There are a multitude of sales and marketing tactics available to your organization. While each has the goal of boosting your leads and/or brand awareness to complement your sales team’s efforts to close a deal, not every tactic will be best for your organization’s ultimate goals. Email marketing, though, is a rare exception to that rule—it benefits nearly every B2B business regardless of industry or goal because it offers a variety of communication angles.
Let’s take a closer look at why your organization should embrace email marketing as well as some best practices on how to get started using this valuable tactic.
Targeted Lists: Cold vs. Warm Leads
Part of what makes email marketing so effective is its insistence on using highly targeted lists to create personalized emails. Sure, you could toss every lead in your CRM into a list and blast off generic emails to them, but you’re guaranteed a much higher open and engagement rate when you segment your recipient lists. Plus, if you choose not to segment your lists, you risk being marked as spam by the recipient, which could irreversibly damage your organization’s email reputation.
The most basic way to begin segmenting recipient lists is by cold and warm leads. From there, you can segment based on industry, company, location, and more. The idea is to refine the lists until you can create email copy that speaks almost directly to the reader (with the help of merge tags, that is). Lists don’t have a minimum or maximum threshold in terms of number of recipients allowed, but you should be conscious of creating specific lists with goals (e.g., re-engagement for warm leads, or a specific product introduction for cold leads).
Short and Sweet Content
When you’re introducing (or re-introducing) your company and service to a recipient, it can be tempting to wax poetic about why your solution is the one that they really want (even if they don’t know it right now). After all, if you don’t explain every detail about your solution, they might misunderstand it.
But before you start crafting the great American novel in an email, remember these email copy best practices:
- Focus on the subject line and first sentence. Every line of the email should encourage the recipient to read the next.
- Only include five to seven sentences maximum. Yes, that’s not a lot of text. But recipients don’t have a lot of time to read, and you don’t want to overwhelm them with copy.
- Focus on your solution’s benefits: clearly identify how your product solves a specific problem.
- If possible, include numbers or other data in the email to entice readers (but, as with other things, in moderation—if it reads like a spreadsheet, you’ve gone too far).
- End with a clear call to action—reply to the email? Make a phone appointment? Schedule a demo?
Overall, keep the email copy short and sweet and get right to your point. Demonstrate how your product can help solve the recipient’s problems; avoid self-congratulatory language or self-promotion. The email may be a little bit about you, but it’s mostly about the prospect.
Personalize Every Email
Earlier, we mentioned that every email should be personalized for its recipient. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that you need to take hours of your time to write individual emails for every person in your list. Instead, take advantage of automation by using merge tags such as first name and company. This way, when the recipient reads the email, they’re seeing their actual first name or company. We highly recommend using a merge tag in the subject line; emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened, according to CampaignMonitor.com.
If this sounds like a lot to handle on your own, know that a third-party marketing agency such as OBO has both the experience and capacity to step in and help you out. Contact us today for more information about email marketing tips and best practices.
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