Fact: 33% of B2B marketers put email among their top sources for marketing and sales leads in 2018.1 So, why is it so hard to send good email?
As B2B customers start to shop more like B2C consumers, marketing managers must change their approach to email marketing to meet the new needs of customers. These new needs include convenience and immediacy, a single source for purchasing and modifying purchases, a frictionless buying process and accessible education and support resources.
In this new era of B2B marketing, customers’ needs are all directly related to personalization. Your marketing emails need to be personalized, succinct and centered on your customers priorities.
We’ve compiled this list of B2B email marketing do’s and don’ts to help you break through the clutter of the modern B2B shopper’s inbox. These pointers will keep your emails read, relevant and out of the spam folder.
Move Forward with These Do’s
- Get personal
With the considerable batching and testing capabilities of most modern email platforms, it’s easier than ever to personalize and segment emails. Segmented campaigns tend to perform more successfully because the reader has specific interest in the contents of the email. So, the more specific you can make your emails to the reader, the better off you’ll be.
In this case study, learn how one software company increased leads by 700% in one year with targeted email campaigns for each of their three buyer personas.
- Keep it short and sweet
As more and more customers read their emails on phones, having a mobile-friendly layout is a must. What looks like a short paragraph on your PC looks like a daunting mass of words on a phone screen. Be sure that your agency or in-house designer is creating emails with a mobile-first mindset. - Ask questions
This is the age of conversational marketing, and email is a powerful tool to keep the conversation going. If you choose an email platform like HubSpot, you can send intelligent emails that give readers the chance to reply to easy, straightforward questions. This boosts your engagement and keeps your contacts interacting with you, rather than just receiving, reading and deleting your messages. - Use preview text
Preview text is the portion of an email’s body text that can be seen before a customer opens an email. The maximum number of preview text characters visible on screen varies depending on the platform the recipient is reading emails on, but a conservative guideline is about 50 characters with spaces. - Make the path clear
Email has come a long way. Where before hyperlinks in emails had to be long and unsightly, now almost anything can be hyperlinked. Sleek buttons and clickable images make it easier than ever to direct readers to their next destination. Just make sure you’re not incorporating too many different call-to-actions. Having one main action for the recipient will increase the likelihood of conversion.
Push Pause on These Don’ts
- Put composition ahead of conversation
The new age of conversational marketing means that it’s no longer necessary for every B2B email to be a beautifully-formatted digitized newsletter. Sometimes the best marketing emails are short and sweet with just a few simple facts, like the date and time of a webinar you’re offering and a link to RSVP. Readers can appreciate that your emails are easy to read, particularly if they’re reading on their phones and your simplicity can save them some scrolling. - Have a “better too much than not enough” mindset
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the average office worker receives about 121 emails per day.2 You must find a way to be memorable without being annoying. The only way to do that is to be selective about the emails you send out. As we touched on with personalization, segmenting and batching the emails you send ensures your company neither repeats itself nor wastes your contacts’ time with messages that aren’t relevant to them. Segmenting by and within industry and by stages of the buyer’s journey are crucial to make sure the right messages get to the right people. - Forget the signature
Email signatures are often overlooked, but they’re one of your company’s most often-seen marketing materials. An aesthetically-pleasing, succinct banner in your email signature that promotes your latest offer is just another way to get readers interested. Services like Sigstr allow you to design and customize your email signatures with calls-to-action personalized to each department within your company.
We’re in a new world of B2B marketing where the focus is having a personalized, ongoing conversation with prospects and customers across all channels of communication. Just because email marketing is changing to fit the new way of communicating, it doesn’t mean that it has to be harder. With the right guidance and technologies, HubSpot, Drift and Sigstr, it can be easy to send an engaging, personalized email. If you need help making B2B emails more conversational and compelling, we’re happy to help.
Are you interested in B2B marketing services? Contact Sagefrog Marketing Group today.
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