With so many marketing emails flooding people’s inboxes, it’s more important than ever to refine and create a strong email marketing strategy for your leads and clients.
Understanding what your contacts need out of your emails as opposed to what your business needs, you can create emails that offer value to your contacts and thus produce powerful emails that actually get opened. Once you’ve identified the types of emails that appeal to your contacts, your brand will get better results from your email marketing campaigns.
With email marketing offering a potential return of investment of 4400%, it remains a powerful way to attract and retain customers so let’s explore ways to create emails that your leads and clients look forward to.
10 Bonafide Tips for Creating B2B Marketing Emails Your Contacts Will Crave
1. Personalization
The more personalized your marketing emails come across, the better. Contacts want to feel like your brand understands their needs and can be turned off with mass emails. However, you can’t send different emails to thousands of people so there are a few ways you can make your mass emails a little more personalized.
Use HubSpot’s My Persona Tool to learn the different persona’s that you should be targeting your emails to and you can create different email buckets to send leads based on their persona.
Using a contact’s first name in the email can go a long way and this is pretty easy to insert with the right email marketing automation tool.
2. Segment Your Lists
Segmenting your email lists goes along with personalizing your marketing emails. If you segment your contacts into different lists, you can dictate the way you write your emails and determine what would be the most relevant emails to each email list. Here are just a few ways you can segment your lists and adapt your email strategy accordingly:
- Industry type
- Where they are in the buyer’s journey
- Leads versus clients
- Company size
- Purchase history
3. Add Value
Instead of just boasting about your brand and constantly trying to convert leads into clients, you want to send out marketing emails that add value for your contacts. The goal of email drip campaigns is to keep your brand top of mind and establish thought leadership. So, the more resources and relevant strategies that you can provide for your contacts, the better!
If you’re dripping educational material and thought leadership strategies, your contacts are actually going to look forward to your emails. A few ideas on how to do this are ebooks, blog posts, the tip of the week, and more!
4. Special Offers
One way to definitely get contacts to look forward to your marketing emails is to occasionally include special offers. This can be anything from a free trial to a limited-time discount or a free ebook.
When you present your special offer be sure to put it in the subject line to convey to readers that your email is worth opening because it contains something for them.
5. Enticing subject lines
44% of consumers don’t open an email when the subject line doesn’t excite them. So, there is a lot of pressure to get creative with subject lines. Here are a few things to try with subject lines for your marketing emails and entice your contacts enough to get them to open your emails:
- Ask a question in the subject line such as “did you know that 87% of consumers prefer this marketing automation software?”
- Use emojis
- “How to” subject lines answers a question that your contact might be interested in such as “how to create blog posts that increase sales”
- An urgent subject line like “you only have 2 days left to get this free ebook” creates a sense of urgency
- The announcement subject line such as “introducing our new iPhone app”
- Research shows that subject lines with numbers in them perform better so try something like “30 new ways to build your email list”
- Elicit curiosity with your subject lines for example “this little-known fact changes the email marketing game forever”
- Insert your contact’s name into the subject line for more personalization
6. Know When to Send the Sales Pitch
Here at FeedOtter, we have a rule of thumb that each new lead gets entered into an email drip and receives a series of five marketing emails. The first four emails establish thought leadership and offer intriguing recourses. Then, the fifth email is the one where we send the sales pitch after we’ve established trust and brand familiarity.
Once a lead makes it all the way through the initial drip campaign they are entered into a drip campaign that emails out weekly blog posts. Occasionally we will ask leads at the end of the blog post email if they want to try out FeedOtter. For clients, we ask how things are going with FeedOtter in an effort to retain them.
So knowing that the sales pitch should only come occasionally, you can plan your email drip campaigns accordingly.
7. Don’t Send Too Many Emails
69% of email recipients unsubscribe because they get too many marketing emails from brands. Taking this fact into consideration, you should be really mindful of how often you send out your emails. While it might be tempting to send out emails every day, you should probably send out emails once a week, at most.
Be careful to not send too many marketing emails to your contacts.
One strategy you can implement is to ask your contacts which emails they want to receive. This way they can choose if they want to receive an email every time you publish a blog post or if they want a monthly round-up of your blog posts.
8. Make Your Emails More Human
When writing your marketing emails, it’s important to keep in mind that you’re writing to actual people. Many brands make the mistake of making their emails too formal and robotic. You want your emails to be friendly and conversational in order to appeal to your contacts.
You can do things like use their first names in your emails and add a CTA to the end of the emails inviting them to reply to the emails if they have any questions for you. Inviting your contacts to reply with questions makes them feel like they can have an actual conversation with you and keeps them more engaged.
9. Automate Your Blog Digest Emails
In order to not email every blog post that you send out and turn off your contacts by emailing them too much, you can create a weekly or monthly digest of your blog posts. This way your contacts can choose which blog posts they want to read and you don’t overwhelm their inbox.
Luckily here at FeedOtter, we have a tool that allows you to automate your blog post emails whether you want to email every blog post or if you want to automate a digest of your posts. With beautiful templates, your contacts will enjoy receiving your blog post emails.
10. Do A/B Testing
A/B testing your marketing emails can be done in any email marketing tool. So whichever tool you use, take advantage of the A/B testing feature. This allows you to try different messaging and subject lines to see what resonates best with your readers. Then, you can build off of what works and continue to refine your strategy so that it becomes exponentially stronger.
Final Thoughts
Your brand puts out great resources and has a lot to say in your marketing emails. There are many strategies we’ve outlined here to make your strategy stronger when it comes to your email marketing campaigns. Having drips for leads and clients is great for customer acquisition and retention as long as you craft your strategy the right way.
Do you have any tips when it comes to your email marketing campaigns? We’d love to hear your thoughts on Twitter @Feed_Otter
