B2B commercial prospecting: to find customers effectively Article summary What is commercial prospecting? (sales, prospects, etc.) Commercial prospecting is a
Email marketing:
issues and best practices
Email marketing is a prospecting method widely used by businesses.
From mass emailing to personalized marketing emails, the use of the email channel has adapted to consumer behavior.
Also, email always has a high ROI, which makes it essential in an acquisition strategy.
What are the challenges of emailing? And above all, how to build an effective emailing strategy?
Article Summary
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the activity of sending marketing messages to a group of people (leads, prospects or customers) using the email channel.
It includes all use of email for:
- to promote products or services.
- to develop relationships with prospects or customers.
The challenges of emailing
The use of the email channel in marketing responds to 4 major challenges:
- Improve brand knowledge and awareness
The attention of decision-makers is saturated. To engage a prospect, you must therefore initiate more interactions. Email remains a minimally intrusive way to familiarize prospects with your brand. - Generate traffic to your website
Marketing emails are used to attract visitors to your website, provided you include a call-to-action to a new offer or a link to content. - Raise the maturity of your leads
Most of the leads generated by a company are not mature enough for a commercial contact. To support them and move them forward in the acquisition funnel, we use personalized email sequences. This practice is called “lead nurturing”. - Building customer loyalty
Email also addresses loyalty issues. It can be used to cross-sell or upsell and increase the average basket of its customers.
The place of email in commercial prospecting
Email marketing occupies a special place in commercial prospecting for companies. It is halfway between traditional prospecting techniques and modern digital prospecting methods.
Therefore, it is a channel that is used by the vast majority of companies.
However, the use of emailing has evolved considerably over the past ten years.
Before, email was used for mass mailing purposes, without any real prospecting plan . Brands sent generic messages to a large base of contacts, purchased or acquired.
Although mass emailing still exists, it no longer really meets prospects' expectations. Email services have installed spam filters that send unwanted emails directly out of their recipients' inboxes.
From now on, email is more part of a marketing conversation logic. It is generally based on the consent of recipients and is positioned as a relay point in an omnichannel logic.
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
Why is email still essential for businesses?
Unlike other traditional techniques, emailing has remained essential for several reasons.
First of all, it is inexpensive and therefore accessible to all types and sizes of businesses. It responds to a wide variety of marketing challenges. Also, email marketing offers a very advantageous ROI.
Finally, emailing is not very discriminating. Most consumers, both B2C and B2B, check their email at least once a day.
Another advantage: it is not considered an interruptive practice since the recipient can choose to consult the message whenever they want. It therefore adapts to new consumer uses.
The different types of marketing emails
When we talk about email marketing, we must distinguish between the different types of messages that a company can send.
Transactional emails are automated messages sent to a single recipient as part of a purchase: purchase confirmations, password reset messages, etc.
They are part of the purchasing cycle but are not strictly speaking marketing emails. However, they may contain a marketing message such as an additional sales proposition on a purchase confirmation.
Conversely, marketing emails take on the appearance of individualized messages but are in reality addressed to an entire segment of recipients based on their preferences, their profile or their interactions with the brand.
This category includes, for example, newsletters, lead nurturing emails or promotional campaigns.
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
What steps for an effective emailing strategy?
Build a contact base
To succeed in email marketing, you have to send the right message to the right person. An effective emailing strategy relies above all on the quality of the contact base.
To create it, two options are possible:
- Buying or renting a contact database
- Building an internal contact base, through online or offline lead generation actions
Regularly update your database
A contact base regularly loses its value. It is therefore necessary to constantly clean it by ensuring the validity of the contacts and deleting erroneous, obsolete and inactive addresses.
Segment your email database
To improve the KPIs of your email campaigns, it is better to avoid generic messages in which no one ultimately recognizes themselves.
Personalized messages provide better open and click rates.
To refine messages, it is essential to segment the contact base, that is to say, compartmentalize it into groups of contacts with similar characteristics or behaviors.
Optimize message content
Email marketing is a group sending but we will act as if we were addressing it specifically to the recipient.
To do this, we will rely on segmentation to write a message that responds to the issues and expectations of the interlocutor.
Using emailing software, you can also insert personalized fields to display, for example, your first name or specific information about you.
Test messages
Which wording, call-to-action or object offer the best performance? What is the ideal time slot in the week or day to send this email?
To find out, the best solution is to test several variations of an email. This is called A/B testing.
At the end of this test phase, we only keep the variant guaranteeing the best opening and click rates.
Measure performance
In a “test & learn” logic, each campaign will serve to improve the following ones.
To do this, you need to analyze your emailing performance and use this data to manage your email strategy.
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
Email marketing KPIs
The opening rate
The opening rate of an email campaign corresponds to the number of emails opened in relation to the total number of emails delivered.
On average, the opening rate in B2B is around 22%, with strong sectoral disparities.
How to optimize the opening rate of your email campaigns?
Several criteria influence the email opening rate:
- The quality of the contact list
- The campaign sending schedule
- The sender
- The subject of the message
- The pre-header
When is the ideal time to send an email campaign?
Studies regularly appear on the ideal time to send email campaigns. What should we think ?
Generally speaking, these studies are published by emailing solution providers who aggregate and analyze their clients' data.
They therefore constitute a sort of average.
However, it is better to rely on a good knowledge of your audience and on tests carried out internally to determine the optimal niche.
Click rate
The click-through rate (CTR) refers to the percentage of recipients who clicked on at least one of the links in the body of the email.
On average, we consider that a click rate is good when it exceeds 3% but, again, this depends on the sector.
How to optimize the click-through rate of your email campaigns?
The click-through rate reflects the relevance of the message, the quality of the content and the copywriting.
An email marketer can use 3 levers to optimize the click rate of an email campaign:
- The content of the message: storytelling and copywriting techniques can be used to encourage the recipient to take action
- The design of the email: in addition to the content itself, the way the email is designed can impact the click rate: the presence of blocks (images or videos for example), the fonts used have their influence
- The relevance and visibility of the call-to-action: if we want to generate an action, we must skillfully encourage the recipient to carry it out. The CTA must be clear, precise, relevant and visible.
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
Marketing automation according to Magileads
The MagiLeads automation solution allows you to very easily create automated scenarios to send personalized messages to your leads.
With automation, you know precisely how prospects interact with your content. You collect information about their behavior. This way, you can better qualify your leads.
Finally, with the lead scoring functionality, you can automate the transmission of hot leads to sales teams to initiate a first commercial contact at the right time.
Email marketing is still a channel of choice in commercial prospecting. But, to remain efficient, we must now gain finesse in the creation of sequences, the content of messages and the analysis of results. Adopting an email automation solution like that of Magileads will help you optimize your campaigns.
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
They use our email marketing tool
Previous
Next
Need more leads?
Try Magileads!
More articles on prospecting and email marketing
Commercial prospecting and CNIL: what you need to know
Commercial prospecting and CNIL: what you need to know Commercial prospecting is governed by a specific legal framework. In France, it is the CNIL which monitors
B2B Prospecting: The Ultimate Prospecting Plan
Prospecting in B2B: why is it difficult? Prospecting is an activity that does not always get a good press. For salespeople, the approach appears
