Keep Winning Leads With B2B Email Marketing

E-mail marketing is a bit of a double-edged sword. It’s one of the most widely-used marketing channels, so those who use best practices will win. That said, it’s also one of the channels that has the most noise to cut through. Full inboxes tend to leave both marketers and consumers fatigued.

There is a solution – a best practice that lets you reap those benefits and drive MQLs. The solution is programmatic e-mail, a method that allows marketers to reach consumers with relevant and highly personalized e-mail campaigns. Everybody wins: consumers are getting content they actually want to see, and your team isn’t wasting valuable bandwidth.

Let’s take a look at the State of the E-Mail Marketing Union.

The Latest E-Mail Trends (and Why we Hate Them)

A few trends have landed on the modern inbox that, though they’re admittedly useful for purchasing decision-makers and rather responsive, act as hurdles for e-mail marketers:

• Better spam filters
• Separate tags such as [Marketing Mail] in Outlook that quickly call out promotional material
• More mobile browsing

One thing this trend means is that there is a cultural shift in which people expect their mailboxes to be doing the filtering for them, and so they’re less tolerant to irrelevant or poorly-placed content. They’re also intolerant to e-mails that aren’t mobile-responsive, and won’t even end up seeing e-mails that use those magic words or phrases that send them straight to the spam folder. For many of us, it has taken a bit of trial and error to understand the fine line between what gets opened versus what gets us penalized.

Thus, it’s no longer quantity over quality (and let’s be honest – it never should have been, but we all have our marketing vices). Marketers have to adapt by incentivizing e-mail performance and nixing anything that might be harming our mysterious credibility.

What the Trends Mean for Marketers

Marketing is a practice that needs to adapt, and so it is. These adjustments to e-mail marketing as we know it have only given rise to bigger, better forms of digital marketing that benefits everyone.

One thing we’ve come to learn is that trigger-based e-mail marketing is a great way to ensure you’re giving your target accounts content that they’re interested in. For example, if your predictive software has told you that a prospect viewed your site more than once or downloaded a piece of content from your site, you could trigger an e-mail that asks if they have time to schedule a meeting to discuss further. Of course, triggers also involve a contact intentionally giving you their information via a blog subscription, scheduling a product/service demo, or requesting further information. In either sense, trigger-based e-mail is a great way to avoid wasting marketing efforts on those who are highly uninterested.

This also means forgoing broad segmentation in favor of more individualized communication. E-mails that can appeal to too large of a crowd in the B2B community only add to noise, and should become a thing of the past. In fact, according to DMA, over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns.

A third way to personalize an e-mail is through AI software. Whether you’ve got existing accounts you’re looking to expand your deal with, or you’ve used predictive to understand an account’s interests, you can set up an algorithm that will send them recommendations of similar – or even the same – products, complementary literature to the products/solutions they were browsing, or literature that has been tailored to appeal to their specific industry.

At the end of the day…it’s all about best practices.

So, what are the best practices for fighting e-mail fatigue and ensuring that your messages aren’t met with an eye-roll by all who receive them?

• Understand who is looking at, interested in, and willing to learn more about your content in real-time to avoid sending information that is irrelevant
• Avoid sending unnecessary discounts to customers who are already considering purchasing your product – not only does this diminish your ROI, it takes away from the personalized feel
• Always aim to improve and enhance the customer’s decision-making experience, not to make it more overwhelming