One of the prime objectives of B2B Email marketing is to convert the leads into paid customers.
So, in this article, I will share the proven email marketing tactics that you can use to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Let’s get started.
1. Personalize your email content
Whether it is B2B or B2C email marketing, your target audience is human and everyone loves to see if the brands care about their choice of preferences. And this can be shown only by delivering them personalized emails.
Now, personalization doesn’t mean only to add the first name and company name in the email body – it works but that’s not enough to double your conversion rate.
You have to be better than that.
Always remember that every person in your email list has a problem statement and is at a different stage of the buying process. So, you have to personalize emails based on their profession, industry, lifecycle stage, etc.
Most email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign allow you to add dynamic blocks in the email body which you can use to personalize the content based on the data available in your CRM for that specific recipient.
By personalizing your emails, you can address the problem statement of recipients more specifically and thus build a better channel of communication with trust and credibility.
2. Make sure your email is Mobile-friendly
Do you know that 68% of emails are usually opened on mobile devices?
Yes, it is true and if your emails are not mobile-friendly then it is most likely to be in the trash within seconds of opening that email.
And don’t be surprised if you see a lot of unsubscription from your mailing list.
Creating mobile-friendly emails doesn’t only mean making your images, graphics, and the overall body display properly on mobile devices, it is also about the readability of your emails on such devices with small display screens.
In order to get better click-through and conversion rates from your email campaign, you want your recipients to be able to read your emails easily on any device using any email application.
So, while creating the emails, make sure you check how the email appears on different email applications including Zoho Mail, AOL, and others.
3. Avoid using clickbait subject lines
The subject line is the first thing that people see and then decide to open it instantly, leave it for later, or just throw it into the trash. The open rate of your email campaigns depends a lot on your subject line.
But rather than just focusing on the open rate of your email campaigns, you should also focus on other metrics that translate into the overall business goals i.e., CTR and conversions.
Using clickbait subject lines, you may achieve a high open rate for a few of your initial emails but gradually you’ll be losing lots of subscribers and most importantly the credibility of your brand.
And in B2B, your credibility is the most valuable currency to grow your business.
So, while creating the subject line for B2B email campaigns, your goal should be to keep it relevant to what is in the email body. However, relevancy shouldn’t stop you from making the subject line exciting and convincing for your recipients.
4. Keep your emails concise
Your target audiences are business professionals and they are too busy to go through your novel-length emails and your message isn’t the only one in their mailbox.
In fact, on average a business professional receives over 119 emails per day. So, you can imagine what type of competition you have to deal with.
Once you capture the attention of the recipient with your catchy headline, you want them to read your email and take the required action defined by you.
To achieve that, you need to keep your email short and direct such that the recipients can get a clear idea of what the email is all about within seconds of opening it.
The ideal length of an email body for a B2B audience is about 50-150 words. So, try to deliver your message with a call-to-action within the limit and you’ll see the improvement in the CTR of your email campaigns.
5. Use a familiar send name
I receive a lot of emails every day from the tools that I use for business and what I hate the most about those emails is the name of the sender. For example, just see these email senders in my mailbox-
All the emails are from brands but the first two are using a person’s name as the sender’s name while the rest are from the company name. Now when I saw these emails, the first thought that came up was that the bottom three are either promotional or notification emails while the first two feel like something to check.
Similarly, there are a number of other companies using names like “no-reply”, “newsletter” etc as the sender name. I usually unsubscribe from such emails after receiving one or two emails from such senders.
Remember, one of the first few things that people notice after opening their inbox is the name of the senders. They instantly open the email from senders that sound important and leave the rest for later.
Or people like me just snooze or archive unnecessary emails because I don’t want to waste my next 15 minutes going through promotional or notification emails during working hours.
But emails from a familiar name sound more personal and people tend to open it more than those with company names even if they know it is a promotional email.
So, next time when you run an email campaign, run an A/B test with different sender names to see if it makes a difference to your email performance.
6. Don’t ignore the Preview Text
While creating an email campaign, most of you focus usually on creating a compelling subject line and email body.
And in many cases, you leave the preview text blank or fill it with something not effective. I don’t know about you but when I started with email marketing, I always used to leave the preview text blank.
However, once I tried the preview text for an email campaign I observed a spike in the open rate in comparison to earlier campaigns. Since then, I never compromised with the preview text – it is a real game-changer in email marketing!
Preview text is a piece of content that appears below the subject line in the recipient’s inbox.
Here’s how it appears in the Gmail iOS App-
Usually, only 50 to 100 characters or 6 to 11 words of preview text appear to the recipients depending on what device or email service they open it.
You can use the preview text to give a glimpse of the email content and convince the recipients to open your email. While crafting your email content think of the subject line as the heading and preview text like a subheading of your email.
7. Have a clear Call to Action
One of the crucial components of email marketing is the call-to-action for your subscribers. A clear CTA allows you to tell the email recipients what they have to do next.
For example, in this email by AgoraPulse, you can see how concise the email is, and most importantly, the CTA is clear and direct.
Like the above example, keeping the CTA direct and clearly visible to your readers can help you direct their attention toward your goals.
8. Frequency of your emails
While creating your email marketing strategy, make sure that you also figure out how often you will be sending emails.
Too frequent emails can lead to unsubscription while very low frequency can make people forget you.
And you don’t want either to happen.
The frequency of emails depends on your campaign goals, the type of emails, and the recipients.
If your recipients are the chief executives and decision-makers in the industry, you should respect their time and keep the frequency as low as monthly or bi-monthly.
On the other hand, if your recipients are managers and executives then, weekly or bi-weekly emails shouldn’t be an issue.
These are just my assumptions on how you can set your email frequency but it can vary for your business depending on your target audience, industry, and location.
You can always determine the best email frequency for your audience by analyzing past campaigns or running split campaigns and seeing at what frequency your emails receive the highest engagement rate.
With the right frequency, you can build a stronger community around your brand which ultimately contributes to the conversion rate of your email campaigns.
9. Pick the Right Time to Send emails
When it comes to B2B email marketing, timing is very crucial because your target audience is business professionals who are not always available to give serious thought to marketing emails.
This is why you need to determine the best time when most of your email recipients can take the time to read your email.
You can find the best time for your audience by analyzing the data from your previous campaigns and determining the day of the week and hour of the day when your email campaigns gained the most opens and clicks.
Also, if your company offers services and products to various industries, then the best time can vary based on the ideal customer profile and buyer personas that you have defined.
So, you must determine the best time to send B2B emails for each buyer persona. If you have segmented the email contacts then finding such data shouldn’t be difficult for you.
10. Make Your Newsletter Emails Scannable
Again, your email recipients are busy and you cannot expect them to go through your newsletters every time. But it doesn’t mean that he/she cannot grasp the information from your newsletter.
You just have to make it easier for them to get the gist of your email by scanning through it (not like a robot, but kinda).
In simple words, you have to make your newsletters scannable just like this blog post. Even if you won’t be reading this blog post thoroughly, you could get the ideas to improve your email campaign performance just by reading the subheadings.
Similarly, you can use the subheadings and headings in your newsletter emails so that people can quickly understand the point of each section without reading the whole thing.
You can also use images like the Hootsuite newsletter to make it even easier for your recipients to understand.
Also, remember that most of the emails are opened on mobile devices so making the scannable newsletter can be helpful for your audience to read without putting much effort into it.
Wrapping up
Email marketing has been proven to be one of the effective marketing channels for B2B businesses. You can always rely on email marketing in order to generate B2B sales. In this article, I tried to cover some of the most important tips that can help you generate better conversions from your email marketing campaigns.
So, what do you think about the role of email marketing in B2B? Let me know in the comments below.