Email marketing is one of the most crucial tools in the armory of a digital marketer. And marketing professionals need to understand how to best use email marketing to reach their objectives.
You never know what 2023 will bring new email marketing difficulties or opportunities.
Given that over 293 billion emails are sent daily, it’s impossible not to pose the question: How can you make your company stand out and increase sales by increasing open and click-through rates?
Here are five simple steps to follow while crafting your email marketing strategy.
1. Create Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are fictitious portrayals of your ideal clients. Individual factors such as age, geography, work function, income, and preferred social media and marketing platforms create B2C buyer personas.
B2B buyer personas include information relevant to the sort of business you are targeting. This comprises business size, industry location, employment role(s), budget, and potential pain areas.
Tips for developing buyer personas
Talking to people and learning as much as you can about their businesses is essential if you want to create comprehensive buyer personas.
- Talk to industry insiders: Tap into your current network of connections and ask them questions about the types and sizes of firms interested in your product, who the decision-makers might be, and what difficulties they face.
- Existing consumers should be polled: Send a survey to current customers to get as much information as possible about their specific position and company information. You may increase response rates by incentivizing the survey with an Amazon gift card or a discount on their bill.
2. Grow Your Email List
It makes no difference if you just have ten people on your email list as long as they are ten relevant contacts who are interested in what you’re selling.
You can build your email list organically. Building takes longer than buying a list, but it produces greater results for your B2B email marketing. If you’ve previously built buyer personas, this will be considerably easier.
Tips for growing your email list
- Contact Your Network: You can think of a few people interested in your product if you think back on your career. Contact them and ask whether they would want to receive your emails. You may also share information about joining your list with your network on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
- Make a Registration Form: Consider the information you’ll need from possible leads, such as company size, industry, and if they’re the decision-maker. Also, optimize this form to appear in search engines, as many consumers begin their product search on Google.
- Use Data Intelligence Platform: B2B email providers offer data intelligence platforms that take all the guesswork out of the B2B list building. Data platforms allow you to access data in one place. Given that, don’t be tempted to acquire B2B email marketing lists blindly since this may turn off potential clients, as no one enjoys receiving emails they didn’t sign up for. Look for data providers that are CCPA and GDPR-compliant. Platforms like ZoomInfo, SalesIntel, etc., have the largest database but offer limited access to users. So while choosing, you should explore the ZoomInfo alternatives.
3. Segment Your Customers
Customer segmentation is the same for B2C and B2B email marketers.
You don’t want to send the same material to everyone on your email list, so you should categorize your consumers. This enables you to deliver more targeted email messages.
The segments you construct for B2B email marketing may differ slightly. Different employment functions within the same organization (for example, accountant versus CFO), business size, industry, and budget are examples of this.
Tips to segment your customers
Not all prospects want the same thing. That is why, to obtain better outcomes, it is critical to establish a plan for distributing to a smaller group, or segment, of prospects and customers.
- Consider your buyer personas: Consider the characteristics you provided to your target audience while creating buyer personas. You might combine many factors, such as job title and geography, to create more targeted segmentation.
- Use your existing data: This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about your consumers and prospects. Examine your data for trends. Perhaps you discover that many of your project managers work in organizations with less than ten people, and none have made a purchase. Create a segment with these characteristics and give them appealing material to interest them about your products.
4. Prioritize Drip Campaigns
Drip campaigns, also known as auto-responders or automation, are an effective way to nurture consumers down the sales funnel.
Drip campaigns are automatic email sequences initiated when a consumer does a specified action, such as subscribing to an email newsletter.
Instead of having to generate follow-up emails for each consumer manually, the emails are sent out automatically.
Because B2B email marketers typically deal with a lengthy sales cycle, drip tactics are critical to keeping consumers engaged at all stages of the life cycle.
Tips for prioritizing drip campaigns
- Identify triggers: Consider the behaviors that clients may conduct that may lead to valuable drip marketing. Signing up for an email list is an excellent example but strive to design drip campaigns tailored to your company. This may be a drip campaign initiated by a demo request if you’re a software seller. This may be a request for a product catalog if you own a stationery firm.
- Make compelling material: You must have content ready for each stage of the drip campaign, and it must be relevant and interesting. Invest in high-quality content marketing to advance leads to the next level of the sales process.
5. Hyper-Personalization of Email Marketing
The ultimate objective of every email marketing strategy is to increase income. Marketers have realized that one of the greatest methods to accomplish so is through total customization of user experience over the previous several years.
Personalization might have a negative impact on the outcome of your campaign. 94% of consumers report taking at least one of the following steps after receiving a non-personalized or mistargeted email…
- 68% of emails are automatically deleted
- 54% of people unsubscribe from emails
- 45% of emails are classified as trash or spam
- 29% become less likely to purchase things
- 13% visit the website on a less frequent basis
- 10% never return to the website
Source: V12
Lack of email marketing campaign customization can result in anything from mailing list deterioration to the email marketing campaign failing due to increasing costs. Personalization also provides several additional statistically demonstrated advantages…
This is a very hot trend, and the value of personalization grows by the day. That is why, in 2023, the corporate sector is predicted to focus on email marketing hyper-personalization rather than merely personalizing elements of campaigns. Profit from this trend…
- Messages and advertising should be tailored to each audience category
- Product or content recommendations should be made based on the audience segment
- Send triggered emails in response to visitor behavior
- Individually recommended items or content
Takeaway: Be Innovative
Having so many opportunities for growth and success is what makes email marketing both a difficult and exciting process.
The competition encourages innovation, pushing out once-effective practices. Email marketing is the most cost-effective and scalable marketing strategy. If you frequently overhaul your email marketing plan to keep up with all the newest trends, it will continue to be a gift that keeps on giving.
Focusing on these five ways makes an excellent foundation for developing well-planned plans that, when properly implemented, will result in increased sales.
