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6 Useful Considerations for Improving Email Marketing ROI for B2Bs
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It has become more difficult to deliver your email messages to users as more and more email service providers are automatically putting marketing messages into the trash and implementing strict rules that filteryour messages into the spam folder. Beyond providing quality content and offers, what else can you do to have the best chance of your emails getting through?
You need to focus on building trust.
The success of any email marketing campaign depends on genuinely compelling content that provides value. You want your readers to search through spam filters, complain to their email providers, and do anything they can to ensure they’re getting your content. That’s how good you need to be.
Avoid associating yourself with the “pitch-fest” crowd, bombarding readers with pitch after pitch and deal after deal. Ensure that your mail content is loaded with value tailored for your audience, so readers are more inclined to open everything you send.If you don’t build this trust and credibility with great content, most other techniques that build on that trust,will not convert.
There are a few practical things you can do to give your messages the best possible chance of success.
Know Your Target Audience
If you’re running a B2B business you won’t necessarily want to market your product or services on every social platform or community in existence. You may want to spread your wings far and wide, but being everywhere in this case is counterproductive and a waste of time and money. For example, the audience you’ll find on Instagram won’t necessarily be same as the one on LinkedIn. You’ll discover that the tactics that work for LinkedIn will fail miserably on Instagram because of the differentactivities on each platform and different expectations of users. It’s likely that you’ll have much greater success with B2B related activities on LinkedIn than most on other networks. As you work on growing your email list, your greatest successes will always happen when you align perfectly with your target audience.
Winning Email Marketing Campaigns Beginswith Excellent Software
Forget about Outlook, Gmail or any other basic email service provider, these will simply not work. Email marketing software provides lots of analytics to allow you to plan and assess campaign performance. They also offer better delivery rates, templates for perfect delivery on all devices and come packed with tools to make every activity accountable.
The autoresponder featureenables you to create defined, automatedsequences of messages to send to your readers ensuring that you never miss a beat. The 100th subscriber has the very same experience as the first one did.This means that regardless of how busy you become or what disasters you might be coping with at any point in the work week, your new email subscribers are always well taken care of with predictable quality.An effective Autoresponder builds a strong foundation for your relationship with your new subscriber in a smart and efficient way.
Keep in mind that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Your first few timely messages are your chance to establish a reputation, provide context and build the relationship with the subscriber.
Use Warm & Personal Language
This creates a really nice rapport with your email subscribers. Early on in your autoresponder sequence, include a cheerful, warm, individual-sounding message, something informal. For example, “Hey, really glad to see you here, hope you enjoy the content…”
You’re not trying to trick anyone that this was an individually typed message for that recipient, but you are trying to create the same feeling asa personal relationship. Invite questions, comments, and feedback at this point, and let them know that you’d love to hear back from them. It’s good to use these kinds of messages in a text-only format. As you rollout your campaigns, it’s going to be vital that you test everything you do to compare what works and what fails.
Ask For Inclusion in their White or Safe List
Regardless of how good your email provider is, some messages will end up in spam. The best defense against that is to convince your readers to add you to their list of “safe senders,” “contacts,” or their “white list.” And the best way to get them to do that is to simply ask.
Send a plain text message in your messaging sequence right before a message that is likely to include a few red flags in the content (Something like “making money online” for example). The message should explain that the next email in the sequence is a little more likely to get trapped in a spam filter, so this would be a great time to add you to their safe senders list.Some readers will immediately white list you: Others don’t, and when the message is caught by a spam filter the next day they will see that adding you to their approved senders list would be a good idea. Obviously, it’s smart to get yourself onto the white list as soon as you can, so you’ll want to bring the subject up early on. But if you do have a message you can’t reasonably lower the spam score on, this technique can give you a good reason to ask a second time.
Take Note of Spam Triggers & Analytics
Email marketing platform providers typically provide feedback via a dashboard indicating whether or not thecontent in your campaigns is flagged as spam. Some keywords and topics like pharmaceutical brand names are obvious. Others are annoying, because they tend to be the words and phrases that have the most selling power. For example, links that say click here can make your content look a little spammier to the filters precisely because savvy marketers know that explicit calls to action achieve better results.
This is a perfect example of why you should keep your email messages short and sweet and leave the long-form sales copy for your landing pages on your website. However, the last thing you want to do is to use less persuasive language just to keep a spam filter happy. Always remember that you’re writing for people, not filters. When you make your readers happy and deliver the quality content they want and need, no spam filter can stop you.
Conversations are 2-Way
Ensure that whether you’re personally responding to email queries or if you have staff doing the work that your responses are thoughtful, personal and specifically serve the sender. Respond in a timely manner and if you need more time to answer a request, communicate that point. Silence will only turn off your subscribers and ruin your chance of gaining trust.
It’s also smart to use an individual person’s name in the “From” field, rather than the name of a company. Anything you can do to capitalize on the intimate nature of email makes sense. By adding the words, “Just click reply to ask me a question, your message will come directly to my personal in-box,” you will notice greater responsiveness from your list. Speaking of responsiveness, creating a responsive email design can also help you increase the likelihood or your emails getting read and as a result ensuring a better email marketing campaign.
Questions and feedback build excellent rapport and provide you with valuable insight into what your customers and prospects need as well as opportunities for further communication.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains a powerful tool in your sales arsenal. Do not be intimidated as the market becomes more challenging and customers demand greater quality. Email still performs when executed in a native, value-driven and informative manner. Email will be the preferred channel for permission-based promotional messages for a long time to come. Another useful channel that’s picking up speed is social media, and innovative B2B Social Media marketing should be adopted alongside other marketing tactics.
Do you need more help with your email marketing? Please share your specific problems using the comments below.
Source: http://www.smarttechtoday.com/6-useful-considerations-for-improving-email-marketing-roi-for-b2bs/5782/
