Editor's Note: Samantha Prowell is a marketing strategist and educator, who joins us today to explain how and why B2B businesses should employ email marketing strategies.
In recent times, B2B marketers have focused on reaching new customers through blogs and social media. While these are excellent strategies, email marketing is still a cost-effective and highly profitable way to generate leads and build long-term relationships with clients. A smartly designed email marketing campaign can help you to engage in sales talk with your promising leads and connect more closely with your most valuable clients.
In this article, we will discuss specific ways in which email marketing can benefit your B2B company, and the best strategies for implementing an email marketing strategy into your workflow. Let’s get started -
How Email Marketing Can Benefit Your B2B Company
Let’s discuss why your organization should focus on implementing effective B2B email marketing strategies.
Take a look at these stats on email marketing to understand our point:
- According to Experian, if you invest $1 on email marketing you get an average return of $44.25.
- ExactTarget indicates that 77% of customers will give permission to receive marketing content via email.
- Earnest Agency states that 72% of B2B purchasers share relevant content using email.
These stats demonstrate that email marketing remains a very effective strategy, and prospects respond well to the personalized nature of promotional emails. A properly executed strategy can help B2B companies:
- Improve engagement and interest from prospects
- Get more leads and sign-ups from interested parties
- Boost the conversion rate of your sales funnel, and finally
- rake in more dollars.
Put simply, if your B2B company isn’t equipped to manage an email marketing program, there is a lot you’ll miss out on as a result. If you don’t have one already, let’s dive into some practical tips to help you get kickstarted:
Choose a Reliable Email Service Provider (ESP)
A definite first step will be signing up to a high quality ESP. These services will allow you to manage email campaigns and lists from a web-based interface. A good ESP is essential for a successful email marketing campaign, and should enable you to format your email messages with a custom layout, links, images and other features.
The best ESPs also offer personalization, automation, and advanced analytics tools. They may also provide training materials, education programs, and free coaching to help you make effective use of their system.
Leading email service providers include MailChimp, Constant Contact, ExactTarget, Pardot, and HubSpot. You should read about these to assess which is best for you; most have free trials as well, so you can try before committing.
Offer Free Content
If you have a blog or social media page, you’re probably already doing this: the best way to raise engagement and keep the attention of prospects is by offering useful content that matches their interests. Smart companies understand that they need to keep in touch with their prospects and existing customers, so they don’t stop with social media - they also use email.
With an email marketing program, you can and should share white papers, eBooks, blog posts and other content relevant to your marketing goals and initiatives via email. Not only that, but offering free content of this kind is a great way to build your email list: by offering to send content to customers via their email address, they get valuable information, and you get a new prospect.
Nominate an ESP Specialist in Your Team
To make the best use of features and tools offered by the ESP, it is a good idea to designate a member of your team as ESP specialist. This employee should manage all contacts within the ESP, and ensure that the vendor is providing for the needs of your enterprise. By designating someone for this task, you can stay on top of campaigns, utilize features for efficiently, and address problems as soon as they arise.
Build a List of Interested Subscribers
Your email marketing campaign will be more effective if you target it towards an interested audience. For this reason, you should carefully develop your subscriber list, curate, and tag it appropriately. This will help you to prepare and send relevant and useful emails that meet your objectives. Your lists should be specific to your industry or business and designed with your marketing goals in mind.
Segment Your Audience
Segmentation is an important step that helps you to narrow down your subscribers into groups that will respond best to certain messages. For instance, if you want to engage your most loyal and profitable clients, you can segment them into a particular group based on this demographic and send them relevant event announcements, blog posts, and special offers. In the end, segmentation takes a little work that goes a long way in focusing your energies where they count the most.
Automate Your Campaign
Use your ESP’s automation features to communicate with prospects and existing clients in a relevant and timely manner. For example, an auto responder enables you to contact those who download content or fill out a form on your site. You can often create an autoresponder to contact new users and subscribers to your newsletters, and engage them with interesting content or start conversations.
Use of RSS-to-Email
RSS-to-email makes it easy to send out a newsletter whenever you post a new content piece to your blog or website. The advantage of this feature is, however irregular your content schedule may be, your subscribers can receive newsletters only when new content is published.
Nurture Promising Leads
Create an email campaign tailored for “hot” leads that have expressed a certain amount of interest. Pay special attention to those who are apparently sitting on the fence about making a product purchase, and give them a helpful push by providing special offers that can convert them into buyers.
Some leads can take a while to make up their minds, and that’s okay. Be prepared to contact them consistently over weeks or months, though in moderation, and only with relevant content or offers. Keep them interested in your offerings using appropriate blogs posts or other content pieces which relate to the subjects they care about.
Conclusion
Marketing professionals have a responsibility to enhance their company brand with messages over multiple channels and media. They have a further responsibility to aid their sales team in closing deals, generating revenue and boosting company profits. For this reason, email marketing strategies and campaigns are an important part of every B2B lead generation effort. Whether you’ve tried email marketing before or are brand new to the game, try one of the above strategies in your workflow, and learn more in one of our classes.
Learn more with these related OMI classes:
Creating and Curating Content People Love
How to Build a Lead Nurturing Campaign
Visit the Online Marketing Institute to browse over 400 classes in the digital and social media marketing space.