How To Keep Your B2B Email Marketing Campaign On-Track

May 27, 2014

Email marketing is still one of the easiest and most cost efficient method of staying in contact with your customers and potential customers, and B2B email marketing is no exception.

Here are 10 easy to follow rules to help you keep your B2B email marketing campaign on-track

1. Have a Plan

   Before you begin anything you need to be able to answer the following questions:

   • Who is the email targeted at? New customers, someone who just made a purchase, existing customers who haven’t bought anything in a while? Be sure you know who you will be talking to.

   • What is the object of the email? Are you selling a product or service, reminding people about your company, promoting a special offer? Concentrate on just one main subject per communication.

   • Know how much a sale/lead is worth so that you can track your ROI.

   • Know how you are going to track results, not just opens and click thrus but also conversions.

2. Offer Something Of Value

   Especially with B2B Email Marketing the one thing that counts the most is the offer. Even if you spend a great deal of time and effort designing the email if you do not communicate what the reader expects to see you have wasted time and money. Remember why they signed up to your list in the first place and give them what they asked for.

3. Be Personal

   Try to avoid sending a mass email to everyone on your list. It’s virtually impossible for everyone on your list to be interested in the same thing, unless you only sell one thing. Do you? Be sure to segment your list based on not only likes and interests but also demographics, location, and habits.

4. Have a Compelling Subject Line

   The first thing your customer will see is the subject line and first impressions matter so make sure you give them a reason to open your email. Keep it short, simple, and to the point. Make sure it is clear where the email came from. Avoid words like – free, discount, special as these may trigger spam filters.

5. Design a Strong Campaign

   Emails should be simple and to the point. Make one subject the main focus and follow these simple tips:

   • Offer both HTML and text versions. Also make sure it can be easily viewed on a mobile device

   • Give it the same overall look as your website and other marketing materials

   • Keep it short so that the reader doesn’t have to scroll or at least not scroll far

   • Do not bombard the senses with too much color or different fonts. Make it pleasing to the eye.

   • Do not rely solely on images as some email programs block them, be sure to include text.

   • Make images and text clickable and trackable

   • Make sure the copy is easy to scan and understand

   • Have a clear ‘call to action’

   • Include an unsubscribe link and physical address in order to be CAN-SPAM compliant

6. Link to a Relevant Landing Page

   Far too often companies will spend a great deal of time and effort putting together an email marketing campaign just to link it to either the home page of their website or a product page. Take the time to design a custom built landing page featuring only the product/service offered in the email. Here is a good example of a custom landing page:
   [image of Ten Ingredients for and page]

7. Test it Before You Send it

   So you’ve spent many hours targeting and designing your email and your custom made landing page. Are you ready to send it? Not quite. You need to be sure of how it will look in all the different email readers and minimize any chance of it being caught by spam filters. Some email marketing platforms offer an in-house testing option. If you don’t have one you might consider using Litmus or something similar.

8. Measure and Learn

   Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of email marketing is what to do after the email has been sent. If you don’t know which ones work well and which don’t how can you ever improve. Here are some of the metrics you should be looking at:

   • Delivery Rate

   • Open Rate

   • Click-thru Rate

   • Look for trends and compare each email within the campaign to see what works best

   • To go even deeper you should consider split testing to see if certain times of the day, colors, wording etc. are more productive.

9. Keep Your Email List Updated

   Make sure that you regularly scrub out any hard bounces from your list and continue to add relevant new contacts. Pay close attention to how many people unsubscribe each month. If this is a high number it tells you that you aren’t sending relevant emails or you are communicating with people who don’t want to hear from you. Either way this is doing far more harm than good.

10. Integrate Your Email Marketing With Other Marketing Efforts

    Numerous studies have proven that combining email marketing with other marketing channels increases responses. You can do this as follows:

    • Promote the offers via your social media outlets

    • Include a social share on the outgoing email

    • Have a pop-up or banner on certain internal web pages

    • Back-up the email with a direct mail campaign

    • Advertising on industry specific web pages or publications

A carefully planned B2B Email Marketing Campaign is an easy, repeatable, cost effective way to communicate with your existing customers and also keep your leads warm.

If you need help putting together an effective B2B Email Marketing plan drop us a line or give us a call – (866) 731-2271.