Transform Your Email Campaigns with These Insider Tips

Email marketing can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal for converting leads.

Unfortunately, it’s often done carelessly, quickly turning into nothing more than spam in your prospects’ inboxes. However, professional marketers have some secrets that can help you succeed. Here are those secrets, presented in a way you can easily use.

Effective email marketing evolves over time. No amount of marketing knowledge can guarantee a perfectly performing email campaign on the first try. It requires a testing approach and a keen understanding of your buyer persona (the demographic most likely to buy from you) and how they react to your email content.

Email Marketers,

Here are 5 quick tips to make your marketing emails more engaging: pic.twitter.com/LNGGzcKdW9

— Chase Dimond | Email Marketing Nerd 📧 (@ecomchasedimond) June 5, 2024

Secret 1: Start with the Right List

List building—acquiring names and email addresses of people likely interested in your product—precedes email marketing. Email marketing is typically used to nurture existing leads.

Acquiring Email Addresses

Building your email list can be done in several ways:

Buying Your Email List

Some businesses opt to purchase lists, but this approach has significant drawbacks:

• It may be illegal in your country.
• It’s unethical universally.
• It can be expensive.
• The purchased list may not include people with your target buyer personas.
• Data quality is often poor.

Building Your Own List

A more effective method is to exchange valuable resources for visitor contact details using Call-to-Action buttons and web forms to collect names and email addresses. The resources must be valuable, and the options are virtually unlimited:

• Calculators and tools
• Worksheets
• How-to documents
• Plans
• Resource lists, e.g., podcasts to listen to, books to read, etc.

By focusing on creating and nurturing a quality email list, you set the foundation for successful email marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience.

Secret 2: Nurture New Leads Immediately

Once you have these contacts, it’s crucial to start sending them emails right away. Waiting more than a week might cause them to forget about you.

Best practice is to send a welcome email as soon as they provide their email address. In your first email, you can:

• Thank them for their contact details.
• Ask if they are happy with the resource they received.
• Give them insight into the value they can expect from future emails.

From then on, begin gathering data from these contacts. Based on their interaction with your emails, you can determine where they are in their buyer’s journey and how interested they are in your products.

The key to lead nurturing is to provide value and information, not to sell.

Secret 3: Target the Decision-Making Unit

Before writing your emails, ensure you have developed a few buyer personas.

In B2B businesses, decisions are typically made by small groups rather than a single individual. While targeting the main decision-maker is essential, your email language should also appeal to the majority, if not all, members of the decision-making unit within a company.

For example, if you are selling Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), you may need to target the CTO as the primary decision-maker. However, ensure your email campaigns also resonate with the DBA and IT Manager to avoid alienating them.

By understanding and addressing the needs of the entire decision-making unit, your emails will be more effective and well-received.

Secret 4: Segment Your Lists

To effectively target emails to different members of the decision-making unit, segment your list according to job titles and stages in the buyer’s journey. Additionally, consider segmenting based on pain points, business goals, and other relevant criteria specific to your product or service.

By creating targeted emails for each segment, you can deliver more personalized content that resonates with specific groups within your main list. Writing decision-specific emails and sending them periodically helps you identify who is interested in which areas of your business. Monitor click-through rates and adjust your email campaigns based on your prospects’ interactions to gain a clearer understanding of your buyer persona.

Secret 5: Find the Optimum Time to Send Your Emails

In B2B email marketing, determining the best time to send emails is often simpler than in B2C. The ideal contact will provide a business email address, typically checked most frequently during working hours. So, you have an 8-hour window to send—when is the best time to increase open rates?

Most professional inboxes are checked first thing in the morning, making 8:00 AM to 9:30 AM a good bet. However, this still requires testing, as there are other key times of the day when email checking is likely and when you might have less competition:

• After lunch – when people return to their desks to check progress and new notifications.
• An hour before COB – when people check for missed communications before leaving the office.

Once you establish the time that receives the highest open rates for your buyer persona, you can time most, if not all, of your emails to go out at that optimal time.

Secret 6: Make Them Miss You with Lower Frequency

It’s critical not to overwhelm your audience with too many emails, as this can lead to higher unsubscribe rates. Once people unsubscribe, sending further marketing emails to them becomes ineffective and questionable. A typical and healthy unsubscribe rate is around 0.5% or less. If your rate is higher, it’s time to re-evaluate your sending schedule.

For regular updates, once a week is the maximum frequency you should consider. Sending more frequently risks your emails being treated as spam and reduces the quality of your content. Creating high-quality content more than once a week can be challenging.

An update every 2 to 3 weeks is still acceptable and often preferable. Focus on quality over quantity.

There are exceptions, such as time-sensitive events like conferences or webinars. In these cases, you may send reminders the day before and the day of the event, but only to those who have shown interest.

Secret 7: Know a Good Open Rate When You See One

The open rate is the percentage of successfully sent emails that are opened. If 5% of your list doesn’t receive the emails (perhaps because their inboxes are full), the open rate will not account for these undelivered emails.

Anything over 20% is considered a good open rate. Welcome emails are an exception, often achieving over 50% open rates, especially if they contain necessary information for the contact.

By monitoring your open rates and adjusting your strategies accordingly, you can ensure that your email campaigns remain effective and engaging for your audience.