It’s easy to think of any B2B email marketing campaign as something that churns along, week after week, slowly picking up new email addresses and delivering a few sales along the way. But that’s thinking small. You need to think big. Here are 5 ways you can optimize your B2B email marketing campaign.
Tip #1: Take advantage of the Thursday-to-Sunday cycle
In the B2C world, Tuesday is the big day to send out emails and announce new product releases. But in the B2B world, everything revolves around Thursday. In fact, it’s been proven that Thursday has the highest email open rates of any day of the week.
It’s all part of what some marketers refer to as the “Thursday-to-Sunday cycle.” Key decision-makers open the emails on Thursday, then do a bit of research and follow up over the weekend, and then first thing Monday, they are making calls. That’s why more and more marketers are re-thinking the weekend. It used to be the case that you didn’t send out emails on a Saturday or Sunday, but that’s no longer the case.
Tip #2: Personalize your email communications
There’s nothing that can boost open rates and click-through rates like personalizing emails that you send out. Just by adding the recipient’s name, you are increasing the odds of that person actually opening the email. And if you can include some type of personalized content in the subject heading, all the better. The good news is that there are plenty of email vendors – such as iContact – that can help you set up a personalized email campaign that syncs up with your CRM.
Tip #3: Optimize for mobile
The days of business decision-makers reading their emails on desktops or even laptops is coming to an end. Mobile is rapidly catching up as the preferred way that business leaders read their emails. That means you need to be optimizing your emails for mobile devices. Long, text-heavy emails are impossible to manage on a mobile device, so go for shorter, more visual emails with a very clear call-to-action (preferably one with a big, visible CTA button!).
Tip #4: Embrace marketing automation
Marketing automation turns the manual process of sending out emails into a highly automated, efficient process. Moreover, marketing automation means that you can carry out very specific types of email campaigns – such as “drip” marketing campaigns that can be activated after key corporate events (e.g. trade shows, exhibitions).
Tip #5: Target emails according to stages of the customer journey
The “one-size-fits-all” email is no longer effective. What’s needed now is a way to target specific emails, depending on the stage of the customer journey. For example, a customer at the early stage of the journey may need more information that’s oriented around brand awareness. A customer in the middle of the journey may need more information about the specifications and details of your product, in order to be able to make the best possible purchase decision.
With these 5 tips, it will be possible to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your B2B email marketing campaign.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.