The following is an edited and anonymised version of an email I wrote to a B2B marketing agency a couple of years ago explaining why a specific email campaign for one of their tech clients wasn’t getting the desired results.
(Although this was written with a B2B tech campaign in mind, most of this applies to most B2B email marketing campaigns, which are routinely awful and ineffective in exactly the same ways.)
Names have been deleted to protect the guilty, etc.
Get your contact list right
Even the greatest email won’t work if you send it to the wrong people, so ask yourself the following about your email list(s):??
- Is the data high quality? Contacts who’ve opted in to receive emails from you will be more responsive than a list you’ve bought in from a 3rd party source. If using a 3rd party source, check the contacts they provide have opted in to receive emails on relevant topics.
- How recent is it? Contacts frequently move jobs, so you need to review your list(s) every 6 months minimum.
- Is it segmented? The more targeted your list, the higher the response will be. Segment by language, by country, by industry, by industry sub-sector, by topic, by department, by seniority, and by job title. (Note: for smaller firms this is less important, and for smaller lists, less practical. But if you're big and your list is more than 10,000 strong, you'd better be segmenting if you don't want to p*ss all your money away.)
Is your customer value proposition relevant?
- If your proposition is not laser focused on solving a challenge that gives your reader ulcers, they aren’t going to read an email about it. If your proposition doesn’t do this, come up with a variation of it specific to your email audience that does.
- Address the actual challenges of your audience using their language and terminology. Don’t talk about challenges that don’t resonate. Don’t use phrases your audience doesn’t use.
- Focus more on practical benefits than abstract ideas. Make them urgent where possible; why should people read this NOW?
What’s the offer?
- Each email is an interruption in your reader’s inbox. Whatever your proposition, the email needs an irresistible offer otherwise there’s no point reading it. Linking to a white paper or report doesn’t cut it. If you do that, you’re asking your reader to add to their workload.
- Far better to offer an immediate solution to an urgent problem. If you can save them money, send them to an ROI calculator, or a case study with an industry peer they respect. Or show how you can help them hit a looming deadline for regulatory compliance.
- Find something that will make them click. When you do, put it in the subject header, otherwise they won’t open your email. If you can’t find something to make them click, you don’t have a compelling offer.?
- Send the email from someone with the same seniority as the recipient. Powerful decision makers don’t take advice from people who earn less than they do.
- Focus more on the subject line than anything else in the email. If they don’t open the email everything else in it is wasted.
Design the email to be easy to read and easy to act on
- Clients often get distracted by making emails look nice, but this is irrelevant if your design obscures your message.
- People don’t read B2B emails; they scan them. (Studies suggest people read about 18% of a page of digital content.) Write and design emails to catch the attention of scanners using subheadings, bullet points, short paragraphs, and a large font size.
- Have all subheadings be either problem or benefit focused.
- Don’t use too many images, as not everyone will be able to view them due to spam filters, low internet connection speeds, etc.
- Elaborate visual design and branding makes every email look like a sales email and your recipient will have their guard up. Make your email look like an email, not an ersatz brochure.
- Stick to one single call to action. The more CTAs you have in an email the lower the click through rate is. However, repeating the same CTA more than once increases response. A mix of text links and buttons usually works best.
- Great layout doesn’t make up for weak content, a weak proposition, or a weak offer.
Style and tone
Stiff, dull language stops people reading. Instead:
- Use direct, active language in the 2nd person, which is more engaging and personal and increases clicks.
- Use short sentences where you can, and shorter words wherever possible.
- Reduce industry jargon to the absolute minimum and try to use common language and phrases.
- Clarity is the single most important priority. Don’t write anything your audience won’t understand instantly. They’re not going to waste time trying to decipher what you meant.
Content and messaging
- Get the offer right and this should be easy(er).
- Never start by talking about yourself. Lead with the problem or the benefits. If your proposition is relevant and your offer is compelling, you should already have this.
- Never try to educate people in an email. Your audience doesn’t want to work. They want you to make their life easier. You can link to educational resources – but only if you’re telling them something they genuinely don’t know that will help them solve an immediate problem. (Or unless they’ve specifically signed up for educational content.)
- Don’t cram multiple selling points in one email. This kills your click rates. (Especially if the email is short.) Stick to a single message; three at the absolute max.
- Use social proof/quotes/testimonials where relevant and where you have space, and always from the reader’s industry peer group. Never quote from people in your own organization because the reader won’t find them credible.
Avoid the #1 mistake in B2B email marketing...
If you only take one recommendation from this article, focus on sending urgent, resonant messages to the right audience. Not doing this is the single most-repeated mistake I see in B2B email marketing, and the cause of most disappointing results.
