How many emails do you receive in a day?
How many of these email blasts come from brands showcasing their products or services? A couple? A ton, perhaps?
There is a reason you keep receiving these promotional emails. Research shows that emails prompt purchases up to three times more than social media.
Email marketing is an affordable and effective strategy for acquiring new customers and maintaining relationships with existing ones.
Emailing allows you to communicate your value, keep customers informed, and customize marketing messages.
Here are five essential steps to help you optimize the email marketing strategy for higher sales, along with several other highly effective B2B marketing tactics.
1. Email Marketing
Let's dive into the tips that will help you get the best of your email marketing strategy:
Segment Your Email List
Segmenting your email marketing lists involves understanding subscribers so you can speak to them in a relevant and personalized way.
Look at their preferences and interests (why they joined your mailing lists), reactions to your emails, and buying behavior.
Then use this information to categorize them according to their needs and the stages they are at in the buyer’s journey for customer segmentation.
Automate Email Campaigns
Email automation campaigns should be created in response to behavioral triggers such as content downloads, subscription, purchases, registration for event attendance, and cart abandonment.
The immediacy of the email campaigns improves engagement and chances of conversions.
Personalize Your Emails
Personalize the sender so that your subscribers receive emails from real people rather than generic company email addresses.
Let the emails come from the same sender so recipients can easily connect your brand to that person. This serves to minimize confusion when they want to get in touch with you.
Write Interesting And Meaningful Copy
Most people avoid lengthy emails and in most cases will only skim through them, potentially missing out on crucial information.
Unless you're addressing highly technical audiences, use easy-to-understand copy, shorter paragraphs, and add images, doodles, or hand-written notes to make things interesting.
Optimize Call-To-Action
The idea behind the email is to get your readers to take action and your campaign's success is measured by how many actually take action.
Create visible CTAs and place them in strategic but relevant places within the body of your email.
Try to use contextual CTAs such as "check out the cool features on our product" rather than promotional CTAs that go, "buy now."
2. Social Media Advertising
For many businesses, marketing themselves on social networks in a way that generates tangible results is tough.
Many go for direct sales, which doesn’t work well since these are social environments where people don’t want to feel pressured to buy. Some audiences are more casual on platforms like TikTok or Reddit and other consumers are more serious on platforms such as LinkedIn.
You can however create copy that pulls in interested audiences to know more and desire to engage.
How can social media marketing help get results?
• Spell out your goals. You shouldn't have social media accounts "just because." since not all social channels suit your target audience. Think about what you want to achieve and narrow down to the networks that will help you attain these goals.
• Aim to build trust. How can potential customers prove your business's worth? Publish positive reviews, testimonials, or accolades as social proof.
• Be more "human." Engage your audience, answer questions, offer compliments, and provide positive customer service to make your brand feel personable.
• Use your social channels to support other initiatives. Do you have an upcoming event? Perhaps you published a new article, ebook, or industry report? Promote it on your social channels.
• Adapt content to suit social formats. Publish minute-long snippets of visual content (presentations, podcasts, webinars), convert blog posts into infographics, or use hand-drawn illustrations to make a point. These are interesting ways to create a buzz and encourage engagement.
Social media marketing is a proven way to compliment your email marketing campaigns and generate B2B leads or sales.
3. Cold Calling
Undoubtedly, buyers have a wide range of tools to help them make purchase decisions, but cold calling still has a place in driving sales.
Why does cold calling still get results when it comes to selling?
Because studies show that up to 71 percent of buyers seeking new ways to drive business results are open to hearing from sellers. A further 62 percent want to hear from sellers when they are looking for solutions to fix their problems.
What better way to leverage this opportunity than to pick up the phone and call them up?
Here are proven ways to help you kick up those numbers:
• Know your prospect's industry. Be a student, learn the industry they are in, the vocabulary they use, and the challenges they face. It's the best way to determine how well your solutions can add value to them.
• Don't give your prospect an opportunity to hang up. Asking if you caught them at a bad time is a sure way of getting them off the hook.
• Come in with a strong opening line that will capture your listener's interest. Having done your homework and identified key issues in their industry, dive into a challenge they face, and how you can help them overcome it.
• What if the prospect has an existing solution? Ask meaningful questions about the solutions they are using. If the quality is lower, identify loopholes you can capitalize on. If it's higher, seek to know more so you can upgrade.
• Nail your timings. Industry experts propose 9am-11am and 2pm-4pm for higher engagement. You’ll want to avoid Monday and Fridays since people are setting goals for the week or winding down for the weekend.
4. Use Webinars
From increasing awareness to educating audiences, sharing industry trends, and driving sales, webinars are versatile digital tools.
But going in front of the camera is no mean feat. The sound may drop, people don't show up, or you could lose your confidence and babble away.
To save you the embarrassment, here are tips you can implement to make your webinar successful:
• Know when to host the webinar. As with cold calls, people are settling on Mondays and checking out on Fridays. Experts recommend late afternoon on Tuesdays or Thursdays.
• Check the sound quality. It's annoying to watch a webinar with crappy sound. Close apps that eat up bandwidth (Skype, Slack, Google Chrome synchronization, etc) and wear headphones to minimize echo.
• Practice being in front of the camera. Maintain an upright posture and avoid turning away from the camera and keep a script handy to ensure you cover all your points.
• Create a webinar schedule. You can host one or more webinars weekly but create a calendar with expected topics so you know what's expected every time. It will help you prepare, promote the webinar, and give audiences time to sign up.
• Promote your webinar in places where your message will resonate with audiences. Blast emails to your subscribers and talk about the event in social media groups where your audience is most active. Follow-up in a few days to increase registration numbers.
5. Content Marketing
Many brands consider the long B2B sales cycle as a cold process that doesn't have any emotional attachment.
They believe that by putting out relevant content, B2B buyers will simply buy and be on their way.
This is not the entire truth in business-to-business lead generation and selling.
The process is definitely longer than a B2C cycle and takes into consideration multiple factors, including ROI and cost-effectiveness.
But today's B2B buyers want to know who you are, like you and trust you before they buy from you.
Content marketing opens the gates to the "know, like and trust factors" but only if you know how to get it done.
• Know your audience. What are their needs? What questions are they asking and what content do they look for? Answering these questions allows you to come up with content that's relevant to your audiences.
• Have a clear picture of the content marketing funnel and come up with content that fits every stage. Create educational content for the awareness stage, personalized and persuasive content (like email marketing campaigns) for the engagement stage, and social proof for the conversion stage.
• Create a strategy. How often do you intend to publish content? What formats will you use—(they should resonate with audiences)? How will you measure ROI? Come up with a content audit that will help you identify the best performing content and the underwhelming ones.
• Create valuable content. Promote your brand and services by providing necessary information that makes audiences think, "I need this now"
• Use multiple distribution channels to promote your content. Talk about it on your social pages, email list, and consider investing in Pay-per-click ads.
Content marketing with context and consistency is key for B2B lead gen and sales.
Conclusion
Increasing your B2B sales numbers year after year is no easy feat. Keep these tips in mind to maximize business-to-business selling with email marketing and other effective advertising or branding techniques.
