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“B2B marketing” has a reputation for being...difficult. While it does present unique challenges, it doesn’t have to be boring. Here are four ways to make your B2B brand’s email journeys a memorable experience.
The first step toward having content that is memorable is having content that gets seen.
The inbox is a competitive place, and standing out is as much about timing as it is about an enticing subject line.
The most popular times for B2B email sends have typically fallen in the middle of the week and toward the morning hours. Other data, though, has shown more successful open rates for email sent over the weekend or late at night.
Only you will know what works for your brand. Just as you test subject lines and imagery, test different send times to discover when your target audience is most active. Better yet, take advantage of artificial intelligence tools, like Salesforce Einstein, that learn to predict the optimal times to send emails to individual subscribers. This way, your message reaches them at just the right moment to boost your open rates.
The percentage of total email opened on mobile versus desktop and tablet has topped 50%. Even though the number is lower among the B2B crowd, it still approaches 30%. If you still aren’t thinking mobile-first for your email strategy, you may be missing out on opportunities to connect with potential clients.
When you think mobile-first, your emails will be easy to open, read, and interact with on a small screen, so that you don’t lose your audience in the moment because an image won’t download or a button is irritatingly small.
Check out the Email Design Toolkit for mobile-first best practices you can apply to your next email.
Interactive features are not just for consumers facing emails. “To truly engage your subscribers and make your email stand out, you must surprise and delight them,” according to Kayla Lewkowicz at Litmus. That includes B2B buyers as well. They’re also people, after all.
Fully interactive emails are beginning to look and act more like microsites, allowing users to explore products and features, watch video reviews, even make purchases without ever leaving the email.
A key challenge of moving busy professionals through your marketing and sales funnel is simply convincing them to take the time to learn about you. Putting the information right in their inbox removes the barrier of multiple click-throughs.
Everyone is talking about email personalization these days. That doesn’t mean it’s simple to pull off. Addressing your customers’ needs is more important that “being their friend.” Your customers won’t care that you call them by their first name if you can’t help them solve a problem.
Personalization means knowing your customer well enough to be able to know the right time and channel to talk with them, make accurate product or content recommendations, and leverage their behavioral data to interact with them effectively on channels outside of email.
You can achieve this knowledge through the use of a DMP, progressive profiling, or AI. If your B2B company takes a more focused ABM approach to marketing, you can even do it manually.
Finally, be authentic. The reason personalization works is because people like to be treated like people, not “demographics.” The goal of personalized content or product recommendations is that they feel like they’re coming from a trustworthy person, not a robot or algorithm. So take the time to examine the messaging and tone of your copy. Is the voice authentic and on-brand? Is it compelling? Is it human? A/B testing can help you determine what resonates most with your audience.
B2B brands may not always have the sexiest social media campaigns or make videos that go viral, but that doesn’t mean they can’t create memorable email experiences for their subscribers.
To learn more about making B2B emails more memorable, watch our video series that takes you through each stage of a buyer’s email journey.
