To communicate with professionals, email marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter.
You should be aware, however, that the rate at which your e-mails are clicked or opened depends on a number of factors, not least the mail servers and the person behind the screen (who may or may not read your e-mail). At first sight, they may decide to delete it or send it to their spam folder…
Remember that the best business relationships are based on trust between customer and company. And you can’t achieve this by sending spam-like e-mails.
Here are a few techniques you can apply to prevent your e-mails from going straight into your customers’ spam folders.
Personalize your emails
According to statistics, customers who receive emails tend to neglect them if they don’t come from someone they trust. Personalizing your e-mails is therefore a good way of overcoming this first hurdle.
The first point to consider is the sender’s name. It must be clearly identified. Avoid names that are too long or in capital letters: spam filters can identify them as spam.
The subject line is crucial, so avoid dubious expressions such as “win big now”. There’s nothing like it to get you relegated to the rank of “spammer”. Here again, forget capital letters and don’t overuse special characters and punctuation (!!!, ????, etc.).
Your sender address is also important. Use an address with which the customer can respond to you if necessary. The use of your company name or the customer’s business contact is welcome.
Create relevant content
The content of your emails must be engaging. Focus on content that your customers will want to read. Be relevant, and send your customers only the information they really need, at the risk of seeing your next emails go straight into the trash. Being generous also allows you to capture your recipients’ attention. You can give them free advice or virtual gifts to build loyalty.
Ideally, you should send personalized messages that will enable you to maintain a relationship of trust with your customers. You can offer them exclusives or deals they won’t find anywhere else but in their mailbox. They’ll feel privileged and be eager to open your next e-mail.
Beware of sending large numbers of e-mails
Although it’s a good way of reaching many potential customers, sending large numbers of emails is not always recommended. However, if this practice is necessary for you, use email providers that allow you to personalize fields with the names of your contacts. For example, you can use the Ediware platform…
Be careful, however, not to send a large number of e-mails at the same time. Mail servers may block some of your e-mails as spam.
And, if you’re sending out newsletters, make sure they include the unsubscribe option, as defined by the French law for confidence in the digital economy.
Check and test your e-mails before sending them
If you’ve applied these techniques correctly, your marketing e-mails won’t normally come across as spam. To be sure, check them with anti-spam testing services, such as the Ediware platform. The latter will scan the content of your e-mail for expressions that may be read as spam by mail servers.
For many years now, companies have been using email campaigns to market their products and services. It’s important to remember, however, that to run an effective email campaign and make the most of its full potential, you need to follow certain best practices.
Your contacts receive numerous e-mails every day, and only open the ones that are particularly relevant to them. So how do you write a B2B email that gets results? Here are the best tips.
B2B subject lines and opening rates
Before writing the message for your email campaign, identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
For cold prospecting, purchase a list of well-targeted contacts from a data provider with a reputation for good data.
Once you’ve established your contact list, think about working on your subject line. The subject line is very important, as it will be the first impression your email will make on the recipient. It must therefore be relevant, punchy and specific. This will encourage recipients to open your e-mail. If your e-mail generates a high open rate, this indicates to spam filters that your message is relevant.
That’s why you need to stand out from the crowd. Personalize your subject line with high-impact language, be specific, but not too specific. For example, use the recipient’s first name or company name. It’s very effective. You can also draw up a list of topics on which you’ll provide solutions to problems and create a targeted campaign that will interest your recipients.
Writing body copy for B2B email campaigns
Once this stage has been completed, you can proceed to create the body text of your email. The principle is the same as for the subject line. Here are a few elements to help you:
Content: make sure every element is relevant to the recipient. Eliminate irrelevant elements and use concise, targeted text.
Text: put yourself in the recipient’s shoes and focus your text on them, not on you. Talk about their advantages and the solutions to their problems.
Call to action button: insert a strong call to action with interesting, powerful and relevant text that will encourage your interlocutor to click on it.
Landing page: create a dedicated landing page with content and text corresponding to the email, allowing visitors to easily fill in a form.
Please note that everything you talk about in your body text must end up on the landing page.
Making sure your email campaigns reach their destination
The effectiveness of your email campaigns depends on their deliverability rate. To achieve this, they must land in recipients’ inboxes and not in their spam. This means bypassing spam filters, which take into account a number of factors that indicate how trustworthy your emails are.
As time goes by and technology improves, these anti-spam filters become more modern.
It automatically eliminates erroneous data from your contact list. It protects your sender score and checks your content in real time to make sure your emails land directly in your recipients’ inboxes.
Every company needs to find new customers and communicate with them. The web is a great tool for this. But it’s changing faster and faster, and it’s getting harder and harder to predict what’s going to work and what’s not. Optimizing the return on investment of your marketing actions means regularly questioning yourself and testing new opportunities.
Most web communication and advertising platforms and tools have a limited lifespan. Internet users quickly become accustomed to new forms of advertising, and results often drop off inexorably.
Just look at Google Trend. This tool gives an indication of the evolution of search frequency for a word or expression. This indicator is directly linked to the popularity and use of the tool searched for. Internet users are more interested in techniques that are in full expansion.
Searches for “blog”, “youtube” or “adsense” show steadily declining curves.
For example, for the word “blog”.
But there are some fundamentals that still “work”, and email marketing is one of them.
The same search on Google Trend shows a stable curve over time.
Even if it’s interesting to communicate on social networks or on tools that are being widely adopted by Internet users, a company should continue to look after its email lists. It remains the most durable and profitable tool for contacting them. It is not dependent on a platform that may become less fashionable.
But email marketing also has its problems. People are increasingly solicited, and collecting email addresses is less easy. You need to make more effort than you did a few years ago to maintain a good rate of return on your email marketing actions.
That’s why I think there should be 3 main trends in email marketing for 2019. All focused on quality rather than quantity.
Content personalization and segmentation
Send the most personalized content possible to your recipients. Based on the information you have about them: purchase history, geographical location, browsing history, behavior during the last emailings received, etc…
Increasing the relevance of emails sent also improves deliverability.
Now is the time to synchronize as much targeting and personalization information as possible with your emailing platform, for those who haven’t already done so.
Generalization of subscription management
Still with a view to personalization, mechanisms enabling users to choose the type of content they wish to receive should become more widespread. This type of option is easy to set up and offers many advantages. In particular, it reduces the number of unsubscribes (the user controls what he receives) and improves the relevance of e-mails sent, and therefore the quality of campaigns.
More text content
Internet users’ mailboxes are full of advertising, each more attractive than the last. To stand out from the crowd, it’s natural to return to text-based e-mails, without images. All the more so as these messages seem much more personalized because they resemble a hand-written e-mail.
HTML messages will also have to be responsive. This is no longer a trend, but has become the norm. Statistics on e-mail consultation all point to a huge share for mobiles and tablets.
More added value in messages
Inbound-marketing also seems to be a sustainable way of collecting new leads. The principle is to position yourself as an expert on a given topic and then naturally generate contacts.
The number of companies combining email and inbound marketing is set to rise sharply. It seems much more interesting to share content that solves readers’ problems than to send a sales e-mail.
This allows you to communicate more often and for longer with your prospects, and thus multiply conversions.
Like fashion, email marketing is an eternal restart. More and more, we’re returning to designs from the 2000s. As well as text messages with contact details leading back to a “real person”. The era of “give to get” has been established; purely advertising emails are losing ground in favor of informative content.
This article was originally written for the SNCD white paper.
Do customers really buy what you sell? Does your business inspire conversion? These questions provide a quick measure of your company’s success.
Email marketing programs are designed to develop a company’s business. Using e-mail to convert a prospect into a customer has therefore become an essential step in marketing.
However, the definition of a conversion is still vague. There are many reasons for this, including the use of messaging programs to achieve secondary objectives. Since the latter have been developed on the basis of each company’s own objectives, this creates a divergence of opinion.
To shed more light on the subject, we put these two simple questions to the experts:
“WHAT IS A CONVERSION?”
“IS CONVERSION VIA EMAIL MARKETING DIFFERENT FROM OTHER CONVERSIONS?”
They all had a fairly similar definition of conversion. But as they expanded on the subject, their explanations quickly became confusing. Everyone agreed that there are two types of conversion, but opinions differed as to what they were and what they were called. Among the answers, the experts mentioned :
micro-conversions and macro-conversions
email and website conversions
direct and indirect conversions
conversions and sales conversions.
A conversion can be many things. Quite simply, it is “the realization of a desired action”. There are two main types of conversion:
micro-conversion (click-through rates)
and macro-conversion (achievement of the final objective, such as a sale or registration).
Many merchants generally opt for the wrong conversion – micro-conversion – because it’s easier and the results are more tangible.
For example, if you send several people an email promising them a free beer and pizza, you’ll probably get a very high click-through rate. But when they get to your home page and discover that you only sell socks, be prepared for a high bounce rate. In fact, many companies have lost the trust of their customers because of mismatched images. That’s why home page optimization is an integral part of email marketing.
If, on the other hand, you send the right message with the same conversion objective in mind, the results will get better and better with every step.
Don’t get me wrong, evaluate micro-conversions first – they can bring you opportunities. But think long-term, and opt for macro-conversions. In other words, keep an eye on sales, not clicks.
A conversion is simply an action that takes place on your home page or any tab on your website. The purpose of the action in question is to lead prospects to achieve a desired result. You need to start by defining the conversion you’re looking for (a new subscriber, a new order…).
Conversions don’t take place in e-mails, but on the website. The conversion rate on the website is only part of the action. So you need to make sure that all parts balance out:
Your audience
Your subject: opening rate
Message and offer quality: click-through rate
Potential customers on your website: number of visitors
Visitors who don’t like what they see and leave the site: bounce rate
Visitors who complete the planned action: conversion rate.
You’ll always need to go through the phases of testing, refining and fine-tuning to get the best user experience and to be able to offer the best deals. Keep in mind that testing never ends. There will always be something to improve to give customers the experience they’re looking for. That’s how you stay ahead of the competition.
Advertisers often question the value of conversions if they don’t result in a sale. This can lead you to believe that a campaign without direct and immediate benefits is a failure.
However, conversions don’t always provide instant benefits. An email conversion can mainly be defined as a subscriber taking the path you’ve indicated in your message. If your email advertises an event, for example, a click to the registration page is progress, while a completed registration is a conversion. If you send out a monthly newsletter with links to your blog content, conversion can be measured by the number of posts read or the time your subscribers spend on your blog.
Some emails lend themselves to direct conversion: you promote a product and prospects buy. But there are also indirect conversions where your email triggers another interaction with your site or a product.
For example, you send an e-mail inviting your subscribers to download your annual report. Your subscriber opens it but does nothing. However, your email reminds him that there’s more content on your blog. He visits your blog and reads old articles. He discovers a promotion for a weekly newsletter that interests him and decides to subscribe. Is this a conversion due to the first e-mail? No, but the email was the catalyst that led the subscriber to old emails. So this is an indirect conversion.
An email conversion is simply when a desired action takes place as a result of an email sent to a customer. Many merchants, however, consider an email conversion when the email is the factor that prompted the customer to make a purchase or take some other action, such as registering for an online conference or a competition.
This point of view is rather limited, as email is much more than the final conversion event. There are many crucial points to take into account when bringing in money through a series of micro-conversions.
So, what is a micro-conversion? It’s the smallest action your customers take before they get to the goal you’ve set.
The ultimate goal of email is to sell a click, because email isn’t really where the final conversion event takes place. Unless you’re one of those innovative brands with enough experience to sell directly via email, without redirecting the customer to your website.
The next time you see an email campaign with several links, but representing low conversions, don’t blame the email… unless it promises something the site couldn’t deliver.
Generally speaking, conversion refers to any desired action that has actually been carried out by prospects or customers. This was the definition of conversion for pre-internet direct marketing.
A conversion doesn’t always involve money changing hands. A conversion can take the form of a form to fill in or a report to download. This is the case for large quantity purchases, ticket sales or a long sales cycle (business-to-business prospecting)… For some organizations, however, conversion rhymes with sale. In this case, conversion is defined as: conversion to sale.
Whether or not conversions involve immediate sales, it’s important to evaluate the evolution of these conversions on a monthly and quarterly basis. Measure the number of sales resulting from these conversions, and divide the number of sales by the number of conversions to obtain a percentage of conversions to sales.
But remember, these desired actions cannot be considered conversions, unless they are the result of an action initiated by the company.
The risk of conversion inflation
Our experts have made some interesting observations, and the distinctions they have drawn are very important. But at the same time, confusion can easily arise and conversion inflation can occur.
Email marketing programs may no longer be aligned with business goals and objectives. This can result in a “successful” program, but one that doesn’t contribute to the company’s evolution.
The best way to avoid vague objectives and measurements is to keep track of the campaign’s objectives. You’ll also need to translate these results into company objectives and metrics. Separate your email marketing metrics from your sales metrics, and you’ll see that your email campaign will be a success in the eyes of your company’s management. Read our article on analyzing email marketing statistics.
