93% of B2B marketers use email channels for distributing content because it can reach a wide audience at such a fast rate. Alongside being a great way to communicate and providing an efficient and effective way of collecting data.
So, let’s talk about how a business can communicate through the inbox.
Communicating through email
Firstly when creating an effective email, a business needs to set one goal. To be having too many goals can end up being messy and ineffective.
After a business has agreed on a goal, they can then move on to layout. They’re plenty of different layouts a business can choose from.
For instance, there’s a sales or engagement email, both of which can have a different style.
Choose which style your email fits in and start to implement your business’s brand identity through this.
After choosing your goal and layout; it’s time to look at personalisation.
Personalisation
Personalisation is a key element that takes an email from generic to impactful. An example of adding personalisation is merge tags, which allows you to insert unique user data.
By involving the name of the audience/merge tag you will grab the attention of the reader.
Additionally, you want to appeal to the reader on a way that entices them to read onwards, ways to do this is by choosing the correct tone.
Don’t panic! if this is your first email campaign, it’s about experimenting with what might work and what won’t.
Data in email marketing
Moving forward ,it’s time to focus on more in-depth practises such as data!
Email is such a broad method of communication. With it being so broad, email marketing then consists of several strategies and elements.
An important element , included in many ‘best email strategies’, is to have a clean and organised database. A healthy database can help a business to be able to create segmented, triggered and targeted campaigns.
Additionally, keeping data organised doesn’t only allow you to target the email to the correct audience but can help you to recognise and extract the correct data in a much easier way.
Just a quick tip, they’re two types of data a business should be aware of;
- Explicit data – information that is intentionally shared between a contact and company.
- Implicit data – information that is gathered from user behaviour.
Keep this in mind, when collecting and organising data.
Moving onwards, contextualised and individual experience is created with the help of data. This experience is vital to a business as it creates a relationship between company and customer.
A business then wants to transform this relationship into a lasting loyal one; a loyal customer will help to reach your business- use this to your advantage.
The buyer
Keeping with the buyer in mind.
They’re two factors that a business should look at about their buyer; the buyer’s journey and persona.
The buyer’s journey is an active research process that a consumer goes through leading up to a purchase. Which is split into 3 stages- awareness, consideration and decision.
By being aware of which stage your reader is at, you can tailor the email to specifically target the correct stage eg if your customer is at the consideration stage and have left something in their basket, send an don’t forget about my email or discount.
Whereas the buyer’s persona is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal buyer based on real data and partially educated speculation.
Why is the buyer’s persona important? again allows a business to create a more accurate targeted email equally allowing a better chance of achieving a good response.
Take into consideration these two factors for future campaigns to create in-depth emails.
In hopes that emails will have a good response and click-through rate.
Additional tips
Here are just some more additional tips you can add to your email marketing techniques-
Make sure the subject line is between 41-50 characters. This is the length that appears on a mobile where emails are typically opened.
As well you could follow the AIDA process formula if needed.
- A- attention; grab the audiences attention eg ask a question in the header.
- I- interest; build relevance eg offer a answer to the question.
- D- desire; add value eg make your product/service sound desirable.
- A- action; inspire action eg add in a call-to-action.
AIDA just helps you to be aware you have every important factor included, like a check list.
Lastly, keep it clear, concise and scannable with the correct tone.
There is plenty more resources like this on the EMS Resource Centre.
Get stuck in with the learning for you and your business!
