93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content, according to Content Marketing Institute. If you’re looking to improve your email marketing results, implement these five email marketing best practices!
Email is perhaps the best medium for B2B organizations to generate leads and drive conversions. The success of an email marketing campaign is measured by its deliverability and the subsequent metrics such as the open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate.
In this article, we share five easy-to-implement email marketingOpens a new window best practices for your B2B brand.
1. Keep Your Email List Clean
16.3% of all emails either don’t reach the user’s inbox or get trapped in the spam folder. One surefire way to prevent this from happening is to purge your email list periodically.
The open rate may be affected due to users quitting organizations (hence no longer able to access their email addresses), subscribers growing disinterested in your emails, or forgetting to update their preferences. Wrong email addresses or expired domain names can lead to a high bounce rate.
A high bounce rate and low open rate can lower your sender reputation and deliverability rate, further impacting the campaign performance. Therefore, it’s imperative to clean your email list periodically. You can do this in the following ways:
- Enable a double opt-in to get legitimate subscribers
- Remove duplicate email addresses
- Delete emails with expired domain names, i.e., hard or soft bounces
- Re-engage inactive subscribers; if they don’t react, remove them from the list
Learn More: What is Email Automation? Definition, Benchmarks, Marketing Best Practices with ExamplesOpens a new window
2. Optimize the Email Content for Accessibility
A piece of common advice given when it comes to writing email content is to write short emails. While the advice is not wrong considering how people consume online content, there’s a better way to do this. An effective alternative to shorter emails is to optimize emails for accessibility. Here’s how you can do it:
- Subject Line: Keep the subject line crisp. Entice the user to open the email by creating a sense of urgency.
- Preview Text: Look at the preview/pre-header text as an extension of the subject line. You can increase the open rate by adding an action verb in the preview text. You can also use the call and response technique (used primarily by blues musicians to emulate human conversations). To use this technique, can pose a question (the call) in the subject line to create curiosity, and answer (the response) it in the preview text.
- Scannable Content: The readers should get the gist of your email just by glancing at it. Mention the important information in bullet points. You can put the essential information in images as well, but be concise.
3. Stick to Fewer Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
The ideal number of CTAs in an email should be one, but it may not be possible all the time. For instance, marketers may include two different CTAs such as Request a Demo and Sign-up for a Free Trial in the same email to boost response.
Although this might seem like a good tactic, it doesn’t contribute to high CTR and conversions. You may have noticed that the above-the-fold section on the homepage of B2B SaaS product websites have only one prominent CTA. That’s because it’s effective to direct the user to the key action before their attention scatters in other directions.
Therefore, the prominent CTA should drive the campaign goal, i.e., downloads, product sign-ups, or sales. The secondary CTA should be hyperlinked to an anchor text to draw less attention towards it.
Learn More: Email Marketing Manager: Role, Skill Set, and Job DescriptionOpens a new window
4. Segment Your Audience
Segmentation is the foundation for personalization. There are different techniques to segment your audience, such as demographics, psychographics, geographic, and behavioral.
Here are a few other segmentation techniques:
- Engagement Level: If you’re offering a discount on your offerings, you can create two different lists for active and dormant subscribers. You can see a rise in the open rate and CTR by merely customizing the messaging for each group.
- Purchase History: For the same campaign, you can also create distinct segments with different messaging for thrift and discount shoppers. Although these shoppers may appear similar due to their reluctance to spend exorbitantly, their motivations are often different.
5. Use Personal Sender Names
Besides the powerful personalization features by email marketing automation softwareOpens a new window , you can personalize the email experience by using unique sender names. Sending emails from a human name gives a touch of personalization and makes the experience more human.
Depending on engagement levels, you can also distinguish senders based on the category of emails. For example, Buffer uses different sender names for blog and product updates.
Learn More: Top 10 Best Email Marketing Services Software Platforms for 2020Opens a new window
Closing Words
We’ve covered the basic email marketing techniques here. Of course, you can aim for more advanced practices to boost your campaign performance, but it’s the simple things that matter.
By focusing on these best practices, you will see a significant rise in your email metrics such as the open rate, CTR, and ultimately conversions.