Almost every business-related conversation I have ends with one of the parties asking the other to pop the details in an email. Every social media platform has email-based notifications available. Whenever you order a product online, complete a banking transaction, sign up for a subscription service or join a new community forum, you get an email confirming it.
Email is, and probably will be for a long, long time, our primary means of communicating online, which is why, despite some greatly exaggerated rumors to the contrary, email marketing is still one of the most powerful tools available to your business and if you don’t have it in your strategy, you need to consider including it. But where do you begin? What is email marketing and how does it work? Here are a few email marketing tips that will help you get the most out of your B2B email campaigns.
1 – The Why
The first of your B2B email marketing best practices is to sit down with your marketing team and work out what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaigns. Do you want to grow your global reach? Are you trying to push sales – if so, in short bursts or sustained sales? Do you want to redirect people to your website? Is your plan to nurture existing clients? The best B2B emails are those that are created with a specific purpose in mind, which guides everything from selecting an audience to creating content, through to email frequency.
2 – The Who and Where
Once you understand your email marketing campaigns’ purpose and goals, you need to establish who your audience is going to be. This could be a short list of current customers, to a long list of as-yet-to-be-determined people in specific demographics, geographies, industries and so on. But it’s more than just selecting specific types of people. You need to do enough research to understand your audience’s pain points, requirements and how they interact with email. The Who covers identifying and understanding the people you will be talking to.
3 – The When
When you’ve successfully determined your audience, it’s time to work out the frequency of your emails. Managing email best practices includes setting out a clear schedule of how often you will communicate with your audience, and what the structure of the communications will be. For example, for a nurturing campaign, you could decide to send a monthly newsletter-style communication to keep in touch, and every third or fourth month, include a special offer or a soft sale.
4 – The What
Next, you need to start creating the content. This can include setting up email campaign templates, email marketing design or simply writing your marketing emails. This is the fourth step in a B2B email campaign because your content will be guided by the previous three steps. You need to speak to the right audience, take into account the contact schedule and make sure you are achieving your objectives to generate the best B2B marketing campaigns.
5 – The What Happened
There is a final step in any email campaign that is absolutely critical – analyzing the data from your campaign. Sometimes, even the best campaign won’t succeed, and sometimes a quickly planned one will be hugely successful. Analyzing the data and studying the campaign will help you understand what works and what you should incorporate into future campaigns.
Some of the best examples of content marketing come from the email marketing space. What are your thoughts on why email marketing is still so popular? Leave a comment, I read every one.
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