Email remains the undisputed king of B2B marketing and a favorite strategy for lead generation. In fact, according to a recent survey, 87% of B2B marketers use email to generate new leads. Moreover, 73% of B2B marketers say that email remains the clear No. 1 channel for nurturing new leads. Even if everything appears to be running as a finely tuned machine, though, there are always new ways to improve. With that in mind, here are five ways to turbo-charge your B2B email marketing.
#1: Create better welcome emails
Whenever a customer first signs up, it’s customary to send out a brief “welcome email.” But there’s a lot that you can include in these welcome emails that can help to get the relationship off on a fast footing. For example, you can include links to customer support or social media sites. Or you can include links to an introductory email or whitepaper.
#2: Integrate newsletter information into customer profiles
There’s a lot that you can learn about your customers by the way they interact with your email newsletters that go out weekly or monthly. If you can keep track of which links they are clicking on and which newsletter subject lines get them to open, you can enrich your basic behavioral profile of your customer. When you add that data to your CRM database, you have a very effective way to get better insights into your what your customers are thinking.
#3: Design all emails for mobile devices
The big change in email marketing is that more B2B decision-makers than ever before are opening your emails on mobile devices. That means you need to have a cleanly designed email that fits on a tiny screen (single columns, never two!), as well as very short email subject headers. The shorter the better.
#4: Embrace the three-second rule for email content
The three-second rule says that the core message of an email should be able to be absorbed within three seconds. Any more than that, and you risk losing the reader’s attention. Unfortunately, once you’ve lost their attention, it’s highly unlikely that the person will go back and read the email at a later date.
One way of grabbing the reader’s attention is by a clever use of headlines, images, bullet points, graphics and links. Think of subtly steering the viewer’s attention to a certain part of the email, where there is a very clear call to action.
#5: Continually A/B test to find the optimal email message
It almost goes without saying that you have to keep testing, to see what works, and what doesn’t. Marketers refer to this as A/B testing, and it basically means that you need to test two different pieces of content to see which one performs better. If you send out 1,000 “A” emails and 1,000 “B” emails, is there a significant difference in the open rates? Or the click-through rates? If there is, it could be a real clue that you can optimize your email marketing results.
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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.