Is your business looking to implement some new B2B email marketing tips to improve its email performance? Allott and Associates dives into its top 5 advanced tips and tricks to help boost your email open and click through rate.

We cover:

1. Why you should be using email in your marketing strategy.
2. How to refine your mailing lists.
3. How to create clear, clickable messages.
4. How to optimise your segmentation.
5. How to effectively apply automation.
6. How to test to maximise performance.

And we’ll also add in our own examples so you can see how we implement this advice.

Why Email Marketing?

Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any form of marketing. On average, the return on investment is 3600%. So, optimising your use of this platform has huge potential benefits for your business.

It’s also great for directing relevant traffic towards your website and increasing your brand’s awareness amongst new prospects.

Using an email service provider (ESP) such as MailChimp, HubSpot or Force24 also allows you to easily and instantly measure the results of your email campaigns. This means you can use this data to measure your performance and adapt your email marketing strategy accordingly.

If you’re unsure how to adapt your email marketing strategy, these 5 tips will help you to increase your campaign performance…

Email Marketing Tip #1 – Refine Your Mailing Lists

When was the last time you manually removed a user from your mailing list? Have you ever?

If your mailing list contains contacts that have not engaged with your emails for more than 90 days, the likelihood is that the user’s details are now obsolete. This is particularly true in the food and beverage industry as it has very high rates of employee turnover.

How To Clean Your Mailing Lists

The best way to clean up any old data is to remove any contacts over a year old that you have not engaged with. This increases the likelihood that your mailing list will be interested in the content that you send them and reduces the number of expired email addresses in your audience.

If you are a B2B business looking to send mailer campaigns in the UK, you also have the option to purchase data to refresh your mailing lists. If you are worried about the implications of this with regard to UK GDPR, Allotts can assist you with this. As experts in UK GDPR, we can guide you on how to market to cold contacts under the grounds of legitimate interest. This overcomes the need to have your contacts opt-in to your mailing list.

Email Marketing Tip #2 – Creating Clear, Clickable Messages

The emails with the highest click through rates (CTRs) clearly and succinctly convey their message to their audience. You need to make sure that you don’t overcomplicate your message so that readers find it easy to perform desired actions.

Sending shorter emails with one message more frequently to your audience massively increases the number of clicks each email receives. Take a look at one of our recent mailer campaigns:

In this campaign we achieved a unique open rate of 45.6% and a unique click through rate of 71.6%. Pretty impressive if we do say so ourselves. And, as you can see, we focused on one clear message that was irresistible to our audience.

Email Marketing Tip #3 – Optimise Your Segmentation

The next step is to check the segmentation of your mailing list.

Mailing lists have traditionally been separated by characteristics such as industry, seniority or job title. At Allotts we believe that a better way to segment your audience is by engagement.

This means that users who are in love with your brand receive content on a more frequent basis than users who have not opened an email from you in the last 30 days.

The best way to determine who your most engaged contacts are is to assign them a lead score. This involves assigning a number to each type of engagement activity a user can perform. Examples include email opens, clicks and newsletter sign ups. Each user then accumulates a score based on the number of engagement activities they complete.

Over the course of a 3-4 emails you should be able to determine between your most and least engaged contacts. You will then need to adjust your mailing list segments using the lead score data.

Email Marketing Tip #4 – Effectively Apply Automation

Email automation can be used to increase your open rate, click through rate and sales enquiries.

If you don’t currently use automation (sometimes called workflows), then an easy way to start is to look at increasing your email open rate.

How To Increase Your Email Open Rate

To increase your open rate, you should resend your mailer to all the contacts who did not open your email the first time it was sent to them. Allotts’ automation setup is shown below:

The workflow has a delay of 24 hours after the first email is sent to allow contacts the chance to open your email. If they do not open the email, the mailer is sent to them again. This increases the likelihood that the users see your email in their inbox and thus increases your open rate.

In one of our most recent campaigns we were able to increase the open rate by 66% using this technique. So, it’s worth giving this a go if you are not already!

Email Marketing Tip #5 – Test to Maximise Performance

Testing should form a crucial component of your email marketing strategy. This allows you to figure out what type of content is most effective at conveying your brand messages to your target audience.

Some testing tips include:

• Changing your subject line.
• Altering who the email is sent from.
• Testing the best time and day to send to your mailing lists.
• Restructuring your email layout.

If you’re looking for some more help with your email marketing campaigns, contact Allotts!