Email marketing has hit it’s 40s, but instead of having a mid-life crisis it’s maturing like a fine wine!

Despite this, we know that many businesses are unsure of how effective their email marketing is, with only half of businesses confident that they can calculate ROI! We’ve put together our top of tips for getting the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to B2B email marketing.

Batch and Blast emails should be a thing of the past!

You might think batch and blast emails are in the past, but one in five marketing managers aren’t confident their organisation can segment their various target audiences. Use all the data you can to really profile and segment your data – for example, looking at the company demographic and splitting your data by buyer persona. Use previous email send data to get a fuller picture of your lists, and what content engaged them. If someone is engaging with emails on specific product lines or service areas and ignoring others, use this behavioural data to target them with tailored content in the future. This kind of micro-targeting will turn your emails from mass mailers with low impact to personalised journeys tailored to each prospect.

Tie it all together

Email marketing can be taken a step further through an automation platform, where you can track visitors and usage to your website, score leads based upon interactions with content and schedule engagement at the most optimum times of contact. Insights can be gathered such as the decision makers who are interacting with emails and content which can then be used to build personas for wider marketing activity.

Acquisition vs Retention

Your email marketing can be targeted to customer needs, tracked throughout the engagement process and take customers and prospects along a designated customer journey! Interestingly 61% of B2B marketers find the main benefit from email marketing is business retention. However, email marketing can also be an effective tool for B2B customer acquisition if you work closely with your sales team to make it part of a proactive outbound strategy.

Mix and Match your content accordingly

For B2B marketers brand content has come out on top with 41% of marketers preferring content such as articles, magazines and videos but this was closely followed by user guides and discounts both coming in at 30%, new product notifications (28%) and the all-important product reviews (16%). Shake up your content depending on what your audience is clicking on and engaging with and segment your audience according to what they like. It’s not about what you want to send them it’s about what they want to receive!

“How often is too often?”

The question on everyone’s lips is how often should I send an email? We all hate the junk mail we receive – to the point we’re clicking on the ‘unsubscribe’ button. However, some businesses are too concerned on the number of emails they send out and not on the execution of engaging nurture sequences. Research has found that sending more emails in a month can significantly increase opening rates – if you’re sending content which is useful and engaging that is!

It should be remembered that email marketing shares traits with telemarketing – building and nurturing a relationship. Always look at the metrics and see what emails have proven the most successful for different individuals and build on that. Make sure that the frequency and relevancy of the content sent is tailored for that decision maker or business as the objective of email marketing is progressing the relationship between them and your brand!

Email marketing is certainly not outdated, at 40 it’s in its prime! To get the best out of it, great email marketing should be part of a multi-channel marketing plan underpinned by good content created with your audience in mind. Estimated return on investment (ROI) for the channel is £32.28 for every £1 spent – so it’s worth putting the time in to get it right!

Also written by Kate