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To be honest, newsletters feel redundant. They are boring and nobody likes to receive them. After all they are the most common type of emails in email marketing. Their purpose is to communicate any news, updates, or promotions to the subscribers’ list.
A subscriber’s list – the reducing list of people who offer no value to your business in any way.
Then why send a newsletter in the first place? Why isn’t this marketing channel dead already?
Because Email Marketing, if done right, produces phenomenal results. In fact, its ROI can be as high as 4400%. That is $44 for every dollar spent on an email marketing campaign.
Get ready to realize the value of an effective B2B Email Marketing strategy in your digital marketing plan.
Newsletters are sent to people who have provided their email addresses because they want to hear from you. This group is your biggest fan, and as such are valuable to your organization. When you send them information that is timely and helpful, you strengthen your brand value and credibility. Spam them or ask for a sale too often, and you push them away and increase your unsubscribe rates.
Email subscribers must be treated with kid gloves. Such a volume of email builds up in our inboxes daily, and so getting the attention of that valued email subscriber is a highly competitive business. It requires careful planning, creative copy, eye-popping visuals, and a professional email software platform from which to send and manage email activity.
When done well, it keeps your business top of mind and well-positioned for the next sale from a healthy growing list of engaged subscribers. So, with this in mind, here is a look at the Email newsletter best practices to understand how you can make email marketing relevant and profitable for your business.
Define your Goals
Do not rush into sending email newsletters without a good strategy and relevant content plan. Without a doubt, businesses need to be strategic when sending email newsletters out in order to see high open and engagement rates with the content.
The first step is to figure out your goals – pay attention to what you want to achieve by sending out these emails.
Do you want to generate new business from the existing subscribers, educate your subscribers on advanced features of your products, grow your base with list-building activities, generate sales, or stay top of mind among your subscriber base? You can grow and maintain thought leadership to educate your subscribers and increase customer value.
What do you want to achieve from your email marketing?
Build Buyer Persona
The right email content plan includes a clear understanding of your subscriber audience. The better you know them the better you are at understanding their needs.
Building Buyer or Customer Personas helps you do just that. The exercise of developing these persona descriptions includes a deep understanding of their needs, purchase drivers, attitudes, and values. Developing a persona for your business is not easy. But there is a high payoff factor as the content you produce that is speaking to persona will perform much better than winging your content without the development of persona for your business.
What is the buyer persona you want to target?
Decide on the Messaging
Your email content is the deciding factor if a subscriber continues or unsubscribes from your emails.
The importance of the right message and strong subject line cannot be emphasized enough in a newsletter. In a saturated market where people get bombarded with emails daily, your email must be the content that gets opened and read. No subscriber wants to be spammed with repetitive messages to “buy now”. The messaging is about variety.
For example, if you are really into sneakers and there is a brand that you particularly like. Now imagine you get three emails in a week asking you to buy their sneakers. How does it add value to you as a customer? You might get annoyed and unsubscribe. Perhaps 3 messages in a week are excessive for you, and once weekly would serve you better.
Since you signed up to receive the emails, you’re wanting to get deals when they are available. But you may also be interested in the latest trends in styles and colors, new sneaker technologies, or aspects of that brand that set them apart from their competition.
Thus, the idea is to achieve the right balance between self-promotion and sending educational, relevant, timely information to your subscriber’s base.
Your subject line is the first impression you are making on your subscriber each time you send an email. Just because somebody is subscribed does not mean he will open all your emails. However, what will get them to click on your email every time is a creative, and strong subject line. Create different, empathetic, and engaging subject lines to increase the click-through rate.
Once the email is opened – the relevant message, appealing email design, and correct CTA drive your open rates.
How are you adding value to your subscriber’s newsletter experience?
B2B Email Marketing Campaigns on the right platform
With so many options out there for email software, how do you settle on one? While marketers have the know-how to differentiate one from the other; it can be a challenging task for a business.
Some of the popular features offered by these platforms are Drag-and-drop builder, Templates, Apps and integrations, Segmentation and personalization, A/B testing, Automation, Analytics & Metrics, and 24/7 support. However, your decision needs to be based on your number of subscribers, segmentation, frequency, pricing, and how well you can analyze your subscriber’s behavior.
What is the right platform for your B2B newsletter content?
Segmentation
Email marketing’s best practice is to pick one primary call-to-action for each message. However, the same CTA may need to be revised for your different buyer personas. This is where Segmentation comes to the rescue. Segmentation lets you divide your email list into different categories based on demographics, sales records, and other email subscribers’ data.
Segmentation also enables you to move subscribers down the sales funnel. As a business, you need to understand the differences in your audience. They face different challenges, have different pain points, and informational needs. You need to send appropriate messages to the right audience to make their customer journey smooth. You may need to educate some about your products and services while just inform others about a new product launch.
Do you customize your communication based on the different target audiences?
List Building
While you may already have a healthy list of subscriber bases, it is best practice to keep growing it to attract more traffic and leads to the business. The practice of sending regular content is two-fold – one is to grow the email list and two is to engage the email list with valuable content.
This can be done with offers on the website, social media sign-ups, paid ads, landing page inquiry forms, sales reps, and so on. Businesses found email newsletters to be a priceless tool during Covid-19. It proved to be the most accessible way to stay connected with their most loyal base allowing businesses to stay on top of mind.
How did your business connect with your audience during the pandemic?
Laws Governing Email Marketing
Canada has digital communication laws. When a business decides to communicate and nurture its relationship with its audience digitally, these laws need to be aligned with. CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation) and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are the three laws that need to be followed closely.
While they may charge heavy fines, they do not stop a business from b2b marketing, growing the list, or communicating with customers and prospects.
Do you understand these laws and how they apply to your business and email marketing? Your email marketing agency can be a great aid in helping you to implement a successful email marketing program that also complies with these regulatory frameworks.
Hear From Industry Experts
Read the latest tips, research, best practices, and insights from our community of expert B2B service providers.
Summary
No matter what industry you belong to or what business model you have; email marketing is a highly effective vehicle for creating business growth and generating leads, particularly in today’s economy. The key takeaway for B2B companies is to understand that engagement is paramount and always choose Quality over quantity.
Email marketing is not expensive, delivers outstanding ROI, and has been overlooked in many cases. We are seeing a renewal of interest in email marketing, and in each instance, the client is seeing excellent ROI. With each email you must achieve the right message, on the right platform, to the right audience. Do not forget to analyze your efforts to keep improving.
As a final note, make sure each message you send is mobile-friendly. Be ambitious and creative and put the beautiful templates that are available with most email software platforms to use. Increase the appeal and readability of your content with brand-relevant gifs and emojis. And don’t forget to balance the white space.
We hope you re-discover the power of email marketing because we know there are wonderful, exciting growth opportunities for your brand lying in wait. Drop us a note at hello@assetdigitalcom.com and tell us how it goes!