagery you use clickable. That way even if the text is only skimmed, or partially digested, the image can still deliver the key piece of information on the page: how to take further action.
Focus on the day of the week over time of day
While many debate the best time of day to send an email, what matters more is the content. To be effective, an email must entice, engage, and—if what you offer is complicated—educate. It can do all these things at any time of day.
We are all bombarded with emails all day long. Recipients often ignore marketing emails until they have time to sort through the inbox. That time of day is different for everyone and will also differ from day to day depending on schedules.
However, campaign analytics show that—while time of day is mostly irrelevant—the day of the week matters. We’ve found that the best days to send emails are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. On Mondays, business people are overwhelmed with emails and distracted by issues that cropped up over the weekend. They are likely to be too busy catching up and triaging to be looking ahead to new relationships. We also recommend avoiding Fridays. By this time, people are focused on finishing projects so they can start enjoying the weekend. Any email that gets opened on Friday is likely to be forgotten by Monday morning.
With Mondays and Fridays out of the equation, it’s no surprise that the highest open rates fall during the middle of the week. By sending your emails on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, you have Wednesdays and Thursdays to follow up.
Follow-up or risk being forgotten
Once you’ve gone through the effort of implementing an email campaign, there are two key actions you should take to ensure its success: follow-up and repeat.
By monitoring openings, you can establish a process for following up. It’s often best to follow up the day after an email is opened. If you have access to the recipient’s phone number, a follow-up call can help to establish a more personal relationship and, ultimately, help to convert a prospective customer. But don’t wait too long.
Whether the lead comes in organically or a follow-up call is placed, your inside sales representatives should handle the talking. They are in a better position to qualify or disqualify a lead.
Just as critical is recognizing that a campaign should never be considered ‘one and done.’ Follow a specific sales cycle. When implementing an email campaign for clients, we recommend emailing at regular intervals of 6 months with a follow-up in the days after the initial email. This length of time allows you to tell an effective story, using each contact to further the story—like a TV series. When the email campaign coincides with the release of a series of thought capital pieces, a prospect should end up with a thorough understanding of your firm, your processes, and the types of solutions you provide for industry challenges.
Checklist for qualifying leads
- Verify the business is the right size and in the right industry.
- Determine if the prospect has pain points you can help resolve.
- Find out if they are open to an outside partner.
- Ask for feedback—use this to refine your campaign.
The role of marketing automation
Self-managing content-driven campaigns have become much easier with marketing automation software like HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. Each replaces standalone email management software like Constant Contact, Mail Chimp and iContact and integrates with your CRM—or can be your CRM in the case of HubSpot.
To acquire more names for your email campaigns, marketing automation allows you to create landing pages to promote educational marketing assets, including recorded webinars, videos, eguides/ebooks, whitepapers, and other collateral. “Gating” these marketing assets means requiring them to fill out a form with their contact info. Then you can send them a series of emails to be automatically sent to “nurture” these people, which we consider “suspects”—they only become “prospects” also referred to as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) when they respond to us with interest by phone or email. They become a sales qualified lead (SQL) when your sales team qualifies them as a good potential fit as a customer or client, then they enter your sales pipeline.
You can also set up sales sequencing where you create a series of emails to be automatically sent over time to a contact list that you upload so you don’t have to manually email them (which you’ll forget).
Integration with your CRM is critical so that you can see what marketing assets they’ve downloaded, which emails they opened and clicked on, and how many pages they’ve viewed on your website—their resulting lead score, calculated by marketing automation software, indicates their potential level of interest and who should be contacted first.
Next steps
Building a beautiful, highly functional website is only step one in a strategic digital marketing plan. Prospects and clients need reasons to visit you there. Combine search word advertising with social postings, digital media advertising, and a well-targeted email campaign to foster brand familiarity and build trust with your prospects.
Email is cost-effective and, when well targeted, creates a direct path for delivering higher quality leads into your sales funnel. Contact us if you need help with creating your email marketing strategy or would like to explore what marketing automation can do for you.
Need help with your email strategy?
Contact us if you need help with creating your email marketing strategy or would like to explore what marketing automation can do for you.
About Innovaxis Marketing
If you’re frustrated by a lack of results from your business-to-business (B2B) marketing efforts, an Innovaxis B2B Marketing Audit will get to the source of the issues and obstacles standing between you and your goals. The audit includes detailed findings and recommendations around problems, performance and opportunities. The audit’s recommendations form the roadmap for your B2B Ignite Program, designed to accelerate your revenue growth by strengthening your brand story messaging, developing industry thought leadership and generating more leads than ever before — with a resulting ROI that can be as much as 300%+ within the first two years.
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