Most B2B marketers use email marketing for promotion. As with event marketing, it is not aimed at quick sales, but at building long-term relationships with the client.
With the advent of new marketing channels such as social networks, chatbots and messengers, there is an opinion that email marketing is rapidly losing its effectiveness. But marketers continue to actively use this tool in advertising campaigns. The main thing in email marketing is to build communication correctly.
In one of our previous articles, we talked about how the Marketing Creatio platform helps us organize webinars. Today, we will tell you more about the email newsletter process and share how we took the process of sending emails to a new level.
We determine the purpose of the mailing
To avoid overloading recipients with unnecessary information, always clearly define before sending emails:
What goal do we want to achieve as a result?
Is the content being sent consistent with this purpose?
Have we chosen the right target audience?
Most often, B2B mailings work to increase loyalty to the company. Here, the sales cycle is much longer than in B2C, so retaining and developing existing customers is more profitable than attracting new ones.
Choosing a site
There are many platforms website development service for sending email newsletters, all of them allow you to create and upload templates, analyze the results of the newsletters - openings, clicks, unsubscribes, etc. In our practice, we used Unisender, Mailchimp, and Sendsay . In terms of functionality, they are all roughly similar, but one of these services had English-language support, which also did not work in our time zone, which was extremely inconvenient.
Now we conduct all advertising campaigns on the Marketing Creatio platform, including email marketing. The “Email” section provides all the necessary tools - from audience segmentation and template formation to split testing and detailed analysis of results.
We create a database for mailing
Database collection. Your contact database can be expanded by:
Participants of your or external events;
Surveys and questionnaires;
Special subscription forms on your website;
Calling target companies;
Applications from the site, etc.
Important – all contacts must agree to the mailing.
We do not recommend buying ready-made databases, because they can easily lead to sanctions from mail services, which will lead to all your letters being sent to spam, and you can also get a fine of 100 thousand to 800 thousand rubles for violating the Federal Law “On Advertising” and “Protection of Personal Data”.
Checking the database
If you do not clean the database and send letters to non-existent addresses, most likely, letters sent from your domain will end up in spam or even lead to a complete blocking of the domain. There are several ways to put the database in order:
Use special services to check the validity of email addresses;
Remove invalid addresses monthly;
Remove duplicates;
Avoid “general” addresses as much as possible;
Pay attention to the Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce indicators, exclude addresses with these statuses from the mailing list.
With Marketing Creatio, you don't need any additional email validation services, as the system itself checks. The letter will not be sent to recipients with an incorrect address, who have unsubscribed from mailings, or marked the letter as spam.
Segmenting the audience
The result of an email campaign and engagement directly depends on the correct choice of the target audience . In fact, a mailing without segmentation is the same as spam.
A personalized approach allows you to increase the Open Rate of the letter. The more often customers interact with letters, the higher their loyalty, which will lead to more conversions.
Creatio provides numerous filters for segmentation. We can divide the audience by any indicators:
History of interactions (participation in events, closed deals, interest in a specific product or service);
Email open rate;
Link clicks;
Presence of activity over a certain period;
The presence of target actions (registration for events, subscription to a newsletter, application on a website), etc.
For example, a trigger mailing can be sent to contacts who have participated in events on the same topic several times, left a request to test the solution, but have not yet purchased anything.