Have you seen an increase in email engagement? In a recent HubSpot study, researchers found that 78 percent of marketers have experienced email engagement growth in the last year.
Considering that almost 60 percent of respondents in a report from SaleCycle claimed that their purchasing decisions were influenced by marketing emails, that’s great news!
Knowing these two stats, how can you take advantage of a boost in engagements with your emails and improve your sales results? By fine-tuning your B2B email marketing.
In this article, we’ll be reviewing B2B email marketing best practices for 2020. We’ll explore optimal content length, the use of emojis in subject lines, personalizing your messaging with segmentation, and more.
Essential Best Practices for B2B Email Marketing in The New Decade
It’s unlikely that social media will go away any time soon, and you certainly need a B2B social media strategy. However, don’t take that to mean that you should entirely rely on social to communicate with your prospects and customers.
Building a list of email subscribers gives you the most control in nurturing your audience how you want to. Unlike an organic social media post that’s only seen by about 5.5 percent of your Page’s followers, email lends a much higher probability that your message will be received.
Marketing emails have an average open rate between 15 and 28 percent, depending on the industry.
Apply these seven B2B email marketing best practices to get the most return on your money and time invested.
- Segment your subscribers into lists – Campaign Monitor reported that segmented campaigns yield marketers “as much as a 760% increase in revenue.” Ask your contacts to select appropriate lists they want to be a part of, or use your CRM to identify and segment. Here’s a look at a few ways you can organize your lists:
1) Location
2) Interests
3) Industry
4) Purchase history
5) Content consumption (specific formats or categories)
6) Event attendance (in-person or online)
7) Job function - Tighten up your emails – A study by Constant Contact shows that click-through rates peak at around 20 lines of text (or 200 words) and steadily drop off from there. Only use as many words as necessary to get the reader to take the intended action.
- Identify an appropriate frequency – 35 percent of marketers email their customers three to five times a week, but that doesn’t make it right for your audience. Test your list by gradually increasing or decreasing from your current send frequency. You don’t want to overwhelm them with too many messages and trigger unsubscribes, but at the same time, missing revenue opportunities is undesirable.
- Schedule emails to send at the best day and time – Current research suggests sending emails earlier in the week with Tuesday as a reigning champion. When it comes to the time of day, OptinMonster says, “the best time to send emails is mid-morning (10 am) or just after lunch (1 pm).” Nevertheless, test your audience!
- Use images, but not too much – While you’re selling to other businesses, there are real people behind those email addresses. Images help to make ideas more tangible, provoke emotion, and break up the text. Use three pictures or less for the highest CTRs. Regarding the subject line of your emails, know that not only do they improve open rates, but they also support inbox placement. Before adding smileys and laptop emojis to each of your emails, though, consider your company’s tone, audience demographics, and rendering issues.
- Make it a conversation – Stop using your email as a broadcast service and lose the donotreply@ email address. Take a more human approach and open your brand up to communications from subscribers. You may even want to send surveys to find out what they want and to gather feedback.
- Think mobile-first – Almost half of email opens, 46 percent, are mobile. Once you’ve enticed a subscriber to open your email, you want the layout and design to encourage them to act—email layout and design matter. Reflect on number two above and test shorter emails that those reading your emails on their smartphones can easily consume.
When testing new practices for your email marketing, experiment with one variable at a time.
Get Help with Your B2B Email Marketing
The seven best practices above are a small section of the many factors that deserve consideration in B2B email marketing. Reach out to Jackson Marketing, Inc. if your B2B company needs assistance strategizing a plan and creating content to generate more sales.
