In this article, I am going to share with you the 6 essential ways to boost your B2B email marketing results in 2023 and get more leads for your business. Nowadays marketers are having so many new options to reach prospective customers such as influencer marketing, social media marketing, chatbots, and other strategies to grow the business. But we should not forget about one of the oldest and still most effective digital marketing strategies email marketing.
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The ROI of email marketing is consistently delivering great results year after year. I have done small research about email marketing ROI and I have found out that since 2015 email marketing slightly improves the ROI.
So the goal of this video is to help you manage your email marketing to boost your email marketing results by implementing some of the most effective email marketing strategies that I have ever implemented for my clients’ business. These strategies are more like evergreen and I am sure if you implement any of these strategies, they will be effective in the next 5 years. Thus, I believe these are not much as strategies but principles as strategies change every time with new technologies and so on, but principles stay. So let’s look at some essential ways how to boost your email marketing results in 2023:
1. Focus on Omnichannel Engagements to Improve Marketing Results
The first way of how you can boost your email marketing results is by understanding and improving your omnichannel engagements and follow your engagement journey as recent studies show that at the end of 2023, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
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We know that driving lead generation with content marketing is based on delivering a proactive and compelling experience at every touchpoint with the customers and provide an educational experience. And the way how we engage with our prospects and customers directly reflects how well our organization is united because one of the biggest challenges that you must first solve is aligning multiple departments together like Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Service. This is essential as engagement is the building block of successful email marketing campaigns. Adobe found that companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies enjoy a 10% Y-O-Y growth, a 10% increase in average order value, and a 25% increase in close rates. So, to successfully launch your email marketing campaigns and improve your marketing results, your organization must focus on the omnichannel engagement journey and satisfy customers’ and prospects’ information needs along the way. Your brand must orchestrate all their potential email interactions with customers based on their needs and use some of the modern technologies to email follow up with customers. A great example is Fiverr and how they are using trigger emails based on customer interactions and searches on the web, not only this improves customer engagement, but their email marketing yields great results.
And as Myles Kleeger, president & Chief Customer Officer from Braze said: “If you married email with one more channel we see three times better performance from an engagement perspective than just using email alone and then we see if you add a third channel you get five times greater engagement. 75% of our clients now are using more than one message type. This really embraces this notion of multi-channel as critical and making sure that your strategies match what your customers need.” Delivering the right engagement at the right time, providing more educational emails based on the customer journey, buyer’s needs, and their interactions across different channels with your brand will be the main driver for email marketing campaigns to drive great results.
2. Measure Content Marketing KPI to Improve Email Results
The second way how you can improve your email marketing results is to measure your Content Marketing KPI and based on that improve your email marketing campaigns. As I have already mentioned that modern marketing, customer service, and sales should be aligned to effectively market, provide seamless customer experience, and drive high-quality leads to their business. Measuring your email marketing metrics is only 1 piece of the pie. Running content marketing across multiple channels could be compared to running a business as you must gather information across departments to make more impactful and right decisions. Thus, measuring your email marketing metrics to improve your email marketing results is really in the box thinking as your prospects and customers do not only interact with your emails but using multiple channels.
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Unify experiences on any channel come with understanding how your overall content marketing performs and take the action to deliver a seamless customer journey. To give you an example, understanding what keywords drive the most amount of traffic to certain a page, optimize the page with related content upgrades and offers based on keywords that drive the traffic, and upon customer downloading the content upgrade or signing up you can provide optimized email marketing automation campaign based on that keywords.
And this is just a short example of how to improve conversion rates of your pages, drive more subscribers and leads with email marketing. And you can take it even further as the more you understand your content marketing KPIs and what content drive the best results you can then orchestrate your customer journey with your email marketing and drive great results. Remember, that you should start with the best performing content and understand your KPI’s of each of those and what makes it so successful. And while it might sound like tedious tasks usually there are only a handful of contents that drive the most number of leads and traffic.
Even big sites like HubSpot, drive the most amount of their blog leads from just 30 blog articles among all 6,000. So, make sure you understand the whole picture of how your customers are interacting with your brand and use your Content Marketing KPIs metrics to boost your email marketing results as this will help you to generate and convert more prospects and improve your engagement metrics.
Unify experiences on any channel come with understanding how your overall content marketing performs and take the action to deliver a seamless customer journey. Integrating AI content marketing can significantly enhance your ability to analyze and optimize your strategies.
3. Total Customer Experience with Your Email Marketing
The third way to boost your email marketing results and to drive customer loyalty is by managing the total customer experience. Many companies are realizing the value of having email marketing software to improve marketing results as it allows them to connect with customers, share useful information, and build rapport with them. And in the age of customer experience when customers are having total control of choice whether doing business with you or not, businesses must focus on moving from traditional email marketing techniques and go above and beyond. To drive total customer experience with email marketing, companies cannot focus only on what email to send next but understand the whole picture of customer experience with the organization across all:
- touchpoints (website, email, social media, service technicians, etc.)
- business departments and divisions
- experiential elements (presales activity, product/service experience, post-sales support, etc.)
Understanding how your customers and prospects are interacting with your brand will improve understanding of your customers because the total customer experience sums up your customers’ opinion of your company and products. Thus, based on customer data, email marketing can be used to personalize customer service, create a seamless customer journey, and improve loyalty. If done everything correctly and using customer data, you can customize your messaging and improve your personalization. As personalization is proven to increase open rates and drive revenue by as much as 760% because it helps marketers to give subscribers more relevant and individualized content.
4. Document Your Email Marketing Strategy
Studies show that if you want to successfully implement content marketing for your organization you must document your content marketing strategy. 69 % of B2B marketers with documented content marketing strategy say that they are very successful compared to just 16% of B2B Marketers say that they are least successful with their content marketing strategy.
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Thus, this clearly shows that companies that can plan their content marketing strategy are more likely to see positive results from their content marketing.
And this also applies to your email marketing as if you are planning your overall content marketing strategy, then coming up with a detailed email marketing plan to effectively synchronize your customer journey with your email marketing is essential.
Of course, that is why customer journey mapping is essential to fully understand your prospects and customers to follow along and create a comprehensive email marketing plan.
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So, to effectively boost your email marketing results you must start planning your email marketing strategy and collect information like:
- What is your current process and how things work.
- Your strengths, what works, and what types of emails have the best responses.
- Your weaknesses, what does not work and should be improved.
- Your pain points, what makes email marketing difficult. E.g. manual tasks, email software not suitable, etc.
- How you are gaining your subscribers.
Collecting information like this and putting them together with your data from CRM can help you to improve your email marketing strategy, develop a more effective and efficient process, improve list management, and personalize your content. Also, once you have documented your email marketing strategy, your testing and tracking will become much easier, and you will be able to see tangible results from your email marketing that can be better monitored.
5. Enhance Your Email Marketing Data with CRM Data
To effectively boost your email marketing, you must create personalized and targeted messaging that addresses your customers’ needs, pains, and benefits. Thus, the best way to manage customer data effectively is by using CRM. By using technologies like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that helps companies to track all customer interaction and fundamentally serve them better can bring better results:
- Create more appealing and personalized emails due to collecting customers and prospects data, creating a holistic view of prospects, and craft emails based on it.
- With CRM you can enhance the communication journey for each of your prospects. E.g. how often you send emails, when you send them and what types of emails they like to receive.
Enhancing your decisions based on CRM system data helps create a seamless customer experience improve customer loyalty and create advocacy. Data-driven marketing increases ROI, with campaigns that leverage data-driven personalization reporting 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend.
Therefore, implementing CRM and Email Marketing should be a strategic decision which goal is to have a real impact on the way the company is interacting with customers.
6. Deliver Right Content Based on Where Customer is in the Journey
Each day you probably get so many emails that you barely open a fraction of them and those you open you just skim and then go back to work or whatever you were doing.
Recent DMR reports show that the average office worker receives 121 emails per day. And that is a lot of emails that you must compete with to get your emails even open.
And top of that you are competing with all types of companies in B2B and B2C segment because your prospect or customer probably receive emails from their favorite stores, subscriptions services, blog newsletters and all kind of emails about he has no idea that he subscribed to.
And while 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months in 2023, which could be due to COVID-19 and WFH status. This noise of the inbox is getting louder as email marketing is the most used form of content marketing by 81% of B2B marketers.
Simply said, your prospects are probably spammed by tons of emails and if you want to break through the noise of the inbox you must know what your prospects want from you based on where he is in the customer journey.
Mapping your customer journey and then providing relevant and personalized content at every stage of the customer journey will help you break through the noise and grab your customer’s attention.
7. Narrow Segmentation
Let’s first discuss the segmentation process and how well it should be done to maximize the ROI from b2b email marketing.
Email marketing has some pretty basic tactics to create segmentation in your business to deliver content and email to a group of people who are the most interested in the topic.
These tactics are widely used across multiple industries but what surprises me is that only 36% of B2B businesses are using segmentation in the right way.
The rest have a few segmentation groups and the rest is under general or they do not have b2b segmentation whatsoever in any way.
This makes no wonder, that b2b decision-makers are upset how b2b marketers generate leads, as even basics can’t be done right.
And by basic b2b segmentation I mean:
- Role of the subscriber, so you know whether he can make a decision, and also what kind of content you should provide as Technical Manager will need different content than Marketing Manager.
- The industry is important too, especially when you are selling software like ERP or CRM then you should know in what industry they are in. Again, it helps you to customize messaging and promotions
- Location of the company as it might be somewhere where you do not even offer your services or have different packages.
- Product Interest is important as well as you know what the buyer’s intention is to buy, especially when nowadays prospects decide what they want, and you do not force them what they do not want.
So, when you are creating an email list, make sure you have at least basic segmentation within your marketing so you can provide better content to improve your conversion rate and ROI.
Segmentation is important between my tips for b2b email marketing, so make sure you work on it.
8. High Level of Personalization
One of the business to business marketing trends coming in 2023 is the level of personalization you can offer to your target audience.
Thanks to increasing digital content every year, more and more prospects expecting tailored content to their specific needs and paints.
To be precise 45% of users are searching for personalized content to the business challenges they are facing at the moment.
That means that being able to create personalized messaging within your email marketing becoming more important than ever, as people do not want to receive anything else than the content to their specific interest and the rest is unnecessary and spammy for them.
Therefore being able to create personalized emails with
things like:
- Using their name within the introduction and somewhere else in every email will create the first good feeling about reading the email, as it feels like an email special for them.
- Personalizing your email with a face picture, name, and social media profiles is important as well, as prospects do not want to talk to businesses but people behind the businesses. It creates a warm feeling of personalization.
Of course, these tactics are basic, but as I already said, only 1/3 of b2b companies are actually using proper segmentation, and create personalized email is even less than that.
That’s why it is a huge chance for you and your business to become unique and out of the box as not many b2b companies using it yet.
So, be fast and take the chance before it will become a pretty common strategy and you will just stay behind.
9. Quick Contact Support
One of the main problems with b2b email marketing is the lack of accessibility to the customer support and sales team.
Therefore my next tip for b2b email marketing is to provide fast customer support.
Yes, you can find something like an email address or you can reply to the email, but usually, you need to be waiting for almost 24h on average for the response which can be frustrating.
Actually, this can lead to losing the lead from your email list as they can go somewhere else, who can provide them quick response and answer to their question.
And this is not a small number but 46% of email subscribers will leave if they do not find quick contact support.
Therefore, technology like live chat is becoming absolutely vital for your business to be able to quickly respond to your prospect and customer inquiries, especially when millennials are becoming decision-makers.
Everybody knows that millennials don’t like to pick up the mobile phone and wait, so don’t call them, but email and don’t let them wait.
So, being able to provide quick customer support within your b2b email marketing will increase your ROI, as it gives you a real-time connection with the hottest leads.
10. Use Personal Name
I have already mentioned, using the personal name of the recipient is an essential part of every email to create an email warmer and tempting to read.
Especially thanks to email automation, using the name was never easier in the emails.
Adding a name to the email is such an easy thing with great results.
35% of people are more interesting to read the email if it included their name and therefore with just adding a single line into your email can produce extra revenue for your business.
Especially with the b2b marketing automation strategies out there, you can automatically add the name into every email without breaking a sweat.
That’s why you should always make sure you are collecting the name of your email subscribers with the short forms.
The best ways how to get people names when they are subscribing for email newsletter are:
- Offer valuable content like eBook or whitepaper to download and include a short form where they need to put their full name, role, and email to download it.
- Give them demo access to your platform or somewhere else, but first, let them complete the full profile to being able to start using the demo. This applies to software’s mostly or courses website.
- Ask them for it, as I found out when you ask them for the name, they will usually give it to you, especially when you create questions that sounds like “How do you want me to call you?”
Of course, there are more technics how to get the name, but I hope you got the concept as the sky is limit and you can use your creativity to get their names.
11. Highlight Important Parts
You might wonder how come, that prospects spend less time reading on websites or emails.
This is happening because of the new trend where people do not read any more websites, emails or newspapers because they are so busy but rather they scan it to find quick information.
A recent study said that people prefer to scan the content and quickly move somewhere else to research more or get more opinions.
- On average a user will only read 20% of the content on your page.
- 67% of users scan quickly emails to find related information within the 20s or less.
Of course, it all depends on a user but most of the time they prefer scanning the content and quickly move somewhere else, especially if they wait on a red light, then there is no much time to read.
One of the great examples is DigitalMarketer.com
As the marketing team from Digital Marketer is very well aware of people who do not spend a long time on their copies and they just scan them, therefore they have highlighted the important information within their emails.
Because if you are using highlighting within your b2b content you are taking certain control over prospects’ eyes and where you want them to aim.
Because if you do not do that, then they will randomly read words.
That means if they do not get or notice something interesting, they will leave and go somewhere else to get what they want.
Even though you might have it too within your content or email, but their eyes just didn’t catch it.
Too bad for them, or for you?
That’s why my tips for b2b email marketing include this one.
Highlighting your text is important for your email marketing and any type of content is it gives you a certain power over prospects’ eyes.
12. Create Neat Looking CTA
My tip number 6 on how to create b2b email marketing beast is to create a neat looking CTA within your email.
This neat looking call-to-action needs to be visible, branded with your brand colours and with simple call-to-action text which clearly states what you want your prospect do to, after reading/scanning your b2b email.
The thing if you want to make an effective email marketing campaign then you need to make it as easy as possible for your reader to read it and react to it.
Because nobody wants to spend long minutes figuring out what the hell is your email about.
- Making CTAs look like buttons created a 45% boost in
clicks for CreateDebate. - Emails with a single call-to-action increased clicks
of 371% and sales 1617%.
You need to make sure that your email is as brainless as
possible!
Exactly, even trained golden fish should be able to understand your email and do what you want it to do.
Why?
Because your prospects don’t care about you, at least at this point and when you create an easy-to-read and easy to react email, the chance is much higher than your prospect find what interests them, something that is about them, their problems, or needs.
So, always make sure your email marketing has clear statements and CTA.
13. Always Deliver Value
What I love about B2B Marketing is that the more value you offer the more you gain in terms of revenue, traffic, conversion rate, and credibility.
Sometimes I hear from b2b marketers that if you offer too much value then they don’t need you and they can do it themselves.
Well, even though they have a point in some way, then I still know that this will never happen.
I mean think about it, how is it even possible, big guys who are leading company having time to learn new staff and taking risk whether it works or not?
I don’t think so!
I prefer the opposite approach, offer every value and knowledge you have got!
I believe the more you give, the more you get, especially if you are sharing your knowledge and expertise.
Not only it shows that you know what you are doing, but also that there is so much to learn that they will start feeling dizzy, sit on the chair, and give you a call to give first-aid.
Theoretically…
Remember, offering too much valuable content can never hurt you, of course, there are ways how you can utilize it, and the level of knowledge can be used in a different way, but never be worried to offer your knowledge, especially within b2b marketing.
They do not have time to learn new things.
So, whenever you are writing an email copy, make sure that there is as much value as email can fit, do not try to sell, as b2b marketing requires much more than just 1 call to action and super promo code.
Summary of Email Marketing Tips
B2B Marketing is all about building trust with your prospects that you are the right person to solve their challenges.
Therefore, email marketing gives you a great connection with them as you can utilize it with perfectly aimed messaging to each of your segments, create a personal touch within and offer valuable content to them to build relationships and trust.
Because what you should always keep in mind when you are creating a b2b email marketing strategy is that 90% of B2B marketers say the leading attribute of content marketing effectiveness is “audience relevance (Statista, 2018).
Learning from your audience and analyzing their patterns whether what interests them and what’s not will give you great insights for your marketing to furthermore improve your email marketing results.
I hope, that this article will help you with your b2b email marketing campaigns and I am excited to hear from you whether you use some of my tips.
Conclusion
Email marketing has still a lot to offer and it will not go away any time soon as it is a preferred choice of millennials to communicate with businesses.
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But the way how you are using email marketing and engaging with your customers must change if you want to boost your email marketing results and drive the promising 3800% ROI from your email marketing campaigns. Rather than focusing on the number of emails sent each week, you should focus on the quality of the emails you send. Remember that 100 well-crafted, personalized, and target emails can bring better results than 1000s of email blasts. Plus investing time and effort in personalized emails will stay with you as you can always reuse them on other similar prospects. Thus, slowly but surely develop a personalized approach to your email marketing, learn more about your customer interactions with your brand and map your customer journey to boost your email marketing results.
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