Email is an almost universal channel. There are over 4 billion daily email users. That is half the world’s population. If you can get your head around that staggering number, you can start to see why email is such an important avenue for marketers to reach customers. Think then, about how emails dominate communications in the world of business, and you start to see why email marketing is such an integral part of B2B marketing.
81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020) There is a good reason for that. The return on investment in email marketing is repeatedly shown to be higher than in other marketing methods. In 2021, software company Litmus found that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $36. (Litmus, 2021) That's a higher return than you can expect from any other form of marketing—digital or otherwise.
So if you are not yet using email marketing to grow your business, you have to ask yourself, why not? Email marketing can easily be scaled and targeted to your requirements. Even better, with email marketing software, so much of the work can be automated, so you can do all the planning and preparation, and then sit back and watch your business grow.
Step 1: Choose your marketing tool
The first step in setting up an email marketing campaign is choosing email marketing software. This tool is important because you will use it to automate your campaigns, saving yourself what to do manually could involve hundreds of hours of work. There are all-in-one solutions available that you can use to manage your email campaign from design to scheduling and sending emails, and then reviewing analytics afterwards.
When you are looking to choose a marketing tool it is essential to review the features carefully to decide which is best for your business. You will want to consider your budget, the size of your email lists, and what skills you have in-house. For instance, if you are a small team and don’t have much capacity for design, then the availability of good templates may be important to you. Alternatively, if you work for a large company with a big sales team, you could be managing much larger email lists, passing on leads and data to sales via a smart CRM system could be a priority.
WHAT FEATURES SHOULD YOU ALWAYS LOOK OUT FOR IN A MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOL?
- Automation capabilities
- Personalisation
- Real-time analytics
- Email templates which are easy to use and customise
- Dynamic list segmenting
- E-commerce integrations
- Mobile optimisation
Step 2: Set up your email lists
The next step is to consider who it is you are going to be sending emails to. You will want to gather the email addresses of current customers and interested parties. Offer engaging content or incentives for email sign-ups. Your chosen software should make the work of managing email lists easy. Ensure your data is accurate, and compliant with GDPR.
Data protection is a legal requirement, and also of great concern and interest to the wider public and is reputationally important. GDPR does not apply to information about organisations. However, individual contact details still fall within the definition of personal data in the GDPR and must be processed in accordance with GDPR procedures.
You should then segment your subscriber list. Instead of sending everything to every name on your mailing list, you want to break up those lists into different categories based on their demonstrated interests, or their stage of the buying journey. This will allow you to target customers with email content that is relevant to them. The exact segmentation will depend on your own business and customer base. Lastly, as you develop your campaign, you will want to split test email campaigns across groups of recipients. This allows you to judge the success of different messaging strategies and gain insight into what works and what doesn’t.
Step 3: Set up automated workflows
This is when you can start automating your campaign.
Automated workflows, sometimes called drip campaigns, are extremely useful for nurturing customers through the sales pipeline. This is perfect for B2B marketers, who typically have longer sales cycles. Automation also ensures consistency, removes the possibility of human error, and results in more insightful analytics. You will first want to define where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey. Are they a subscriber, marketing qualified lead, or sales lead? You can plan out, design and write automated sequences of emails that are triggered when a customer takes a specific action. Then you can automate these workflows so that follow-up emails are sent out automatically.
With a bit of careful planning, your automated workflows can make your job as a marketer much easier while keeping your customers engaged.
AUTOMATED WORKFLOW CAN BE USED TO THE FOLLOWING:
- Nurture leads
- Welcome new subscribers
- Increase product adoption
- Gather feedback
- Promote
- Re-engage unengaged customers
Step 4: Gather data
Once your campaign has been created and automated and is up and running, it is time to review your work. As with all marketing efforts, you should always be optimising. All good email marketing software should have analytics built in so you can see the performance of your campaign, including email open rates and conversions. This data is invaluable. But data is only as good as the use you make of it. If you use data analytics to uncover customer behaviour and engagement, and then use those insights to revise and improve your email campaign, you should be able to drive up performance. The better you are able to make use of data and analytics to inform your strategy, the more you will be able to hone your email campaigns to perfection.
The key takeaways
The key to successful B2B email marketing is to carefully target your customers to provide them with the content that they need at that particular stage of the sales journey. By preparing this content ahead of time and automating the delivery with the help of email marketing software, you can keep your customers engaged in the least labour-intensive and most effective way.
If you would like help designing or executing your email marketing campaign, we can help. We are a full-service B2B digital marketing agency and can create an email marketing strategy designed specifically for your business objectives and customer base. Contact us to learn more.
