9 Steps to an Effective B2B Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is alive and well, and you are doing your company a disservice if you are not maximising the opportunities this marketing channel provides.

90% of adults still use email regularly.

This makes email marketing the perfect tool for building customer relationships to help you generate leads and sales.

Here are nine steps you can follow to create an effective campaign.

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

What do you want to achieve with your email campaign?

1. Attract new subscribers
2. Nurture existing subscribers to encourage them to become a customer
3. Boost engagement
4. Promote a Special Offer or service

And you have to be exactly who are you targeting with your email campaign?

Once you’ve defined your goals then you can start work on creating an email in line with those goals.

Step 2: Know Your Audience

If you want your audience to open and click on your emails, you need to know what their challenges and concerns are, and will help them in their work?

1. What pain points are they looking solve?
2. What keeps them awake at night?
3. How can you help?

If you don’t send relevant emails, then your open rates will nosedive and your click-through rates will be negligible.

Step 3: Create an Email Plan

There are a number of key points you need to consider:

• Frequency: How often you send out emails.
• Content: If your content is irrelevant or boring your recipients will soon unsubscribe.
• Examine their pain points, the things that keep them awake at night and provide solutions. What will help solve their challenges? How can you help them? What will make them want to continue receiving and opening your emails?
• Call-To-Action: This is the primary action you want the reader to take after they read the email. Every email you send needs some sort of call-to-action.

Step 4: Build a Targeted Email List

The best way to build a targeted email list is to convert your website visitors into subscribers.

Unfortunately, over 90% of your website visitors will leave your site without signing up to your newsletter. A great way to convert those abandoning visitors into subscribers is using ‘exit-intent’ popups.

Exit-intent popups detect user behaviour to prompt them with a targeted campaign at the precise moment they are about to leave your site forever. This smart technology can skyrocket your conversions.

As you build your list, it is essential to segment it as you probably won’t want to send every campaign to every contact on your database. It is important to send specific emails to specific segments of your list. There are many ways that you can segment your list, including by:

1. New vs existing subscriber
2. Geographic location
3. The lead magnet they downloaded
4. Purchase history
5. Job title/Responsibility

Segmenting your list allows you to send highly relevant emails to specific subscribers on your list.

Step 5: Craft Your Subject Line

So, you’ve set your goals, researched your audience, created a plan and built a segmented database. The next step is maximising the chance that each recipient will open your email.

For this, the subject line of your email critical. It is like the headline in a newspaper. It’s what grabs people’s attention. It has to lure them to open the email.

What is the best way to craft a great subject line? There are a variety of tactics you can use, such as:

• The question– Questions are great subject lines because they suggest that there are answers in the email that will help the reader.
• The how-to– People are always looking for better, faster, cheaper ways of doing things. For example, “How to get qualified sales leads”.
• The numbered list–Lists are always strong motivators. When things are presented in list format, it provides an easy roadmap to achieving a goal. For example, ‘5 Ways to reduce pick costs in a warehouse.’
• An announcement– Make people feel like there is important, breaking information that they need to know.
• Generating curiosity – ‘Have you heard about the latest mobile phone scam to hit businesses?’
• Scarcity – FOMO. If your subject lines suggests scarcity there’s a good chance it will encourage readers to open the email for fear of missing out.

Your subject line is the first thing people see when your email shows up in their inbox. It is the number one factor as to whether or not your email is opened.

Spend time fashioning a compelling, clickable subject line. Keep it short, add personalisation, avoid spam trigger words and make sure that the content in your email meets the expectations presented in the subject line.

Step 6: Write Your Content

For the best results your copy must:

• Be concise– Start with a strong opening, make your point clearly and quickly, and keep your emails brief. If needed, provide a link to more detailed information.
• Talk in the second person (you, yours, etc.)– Your emails need to focus on the reader. If you find yourself using the words ‘I’ or ‘We’ a lot, then you’re spending too much time talking about yourself.
• Benefits/Value– What is in it for the reader? Paint a picture of the benefits your solution will provide.
• Make it fun or at least interesting!– Tell personal stories, reference current events, use humour, images or infographics. All these things add personality to your emails, helping you to stand out.
• Create a compelling call-to-action– Getting the recipient to read your email is of prime importance, but you also want them to act. To achieve this include a strong ‘call-to-action’ button to take them to the next stage.

Step 7: Design an Email Template

The design of your email is very important. If it looks terrible or unprofessional, that not only reflects on your brand, but also means people are less likely to read it.

Having an email template professionally designed avoids pitfalls, particularly with more people than ever reading emails on mobile devices. If your template is not device responsive, your carefully crafted email could end up looking like a dog’s dinner.

As mentioned earlier, images can add impact to your emails, but avoid hiding information in images because some people disable images and so won’t see this information. To help with this use alt tags to describe images so those who have disabled images might at least be tempted to enable them.

Step 8: Test and Track

Before sending an email campaign it is vitally important to test everything to make sure that what you are sending is what the recipient will receive. You will also need to check that all the links in the email are working and that your database has been uploaded successfully to your email platform.

The time and day you send your campaign can also have a significant impact on the open rate, so always test to find out what works for your industry.

Once the campaign has been sent, the analytics from your email provider will give you all the open rates, unsubscribes, and click-through rates. You need to monitor and record this data as it will help you make improvements if future campaigns.

Step 9: Resend

It is always worthwhile resending an email campaign to all those recipients who did not open it in the first send. Common practice tends to suggest that a resend sent one week after the initial campaign works well for B2B campaigns.

Take a look at our B2B email marketing campaigns.