Effective Emails: Best Practices for B2B Newsletters

Even in the age of many digital marketing options, over 87% of B2B marketers use email regularly. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it shows that email newsletters and marketing are still effective and useful. On the other hand, if you’re a B2B marketer using emails, you’ve got a lot of competition in the area. The everyday use of email by all business people makes effective emailing vital in a digital marketing strategy. Read on to learn the benefits of effective emails and five best practices for B2B newsletters.

Effective Emails: Best Practices for B2B Newsletters

Benefits of effective emails:

They’re active.

While social media is a helpful marketing tool, it relies on potential customers coming across your content. Various content practices and marketing moves can push content in the right direction of an appreciative audience, but overall social media is a passive marekting endeavor. However, email newsletters are a direct line to the potential customer. You are speaking directly to them because the message is sent right to their inbox. This makes emailing an active marketing option.

They’re impactful.

Email newsletters also boost your website’s SEO. This is because Google uses traffic, engagement, and conversion rates to rank your website in its search engine results. If your email audience is clicking through to your content and hopping on your site, this’ll impress the Google algorithm.

They’re relevant.

Email newsletters are relevant to a large audience. The mix of content that you send out can appeal to a multitude of people. Either in separate emails or in different parts of the same newsletter, there’s a mix of content and information that people can look at. This allows more people to find things that they like and are interested in to read/view.

Best practices for B2B newsletters:

Define your why.

To make use of all the benefits listed above, first make sure you have a strategy behind your email newsletters. Define exactly why are you sending the emails. A clear purpose and goal behind the emails allows you to figure out what to include and exclude in each email. For example, if your purpose is to build relationships with your audience the content you write and include might be different than if your purpose was to sell a specific product. This doesn’t mean that you can only do one thing in each email, it just means that you should be clear what you are planning to do in each email so you can follow through and evaluate your results.

Use your data.

The next step is to pay close attention to data and metrics after your emails are sent out. Look out for these key areas (found in this article from MailerLite):

• Opt-in rate (How many people convert to subscribers)
• Delivery rate (How many people are actually receiving your emails)
• Open rate (How many recipients are opening the emails)
• Click-through rate (How many recipients click through your call-to-action)
• Unsubscription rate (How many recipients unsubscribe)

Pay attention to these rates and then use that information to change your future emails. If something isn’t working well, change it up and see if that helps. If a particular technique is working very well, keep it up!

Segment your emails.

Segmenting your emails can keep an audience engaged. In B2B circles, there are a lot of different levels of decision makers in the buying process. Email segmentation allows an edited version of your email newsletters to focus on different positions in companies or different areas of interest. When something is targeted at their interests personally, your audience member is more likely to open and engage with the email.

Craft your preview text.

To use the first impression of your email to the best advantage, put some thought into the preview text. The preview text can add a further description of what’s inside to grab the customer’s interest. It could be personalized to get attention (like segmentation above). Or it could call the audience to action—give an offer, preview a product, or highlight a service. Once you choose your preview text, craft your first paragraph/section to be relevant to the subject line and preview text. This way, the customer will know what to expect and be fulfilled in that expectation right away. It’ll keep them feeling satisfied with the email.

Include video.

Videos are catchy content. Viewers are more likely to watch a video than read content in this day and age. To make use of this in your emails, use videos or links to videos in your email newsletters. Vidyard reports that even mentioning a video in the subject line can push email open rates up by 40%. Linking to your YouTube content or relevant industry videos ups your engagement and adds value to your customer’s day.

For more marketing information and services including branding, website development, and digital marketing contact RedMoxy. Call us at 262-363-4238 or contact us here.