B2B email marketing is time-consuming, complicated, challenging, and at times, taxing. Unlike B2C communications, traditional marketing concepts like FOMO and sales hacks like lowballing or foot-in-the-door (FITD) aren’t practical. Instead, you must have a comprehensive repository of market insights, dedicated content teams that churn relevant, insightful content pieces, and a state-of-the-art customer database that covers their journey and credentials.
No doubt, you will need to pour in enormous effort to keep your automation experts, HTML email developers, content marketers, and QA team working in the same direction. It becomes difficult to generate extraordinary results, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t deliver higher performance. In this article, we will walk you through five power-packed tips that will help you win big with small efforts in B2B email marketing.
Let’s begin:
Table of Contents
Level Up Your Targeting Strategies
As a rule of thumb, all B2B emails are directed towards the working title and not the decision maker. It is observed that most B2B marketers are focused only on work titles, and they miss out on the rest of the context, leading to epic targeting mistakes. While it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use their names in your emails (personalization), you must pay due diligence to the fact that your email must serve the recipient and anyone else who is a part of the decision-making process.
Generally, you can bucket the recipients into initiators-users, gatekeepers, decision influencers, and buyers/deciders. Your targeting strategies must be based on where the recipient fits into either of these buckets and what equation they share with the rest of the actors in their work hierarchy.
Rethink Your Email Content Strategy Often
Another tactic that consumes lesser time but can potentially make a huge difference is to rethink and recalibrate your B2B email content strategy. As time passes, we are witnessing unparalleled volatility from the Covid-19 economic crisis and work-from-home model to restructurings amidst the ongoing recession. If these changes haven’t been reflected in your email content strategy, it is high time you take cognizance of these major developments.
It is natural for your target audience to experience these changes and expect you to update the content to resonate with their evolving wants, needs, fears, and careers. You can start by using tools like BuzzSumo to identify the trending content and monitor your email metrics to identify the combination of tonality and topics that work the best for your brand.
Run Your Email Efforts On The Basis Of Buyer POV
When any B2B email marketing plan is developed, it takes into account both seller and buyer points of view. But with the passing of time, marketers end up emphasizing the seller POV over the buyer POV due to their constant focus on the targets and their company. Thus, it is necessary that you take time to evaluate the ongoing email efforts and recenter the focus on the buyers’ point of view.
This way, your email campaigns will become and stay more relevant to the buyer, boost brand association, as well as help them advance into your sales funnel. While it doesn’t require any major changes in your existing operations, balancing buyers’ needs and benefits with your surely adds to your email campaign’s ROI over time.
Divide Your Campaigns Into Small, Dynamic Stages
Unlike B2C email campaigns, B2B campaigns are both lengthy and have multiple variables and decision-makers involved. As a result, you must avoid building an email marketing plan with little room for changes. Running an email campaign should be a dynamic process since your recipients might witness a change in their priorities, budgets, requirements, and aspirations.
Thus it is important for B2B marketers to ensure that the email campaigns are run in multiple, small stages and that the next stage can be altered based on the results. This way, it becomes easier to drive results as you have a more realistic understanding of how subscribers interact with different information sets. This strategy helps fix any leaks in your sales funnel that can be attributed to poor targeting, personalization, segmentation, and content strategy.
Implement Dynamic Segmentation And Dynamic Content-Based Automation Workflows
The above tactics are all focused on introducing dynamism to your email efforts, but the most important part of instilling these tips in your efforts is to use dynamic segmentation in your automation workflows. In fact, automation is now a standard part of email marketing across all sectors and industries. This makes it imperative that businesses need to go beyond regular automation workflows when considering email marketing.
For B2B email marketing, this comes in the form of the combination of dynamic segmentation and dynamic content blocks. At times, it is not possible to develop entirely different sets of email templates or content, and it won’t be necessary as well. Dynamic segmentation helps you identify the recipient’s interests accurately, and dynamic content blocks help you resonate with them. Even if you need to hire email template developer, it’s a must-have part of your email strategy as you can run campaigns more effectively while keeping the costs down.
Wrap Up
B2B email marketers have a lot to take care of since they need to integrate multiple interests and perspectives, but it’s necessary to focus on the core part- email marketing. The above tips will help you make better choices and scout for the right insights when running B2B email campaigns, but most importantly, they will help you ensure long-term success without moving mountains.
Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, that specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on email marketing blog.