With its low cost and potential for high returns, email marketing has earned its place at the center of B2B marketing programs. According to the Direct Marketing Association, businesses can achieve ROIs of more than $45 for every dollar spent on email. Earning that kind of exceptional response to email only happens when businesses work with email marketing experts who can deliver on the medium’s promise. To get full value from B2B email marketing, you need a marketing program that gives you successes you can quantify and reproduce for every campaign.
Email by the Numbers
Marketers know email is important, but not all of them know just how much it matters. In a Direct Marketing Association poll of B2B companies, 32 percent of the companies surveyed didn’t know which devices their clients preferred for reading email. Nearly a third of them were unable to track revenue generated through their email marketing programs. Without being able to capture and use customer data, these companies can’t tell how effective their email marketing strategies are at the most fundamental level, let alone understanding how individual campaigns differ in effectiveness.
Email in the greater context of marketing automation becomes quantifiable, telling businesses how their customers read email, how long they take to read, what inspires them to click through, and how much of a return on investment each campaign should create. Only when you quantify your returns can you make solid projections about the scope of your email programs – and only then are you able to build successful campaigns every time.
Sustaining Successes
Hidden within every wildly successful campaign is the secret of that success, the little change that sets it apart from its more moderately successful predecessors. With marketing automation systems that track email metrics, you learn what those differentiators are so your marketing team can implement them with future campaigns. Email campaigns are anything but static; they shift with changes in your audience, with your industry, and among your competition. To stay ahead of the game, marketing automation software tests emails and monitors responses so each campaign incorporates new ideas
One of the biggest secrets to sustained success is creating compelling content in email. It’s no longer enough to rely on quantity to get your message read; email marketing has become targeted and customized to give readers higher quality. Market segmentation that lets you tailor email to specific audiences and speak directly to them with your content is a good way to maximize returns on your email marketing investment. Make your customers feel as though each one is the most important client you serve, and your email content immediately becomes more persuasive.
Becoming Agile
The cost to send an individual email is minimal, but even a low-cost marketing channel still has expenses associated with it. Content creation, image licensing, landing page maintenance, and other essentials drive up the cost of an email marketing campaign. To get the most value for your investment, your email marketing program must be agile. An agile system adapts quickly to shifting market needs and sends triggered emails when they’ll have the greatest impact. The effort your marketing team puts into content and design pays off when your automated marketing system delivers email at precisely the right time.
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