While email marketing has been a steady warhorse of every B2B marketing campaign for years, there’s now growing concern that email as a digital platform could be losing some of its momentum. You can blame the information overload for that – as long as people continue to have their email inboxes fill up with newsletters from companies, it becomes increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter and find the ones they want to read.
So here are three ways that companies could update their B2B email marketing campaigns to bring in more leads in 2017:
#1: Optimizing for mobile
Mobile has just about reached a tipping point, where just as many business managers and executives read their emails on mobile devices as they do on their desktop. That’s pushing companies to really optimize for mobile. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to make sure the subject lines are optimized for mobile – there’s less physical screen size, so the subject lines need to be shorter and more evocative.
The next way to optimize for mobile is by making sure that the content is designed to be readable and engaging on mobile devices. The key here is video. Instead of a paragraph-long explanation of what your products and service do, why not just embed a video instead?
#2: Exploring new forms of email automation
There’s a lot of buzz surrounding “marketing automation,” or making it possible for companies to automate which emails go out to customers and when. Thus, all prospects who downloaded a whitepaper from your website might get a follow-up email exactly 30 days later.
But you can also think about automation from the customer’s perspective. By giving customers a choice of what topics, keywords or subjects they want in every email, you are giving them a chance to automate email delivery by themselves. When customers are choosing what type of content will appear in their newsletters, they are much more likely to click on them when they appear in the inbox.
One way of enabling the personalization of emails is by exploring online newsletter software, such as RapidMail, which enables you to customize email templates for the newsletters that go out to customers.
#3: Re-thinking the content in every email
For many companies, the email newsletter is a handy way to blast out broadcast messages, such as announcements of new products or new promotions. But that’s not why customers are signing up for your email newsletters – they are signing up because they want to be informed and educated. Thus, the focus should be on “usable” content rather than content that’s just been scraped from the latest
marketing campaign.
And there’s another way that content in email newsletters could change. There will be more emphasis on driving users to specific landing pages on the home website that are geared to specific industries and verticals. The fundamental insight here is that prospects and customers are looking for more information that is personalized and customized to their own needs. An email newsletter that ends with a call-to-action like “For more information on how healthcare providers are using our solution, check out the new case studies on our website” is going to be more effective than a general call to action.
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If B2B email marketing really is at a saturation point, you want to make sure that your company finds a way to keep people from tuning out or unsubscribing. While there’s no magic bullet solution, the 3 tips above could provide a real boost heading into 2017.
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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.