Did you know that there are 3.9 billion daily email users? That represents a huge opportunity for your B2B organization to enhance its B2B Inbound Marketing strategy and improve profits through email marketing.
In this blog, we’re going to take a quick look at why email marketing is so important for the growth of your company, along with five simple steps that will help you build a successful B2B email marketing program.
Before we get into that, here’s how HubSpot describes email marketing:
“You should use email to build upon an existing relationship with your subscribers and leads by providing relevant, valuable information that will help them take action on their goals.
“That’s right, email marketing isn’t just about you, or your company. It’s about your customer.”
Why email marketing is a crucial aspect of your B2B Inbound Marketing strategy
If you already have an Inbound Marketing strategy set up, or you are thinking about building one, then you’ll know just how important relevant, timely and valuable content is to not just pushing prospects down the marketing funnel - but also genuinely helping them.
Well, email marketing is no different - the only difference is that these prospects or customers have already willingly given your business their contact information. That means they care about what your organization has to say, making emails a highly-effective marketing strategy.
Here’s a few statistics from the Content Marketing Institute's report that show why B2B email marketing is so important:
- 87% of B2B marketers say email is one of their top free organic distribution channels.
- 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.
- 90% of content marketers say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance.
So, how exactly can your organization build a successful B2B email marketing strategy that not only helps your revenue goals, but also improves your relationships with prospects and current customers?
We’ve created a five-step guide to seamless B2B email marketing here:
1 - Build your B2B email marketing plan
As with an Inbound Marketing program, the first step of successful B2B email marketing is creating a strategy. You need to define what you want to achieve (is it prospect education, more leads or simply enhancing your brand reputation?), and you need to define how you will measure success.
Things to consider when building your B2B email marketing program should include:
- Tailoring content to your buyer personas and what stage of the buyer’s journey your email marketing list is currently in.
- Establish goals that you want to achieve.
- Create a plan for how you will get contacts to sign up for your emails.
- Define how you will measure those goals, and then measure them!
Create a consistent email marketing schedule that you will stick to, but can adapt easily depending on what you find from your analysis.
2 - Choose an ESP
An email service provider (ESP) allows your organization to send build, and send, email campaigns to a list of email subscribers. These providers make it easy for your business to build email lists, send emails and create campaigns, and then measure your results through key performance indicators (KPIs)
The most popular ESPs that your organization may want to consider include HubSpot, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and Exact Target.
3 - Build your B2B email marketing list
The success of your B2B email marketing strategy hinges on the email lists you build around it. The stronger your list of contacts, the better your email campaigns will perform. You want a list built up of prospects and customers who genuinely want to hear from you, and who will greatly benefit from the content you are sending them.
Use lead generation tactics on your website and enticing email opt-in forms to build a list of prospects who find your content truly valuable. Segmenting these lists further will help to ensure you send the right emails to the right people, at the right time.
4 - Start creating emails that convert
You have a plan in place, you have an ESP ready to start building campaigns and your email marketing list is ready… What are you waiting for? It's time to start creating emails that push your prospects further down the funnel!
Email marketing is forever evolving, but best practices include writing a strong subject line, keeping your emails concise but valuable to your prospects, and including at least one call to action.
Here are some current email marketing trends that can help you improve conversion rates.
5 - Use B2B email marketing analytics to measure performance
B2B email marketing, like any type of marketing, is a game of trial and error. Your business will only really know what’s working for you and what’s not by diving into your email marketing analytics. This will help you to make smarter, and more strategic, email marketing decisions moving forward that positively impact your bottom line.
Effective ways to analyze how successful your email marketing program is include, A/B testing, reviewing KPIs (such as clickthrough rate, unsubscribes, open rate etc.) and adjusting different element of your emails (such as subject lines and layout) to see which designs/content lead to improved metrics.
We hope this blog helps! If you want to learn more about building a successful B2B email marketing strategy that generates leads and boosts your company’s profitability? Contact The Brit Agency today. We’d love to answer any questions that you may have.