Email. For some, it’s an ineffective way to market one’s products and services. After all, how much spam do we receive on a daily basis and how many emails to we truly open and read thoroughly? If you are one of those who are placing email marketing on the lower end of your list of marketing priorities, you might want to reconsider. BitBounce reported that email ranks third among the most influential sources of information for B2B audiences, with the first two being colleague recommendations and thought leaders. In addition, click-through rates are 47% higher for B2B emails than B2C, Hubspot reported. This means that a lot of professionals are still tuning into emails. The challenge is now, how to do you get them to open your email and engage with it? For IT marketing professionals like yourself, you might be wondering how your digital marketing plan can impact the way you convert leads to customers via email marketing. Here are some B2B email marketing strategies to help convert your leads into paying customers.
Basic B2B Email Marketing Strategies for Software Companies
Make signing up a breeze for subscribers.
As IT marketing professionals, you’re aware about how usability plays a major role in how users engage with a website, app, or software. The same principles apply to your email campaign. Make signing up effortless for your subscribers by placing signup calls to action on your blog, website, and social media. These forms should then be easy to understand and fill out for a friction-less sign up process. Be transparent when it comes to informing subscribers of your intentions with their information. With the new GDPR rules in place, it’s important to be compliant and transparent with how you will use your subscriber’s data. Make sure that confirmation emails are sent as soon as they sign up. CoSchedule recommends using a double opt-in for subscribers to know what they have signed up for. As always, keep these confirmation emails concise, short, and straight to the point.
Create content that solves problems.
Content is king and when it comes to email marketing, it is front and centre. Your email campaigns must offer content that is relevant to your subscribers’ needs. Digital marketing strategist Mike Khorev recommends developing content that “aims to help people solve problems.” Such content that can help achieve that goal are tutorials, best practice guides, step-by-step infographics, and the like. As an IT marketing professional, you’re often offering solutions to your potential clients. Let your email campaigns do the same by offering content that will help solve problems.
It’s also important to diversify content. Sometimes, you just want to share the good news. While it’s important to push for content that solves problems, subscribers would not want to be spammed with how-to’s all the time. Diversify by providing what Campaign Monitor calls “people-focused content” such as customer feedback and testimonials, team member blogs, executive interviews, and the like.
Personalise, personalise, personalise.
Personalisation can be applied in almost every aspect of B2B email marketing. From sender names to greetings, to the actual content being sent, personalisation plays an integral role in the success of a B2B email marketing campaign. One great tip for IT marketing professionals like yourself is to humanise the sender. A Litmus-Fluent survey revealed that 42% of people first look at the sender or from name when deciding to open an email. 34% look at the subject line. This means that more people will read the sender name first and if it reads “No Reply,” these people are more likely to dismiss your email and not open it entirely. The reason? It’s impersonal and detached. Receiving email from “Mark Anderson @ This IT Company” reads better than “No Reply.”
Another way to personalise your B2B email marketing campaign is to segment your list. List segmentation allows you to see information about groups of people on the list, including data on their demographics, location, profession, gender, interests, and more. This allows you to create content strategies that will earn better click-through rates because you’re tailoring your content to what they are interested in or what they need.
Measure and review your B2B email marketing statistics.
Email marketing software all come with a set of tools to help you measure your campaign performance. The data in these tools help you tweak your strategies accordingly, as it gives you insight on which users have high open rates and click-through rates, which landing pages are most viewed, and other such metrics. Having this information on hand will help inform your next email campaigns.
These B2B email marketing strategies are just some that can help you achieve your IT marketing objectives. To learn more about marketing your software company’s products and services, team up with a B2B marketing agency that can give you insights on how to best generate leads and convert them to customers fast. Visit The Lead Agency to know more.
