Over the years, there have been a variety of different marketing channels that have come and gone. However, one channel that has remained consistently effective is email marketing. What are the reasons for this?
First, email marketing helps you stay top-of-mind with your customers and prospects, increase brand awareness, nurture leads, build relationships, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.
Second, email messages are typically shorter and more to the point than other forms of communication such as blog posts or videos.
Finally, email marketing is relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing such as PPC advertising, making it an especially attractive option for smaller businesses. For all these reasons, email marketing is proof that a winning concept can stay on top for a long time.
However, crafting the perfect email campaign isn’t easy. You need to understand how to create content that resonates with your audience and make sure it reaches them at the right time in their buying journey.
Luckily for you, we have put together a list of best practices that will help ensure your success in this arena. In this article, we will explore each of these practices in depth and show you how you can put them into action to maximize your results.
So, if you are ready to learn more about how to make your B2B email marketing efforts pay off, read on!
Who we are: With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech.
Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
If there’s any practice that has shown significant revenue improvement, email marketing stands out by a long shot. Specifically, for each $1 spent, $44.25 is the average ROI. With a lucrative B2B email marketing strategy, a lot of great things can happen. First comes increased engagement which drives leads. An increase in leads will result in more conversions. And guess what: more conversions entail more revenue. The circle is complete. For B2B, it is important to remember that 86% of professionals prioritise an email connection.
While this should be obvious, we will warn you right now: if you think a generic, broadcast email will automatically give you an endless revenue stream, you are sadly mistaken. While the marketing tactic can be seen as a reliable tool in your inbound marketing toolbox, it undoubtedly requires commitment and mastering the best practices of today. We’ve identified 9 meaningful email advertising strategies driving us forward in 2022.
We are living in an era where people are constantly on the move: going to the gym, commuting to and from work, traveling for work, enjoying hobbies and social events, you name it. We are always on the go, so how do you reach people who are never fully available? Today, 91.69% of the global population are actively using smartphones, and it’s safe to say that they are becoming a huge part of our daily life. In fact, it is determined that over 55% of emails are opened via a mobile device.
What can we learn from this? Knowing that almost half of the entire global population is on their smartphone while on the go, the best way your business can reach prospects is through their mobile devices, and by making sure any and all marketing campaigns are suited for being read on more than one device type. Right now, one in five email campaigns is not optimized for mobile devices. This is troubling information, knowing that mobile optimisation is at the focal point of the holistic digital marketing scene.
Optimising for mobile devices is more relevant than ever. This can be seen not only in email marketing but in all digital marketing areas. For instance, in the spring of 2022, Google is going to implement Mobile-First Indexing. That means Google will use mobile versions of company websites to determine their earned ranking.
An important part of succeeding with email marketing is to fully optimize your email content and landing pages for readers using their phones. The top four things you should look out for are:
This will enable you to keep a consistent user experience, no matter where (desktop or mobile) they open it and on what device.
Most open their emails on the go. Make your content enticing, engaging, and to the point, so it can resonate with users while on the bus, the plane, in the office, or anywhere else.
We consider anything from pictures, columns, paragraph sizes, readability, font sizes, and white space; anything that makes the experience as easy and comfortable for the reader as possible. And also, are you considering ‘the little things’, like thumb placement on the screen and what that does to the experience?
Avoid frustrating tap errors and keep your CTA size with at least 45 pixels to fit the finger comfortably. The easier and more accessible the button is, the more likely users will click on it.
One of the leading reasons for email marketing holding significant favor with B2B marketing teams specifically, is that this tactic has a high potential for creating a bond with the recipient and a unique ability to establish high-impact, personal touches, on a scale on which most other channels can’t compete.
However, to this day, 89% of B2B email campaigns are sent from company names, which means that the customer is having trouble connecting with you and your brand - they need a name to connect with and they need to know that you’re emailing them because you provide data that relates to their interests and needs in their buyer journey. Prominent lead generation trends suggest that 88% of recipients believe that personalised emails resonate with them much stronger than generic initiatives ever will.
When we introduce the personalization aspect to our clients’ email lead-gen initiatives, specific sender names, tailored messages, and characteristics triggers are crucial non-negotiables. Also, applying segmentation to your email list can lead to a 760% increase in revenue, which should lead you to the conclusion that segmentation can’t be overlooked.
There are many ways to incorporate personalization aspects into your email marketing campaigns, to ensure that your company achieves the highest level of ROI, CTR, and ‘open’ rates. The most effective tactics are the following:
Dynamic content and individualized messages that speak to the customers’ and prospective buyers’ needs, interests, or position in the brand’s life cycle, will provide B2B companies with a significantly higher ROI in the long term. We’ve seen that campaigns built on tailored outlines can perform up to 22% better on ROI alone. Also, with list segmentation, you can significantly drive higher open rates, fewer unsubscribers, and increased sales leads.
Creating a tailored experience for users has been an outspoken necessity for years, and the importance of it keeps increasing. As users are growing far more sophisticated, businesses’ outreach models need to grow correspondingly. To explain why personalisation is a key component of B2B email marketing best practices, here are some stats to contemplate:
Personalization has long been the key to relevancy, and the trend continues to grow in 2022. Data show that personalisation needs to be adapted if you want to compete, stay relevant, and remain included in the customers’ and prospective buyers’ email inboxes. If you are still hesitating as a B2B marketer, we’d like to remind you that 65% of business buyers will potentially switch brands if suppliers don’t personalise communications.
In the coming years, the landscape for personalisation will be rapidly changing. While users are demanding higher degrees of personalisation, they’re also progressively cautious about their data. With data privacy and cookieless online experiences being the future, opting for tailored experiences will be a dynamic process with a demand for flexibility. To best address customer needs and tailor their experiences, 1:1 communication and quality-first outreach will be the way to gather user data in a manner that customers will gladly comply with.
There are many different views on this. One thing is clear: it is vital you don’t overwhelm your subscribers and contacts by sending out emails too often. But at the same time, you want to make sure you stay top of mind for them, and therefore have them interact with your brand often enough to ensure brand recognition and authority.
When we create an email marketing strategy with our clients, we typically want to target a frequency of 4-5 times a month. This is proven to be a favourable frequency rate. Truth is, upwards of 45% of subscribers will mark a sender as spam due to being contacted too often, so you really want to hit a mark that strikes in between spamming and being downright forgettable.
Importantly, the high frequency may keep your brand at the top of prospects’ minds, but not in a good way. If you are afraid of losing conversions as a result of sending fewer emails, remember that quality will always trump quantity. So make sure that you are creating personalised, intriguing send-outs to the right prospects, and you’ll have no need to worry.
As we mentioned in this year’s leading marketing trends, email remains the most popular marketing channel and generator of leads and revenue. It may feel like a natural response to think ‘ok, so we’ll invest fully in email marketing’. While we salute the hopefulness in that notion, the truth is that email marketing is good, but it’s not great. At least not on its own. Ultimately, good tends to turn into good enough (decent at best), and good enough is under no condition actually great (excellent). This is where the omni-channel factor comes into play.
To achieve maximum ROI, you need to expand your approach towards a more sophisticated standard and bring in other channels that provide even more information about your audience. By working with email marketing as an integrative part of a holistic marketing approach, we ensure that our frame of reference on our customer characteristics and data about their behaviour is broadened into a central integrated database environment.
This gives our clients the opportunity to evolve their marketing from one generic platform with generic messages, to an all-inclusive strategy where all the data they gain from other marketing efforts can be transmitted into highly specific, targeted messages based on segments. In our experience, this provides businesses with a more dynamic email setting and your inbox will start seeing significant interest as a result.
Okay, so we know that emails have been around a while. A long while, even. So there is definitely a need to keep modernising the tool for as long as it’s relevant. If you are a believer in tradition, let us demonstrate why modernising video has huge potential:
If you’re not familiar with the impact video content can have generally, then head on over to our previous blog post about social media trends for 2022.
When we create personalised videos, we focus on important attributes and traits like person/business name, personal connection factors, or industry specifics which are extra valuable to the targeted audience. We use the same characteristics and data as we would if creating personalised text-based content.
The potential in video email is clear: email is the most popular marketing tool today, and the popularity of video marketing is booming day by day. In fact, by 2022, 82% of all online content is predicted to be in video format. So what you are really doing is merging the standing leader with the leader to be, and bringing out the best in both. Most importantly, when adding videos to your email, you can increase the click rates by 300%.
When adopting video into your emails, marketers have the chance to create highly valuable, profitable campaigns. By providing actionable video content, we are able to not only deliver high value but build a rapport with our subscriber lists. The biggest wow-factor to this is that when your clients and prospects get to see you, that builds a deeper connection with the audience compared with what you could achieve by using most other methods.
These campaigns can look very different:
Another best practice is ensuring that the people you’ve targeted with your email campaign stay intrigued post-click. Your email should entice the reader to visit a landing page, and that landing page should direct them towards conversion; i.e., the campaigns must include purposeful landing pages to take the visitor from the click-through to the eventual conversion.
Targeted landing pages will help you optimise lead nurturing, can opt as a platform for engaging your existing customers, and attain powerful feedback and insight. We focus on getting visitors excited about what’s to come by signing up for trials or getting their hands on one-time-only discounts. One way of doing this is by leveraging the FOMO (fear of missing out) factor of our modern world and highlighting time-limited offers, amazing premium perks, or urgency in the availability of an offer.
Whatever wow-factor you decide to include on your landing page, make sure it speaks to the visitor you’re emailing; i.e., that the landing page serves the targeted audience. With this, there is also a need to ensure a cohesive design and structure throughout your website, email, and other platforms, to keep buyers coming back as a result of brand recognition.
We know it might sound strange to have to sort away potential clients on a list, but this best practice in email marketing has to do with the need to free your email list of accounts you just know aren’t creating value for you. Email list cleaning means clearing away outdated profiles or faulty data from your email database. Working either manually or automatically, email cleaning keeps your list from getting overwhelmed or downright toxic.
We always try to ensure that as many contacts as possible on our targeted email list start engaging, so if a lot of reach-outs are ignored, we know that we are wasting our time on that account. Also, some prospects may hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button, so those obviously also need to be cleared away immediately, unless your email marketing software does this automatically for you. To attain high engagement rates, continuously cleaning out an email list will boost your rates significantly while helping you build more meaningful relationships with people who are genuinely interested in your content and offerings.
The arrival of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), is something many feared would become a tough enemy for email ROI as we know it. Even inside the walls of SnellMedia, we had our concerns about what GDPR would mean for our marketing solutions going forward. In hindsight, we are very happy to see that, even if a few corporations experienced minor losses in list size, the regulation has done a lot more good than harm.
At SnellMedia, our focus is on quality over quantity. We want to make sure that the people we target on our clients’ behalf are quality leads that will transform into conversions. The arrival of GDPR actually means higher opt-in rates and deliverability. An impressive 75% of marketers say that their click-through rates are increasing since GDPR became a reality. In other words, smart cuts in list size will help increase the quality of campaign performance.
In 2022, marketers are well versed in handling GDPR and it’s no longer a cause for concern. Truth is, with guidelines like GDPR, what you put out is better, and follows the trail of email marketing best practices: being mindful of the user and their needs and requirements.
If we are all well acquainted with GDPR, why is this best practice still relevant in 2022? Expanding the efforts of data protection, Apple has launched an MPP (mail privacy protection) update in iOS 15. The MPP feature allows Apple users to protect their email activity with the ‘mail’ app, preventing third-party marketing services from tracking their email activities in 2022 and forward. The positive thing is that the only metric you’ll really have trouble tracking is open rates. We’ll take that as a ‘glass-is-half-full’.
Because, while the updates have an impact on your open rate data mining, your click-through, bounce, and unsubscribe data will remain intact. With this in mind, instead of listing the negatives, here’s how to optimise your B2B email strategy post-iOS 15:
As an email specialised digital marketing services agency, we know how to take care of marketing campaigns and sustain their efficiency. Just like any other marketing campaign, email marketing requires a margin for improvement, as preliminary runs won’t yield results right away. In order to sustain the efficiency and profitability of email campaigns, testing is everything.
If you want your email campaigns to succeed, you need to get acquainted with the world of A/B testing. At SnellMedia, we A/B test both broadcast and segmented email throughout a campaign, to ensure that both sides of the coin are performing on a sufficient level at the very least. More than that, we include tests on transactional emails (interaction exchange between supplier and customer) and any automated send-outs we transmit. All of this is to ensure a competitive edge and move the needle on performance towards new heights.
One important concept we apply in testing is the notion that small changes can create a big impact. Always test just one thing at a time. The reason for this is that multiple changes can make it difficult to determine what changes have impact. Knowing what is successful to one campaign makes it easier to get fast results for later campaigns when new data is applied. Run your campaigns to adequate test audiences, determine success factors, and keep track of all new findings. This best practice is extremely powerful for generating better results in 2022.
In 2023, the use of AI in email marketing is rapidly becoming a must-have for businesses looking to stay ahead of the competition. AI technology has revolutionized how companies communicate with their customers, allowing them to personalize each message and tailor it to individual preferences.
By incorporating AI, marketers can better understand their customers’ needs and interests, resulting in more relevant messages that are more likely to be opened and acted upon.
AI can help optimize campaigns by targeting specific segments of users with customized content, increasing the chance of conversion. With its ability to automate many tedious tasks such as sorting through customer data or creating personalized emails based on customer behavior patterns, AI helps marketers save time while still delivering powerful results.
Furthermore, using AI allows companies to quickly test different versions of an email campaign before sending it out – ensuring they get maximum ROI from every message sent.
Are you a B2B company looking to start a successful email marketing campaign in 2022? Or do you need help optimising your email marketing today? Do you feel that your email marketing has great potential, but you aren’t too sure how to optimise your leads or where to start?
In that case, look no further, ‘cause SnellMedia is here to guide you. As an experienced B2B digital marketing agency focusing in part on valuable email marketing solutions, we can build personalised, intriguing campaigns designed to maximise your ROI in 2022. If you’re curious to know more about what we do, and how we can help you grow your business online, feel free to reach out to us when you need us. We’d love to hear from you!
This article is part of our digital marketing trends series, showcasing the primary pillars of digital marketing that we at SnellMedia focus on; PPC, SEO, Social media, Email marketing, Web design, and content marketing.
With over 25 years of experience, SnellMedia has created thousands of successful B2B Google Ads campaigns for clients primarily in SaaS, Manufacturing Automation and Healthtech. Book a 30-minute consultation with a senior, Google-certified member of our team today. During the call, we’ll answer any Google Ads-related questions you have and audit your account to provide your marketing team with valuable feedback they can implement to double or maybe even triple your lead generation.
It is safe to say that email marketing is definitely useful and beneficial. That is why it is so popular today, especially among B2B marketers. Today, 84% of B2B marketers state that email marketing is their most successful marketing tool, and a whopping 93% of B2B marketers are continually using the marketing tactic. With a well thought out strategy, email marketing is one of the tools with the highest ROI potential.
To get a sizeable email list, it is important that you make use of all your channels. Import all of your current clients, use social media platforms and pop-ups on your website to create new engagement, and import subscribers from your website. You can also create different experiences to keep users entertained with interactive features like questionnaires, on-site games, and quizzes. Lastly, there is always the opportunity of buying a cold list from an email database vendor.
