Email can play a big part in conversion for B2B marketing. Whether the email mechanism is part of a marketing automation solution or the marketer sends out email, depends more on the size, scale and aggressiveness of the campaign--than the desire to improve conversion rates.
Email can be used for a variety of purposes. Certainly email marketing can play a central role in lead nurturing, product/service education, have conversations, solicit information from prospects/leads, share premium content, send promotions and improve conversion rates for B2B marketing.
An email best-practice, B2B marketers should practice email list segmentation and ensure that the recipients are receptive to email communications. "Blasting" out an email is a sub-par strategy that, at best, gets little response. At worst, broad, unwanted email blasts can result in blacklisting and customer resentment.
Best practices for B2B email lead solicitation
- Ensure that sender is a person (and not a department or the company name)
- Better yet, make sure the sender is an important person... this will improve open rates
- Optimize the subject line... try A/B tests on a small group to improve the subject line... another important step for open rates
- Make it readable... think carefully about your readers... don't write a novel. Ensure that the email is easy to read and make it short and sweet
- Add value... If you want the email to perform well, then make sure you are offering something of value. Don't just pitch your leads again. Try to build a relationship.
- Images can sometimes mess things up... Embedded images in emails can cause them to be taken as spam. An all-text approach is sometimes better for B2B email marketing
- Employ marketing automation to improve your measurement and specificity of communications with your lead segments
- Segment your list to send content that is appropriate to your recipient. The more specific you can be to your lead, the better.
- Segment your emails by behavior: Track your lead activity and direct communications based on their actions with your content
- Create modular content to allow for both standard messages and customer-specific content to be grouped when appropriate
- Get feedback to ensure your communications do not offend or are not ignored
- Clean your list
- Offer a link to your privacy policy to build trust with your recipients