Email marketing is an essential part of business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategies. Email marketing campaigns build relationships with business prospects, gather important data and improve marketing returns on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, many businesses fall short on the returns.
To conduct successful email marketing campaigns, B2B businesses must pay attention to their audiences and avoid blatant self-promotion. Too many self-promotional messages will send those emails straight to the trash before prospects even open them. Here are seven tips for successful B2B email marketing campaigns that will boost leads and returns.
“Batch and blast” is a popular email marketing method. This approach involves collecting or “batching” email contacts and blasting all of them with email messages. Unfortunately, this does nothing to start a dialogue with business prospects. Successful email marketing encourages meaningful conversations.
Marketing metrics are important, but smart B2B marketing analysis moves beyond click through rates. Businesses that run successful campaigns pay attention to how many prospects visit their website and when, where they go on the site and how they can be grouped according to their online behaviors.
Behavioral data is important for B2B businesses because it allows them to segment their prospects into groups. Knowing who opened an email or who downloaded an offer can help businesses target and tailor future email campaigns to the right audiences.
Email campaigns are more than simple communication; they share a message about a product, service, business or brand. Successful businesses use these campaigns to tailor their email messages according to prospects’ profiles, behaviors and interests. It’s acceptable to send different emails to different segments of an email list, and automation solutions free up time for relationship-building.
Businesses avoid under-performance when they mix their campaign styles and methods. It’s also helpful to test the campaigns with different delivery times, surveys, videos and other types of content. According to this site, professional content and revenue services make this process easier.
Testing and analysis are essential for B2B email marketing campaigns. Most businesses use standard A/B testing to focus on subject lines, images, copy changes and other email revisions. Smart businesses don’t spend hours crunching numbers, but they make good use of their reporting dashboards. The test data helps them understand their prospects and improves their future marketing campaigns.
Email marketing campaigns build relationships over time. By checking in with their prospects every now and then, businesses keep the lines of communication open and gain helpful feedback. This reminds prospects that real people exist behind the branded email messages.
B2B marketing strategies are incomplete without email marketing campaigns. However, successful email campaigns require more than zealous “batch and blast” efforts. Marketing emails send a message, start conversations and build relationships over time. By following the above tips, businesses will get to know their prospects better, increase their leads and boost returns on their marketing investments.
