Why email should be part of your marketing mix
While blogs and social media are winning larger portions of B2B marketing budgets, email marketing remains an important and cost-effective way to drive leads and build long-lasting relationships with customers.
In Marketing Charts 2015 B2B Marketing Survey Report of 240 B2B marketers, email marketing was still seen as an effective way to generate leads.
How to make email marketing keep up with the pack
Despite the growing social media numbers, don’t kick email marketing to the side. It’s still a great way to nurture your leads until they’re ready, start the sales conversation and help you to stay connected with your customers.
Here are 3 trends to keep email marketing fresh in 2015:
1. Managing your lists
As your business grows, so does your email contact list. Make sure that you keep your contact information up-to-date. A good CRM system can help you to keep all your contact information in order. Contact details like name, email address, title, company, and personal interests are good information to keep updated in order to ensure personalization and help you with segmentation.
Make sure that you get their opt-in permission. It’s really easy to get a lot of email addresses, but without opt-in permissions, you’re just filling your lists with disengaged and unresponsive subscribers. This can, over time, affect your deliverability and your reputation. It’s a good idea to conduct regular reviews of your email list to clean up and/ or do something special to try to re-engage the people who do not respond.
2. Create longer and more relevant subject lines
There was a time that the best subject lines were those that were “short and sweet”. And it’s true that mobile devices cut off subject lines that are long. However, studies by both Alchemy Worx (2008) and Return Path (2015) states that long subject lines are powerful motivators for recipients to open emails. Long subject lines are better indicators of relevancy and also address the expectations of the recipient better.
3. Measure your results
Any good email marketing tool will help you to track your campaign from tracking who clicked on which links, to seeing who unsubscribed and how many bounced. A few good email marketing metrics to track are:
- Open rates – the number of recipients that opened your email
- Click through rate (CTR) – the number of contacts that responded to your email by following a link or a call-to-action (CTA)
- Response rates – this includes CTR’s but also measures the number of people that reply to your email
- Bounce rates – measures the number of emails that did not make it into an inbox. There are two types of bounce rates: Hard bounce – when the email address you are using doesn’t exist. Soft bounce – when the receiving server is having technical difficulty delivering your email
Make sure to regularly revisit your email lists and clean up the bounces. Unclean lists slow down your delivery and can damage your email marketing reputation.
It’s NOT all or nothing
Just because you use email marketing doesn’t mean that you can’t use social media or vice versa. The best thing is to integrate the two together. Allow people to opt-in to your email newsletter, to like you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter. Even send the same content through different channels because you’re possibly targeting different audiences. It’s all about trying to reach as many people as you possibly can with your message.
Email marketing is not dead. Long live email marketing.
Sources:
- “Why Email No Longer Rules”, Wall Street Journal, 2009
- “Subject Lines – Length is Everything", Alchemy Worx
- Marketing Charts 2015 B2B Lead generation survey
- “Email Marketing Chart: How subject line length affects open rates”, Marketing Sherpa, conducted by Return Path, 2015