Email marketing is still the workhorse when it comes to B2B marketing, both as a way to reach potential prospects and as a way to reach out to existing customers. But how do you stand out in the crowd when potentially hundreds of other companies are also sending marketing email messages to those very same people? If you want to boost your open rates and stand out from the crowd, you have to think about your email marketing strategy differently.
Segment Your Email Database
Not every name in the database is the same, and so not every message that’s being sent out should be the same. This may sound obvious, but it’s always surprising how many B2B marketing departments don’t take the next step to segment their database. This segmentation needs to go beyond just “customer” or “prospect” – it should take into account an individual’s position or role within the company, any previous contact points with the organization, and the specific point of the buyer’s journey.
When you’re able to finely tune this segmentation, you can streamline your email marketing strategy. Instead of the infamous “email blast” where everyone gets the same message at the same time on the same day of the week, you can be a lot smarter about what type of message you send out, and when.
Personalize your Message
The biggest misconception about B2B marketing is that it’s just two businesses talking to each other. “Business to business,” right? Wrong. It’s two people talking to each other. As a result, you have to think about ways to personalize your message so that it’s clear it’s coming from a person, not from a bland, generic corporation.
There are plenty of ways to personalize an email message. One easy way is to make the message from an actual person not from the company. Another easy way to personalize the message is to use the first name of the recipient. There’s no better sound than the sound of one’s first name, and that’s why this technique is so effective. If given a choice between a bland, generic email and one that’s been addressed to them by name, guess which one a recipient is going to open?
But even beyond these basic tactics, there are plenty of ways to personalize a message. For example, you can think of ways to make the message more “conversational” so that it’s actually interesting to read. This doesn’t mean inserting a whole lot of emoticons into the message and using slang terms – but it does mean explaining what your company does in terms that people actually understand.
There are a number of tech-savvy email vendors out there who can help you with personalizing your email marketing campaigns. For example, Mailjet is an all-in-one solution to send, track and deliver marketing emails. It’s all cloud-based, so you can access it on your mobile device. And it also becomes easier to run some pretty sophisticated metrics, to see how your emails are performing over time.
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If you’re finding that your open rates and click through rates are declining, that’s when you need to move to Plan B. By thinking of ways to segment your email database and ways to personalize your email messages, you’ll be a lot closer to optimizing the results of your 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.