20 Quick Tips

20 Quick Tips

B2B Email Marketing

Today I’m talking about dramatically improving B2B email marketing conversions. I think of email marketing less like marketing and more like a blend of psychology and physics. Our goal is to mentally entice our prospects to motion – – to agree to take action or move forward through each step – from opening to reading to click. So we need to think through each step for the reader to achieve momentum all the way through their experience with our email until we reach our goal of a conversion activity – their click. Ready to get started? Let’s go.

If you are sending to the wrong people nothing else you do will matter. And I know that sounds silly for me to say but it is the most common problem with failing email marketing. Make sure you scrutinize your list thoroughly and run it through a hygiene cleaner and invest the time to eyeball your contact list too – especially if it came from the sales team or an external source.

B2B prospects are more likely to delete email than read it and they determine which actions they will take by giving you 1 to 2 seconds to assess your validity. Make sure you send from a source they trust or care about and that your subject contains something important to them without saying the word “free”. Think carefully about the value of what you are offering and put it clearly and succinctly in the subject line. Don’t trick them to open with misleading subjects. No one likes to open a present and find a piece of garbage in it.

When your reader opens your email the first thing they do is what I call determining the “value exchange”. They scan your email to decide if spending a few seconds to see what you are offering is worth their time. If they value what you offer enough to exchange their time to read it, they read, otherwise they close and delete. So whatever you are offering, whether it is more content you want them to consume, a service or product, your email must immediately articulate value to them – even if it is value in terms of entertainment that they get from continuing. Don’t bore them or waste their time with background copy or explaining the reasons why you are emailing them. And remember that you are competing with that little burst of endorphine your reader gets as they get closer to an empty inbox.

If you are able to get your prospect to agree to look at your email and like your offer, it’s likely they will be unconsciously trying to discredit what you are presenting to them.

Humans most often take the path of least resistance and deleting takes less effort than reading. This is when your believability will be tested. The clarity of your message, the design of your email, and your entire legitimacy is assessed in 4 to 5 seconds. Your email has to match expectations of the offer by looking, sounding, and feeling right. Also, make it EASY for your reader to consume what you are offering them with design that makes the message simple to process. No one likes extra steps. Just ask the soup industry that now puts pull tops on their cans.

Make sure you have a simple call to action that aligns to the offer in the subject line and in the first part of the email. Less words are better. And try to bring the emotional value of your offer into your CTA if that includes things like ending frustration, speeding things up, simplifying life, or bringing joy. Don’t forget your entire goal at this point is to get them to click. The strength of your landing page and its ability to convert them into a prospect is a different marketing effort. If you lose sight of your click goal you are likely to never get a chance to convert them to buyers from your landing page.

I hope this video was an appropriate value exchange for you, and that is what we strive to do with all of our content at our blog – THE BIG IDEA from Yeager Marketing. Each month we provide game-changing ideas and unique insights exclusively for B2B marketers of technology products and services. You can access the Big Idea at yeagermarketing.com and don’t forget to get these ideas delivered to your email doorstep each month by signing up to receive our newsletter digest of our most popular articles each month. Thanks for watching.