In B2B marketing, email can be an essential channel in building trust and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with your audience. Every campaign you send out offers the opportunity to:
– Listen to the ways your segment responds (by paying attention to open and click-through rates).
– Maintain relevance in your conversations (by acknowledging recipients’ profiles and interests).
– Engage with customers in the most meaningful ways possible (by following up appropriately).
True email marketing is NOT taking the “batch and blast” approach. Every email that is sent out requires careful consideration of the relevance of the message to the audience and what follow-up measures will be taken.
When sending out emails, ensure each action is optimized to meet your objectives. Here are 5 optimization tactics to keep in mind:
- Develop buyer and customer personas and align them with the content in any email message. Create multiple messages or use dynamic content to ensure the email is sent with information that is important to that persona.
- Use the same name and email address when sending mail to ensure the recipient recognizes the email sender. Also, keep your emails in the same style as other branded content so the email feels familiar.
- Make sure to use A/B testing to find the right subject lines, images, and content for your buyer personas.
- Each email should have a call to action, typically in the form of a link, which will allow you to see if the message resonated with the recipient. Try to limit the number of calls to action so the recipient does not become overwhelmed or miss an important call to action.
- Go beyond following CAN-SPAM rules, ensuring that every recipient has opted-in to your email.
- Test how emails will render in multiple email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Gmail, and Hotmail. Also, test to see how emails will render on mobile phones.
Be sure to tweak this to the goals you set because ultimately your optimization tactics will be specific to your company’s strategic objectives. Make sure that each message you send supports that goal in some way!