The Daily Carnage

Getting your ducks in a row for email marketing can be made easier when you have action items to check off your list. Here are some key things to keep in mind when it comes to B2B emails of all kinds.

STEP #1: Profile Your Target Customers. It’s an exercise many brands skip, but when targeting a particular B2B company, you’re really targeting that company’s buying center. Set up an ideal customer profile (ICP) for each group in a buying center such as:

• Initiators – the first people at a company who become aware of and interested in you.
• Users – the people who will be using your product day-to-day.
• Buyers – the people who handle the logistics and administrative aspects of a potential purchase.
• Deciders – the people who ultimately decide whether or not to approve the buyers’ purchase.
• Gatekeepers – the people who control the flow of information to and from other groups.
• Influencers – the rest of the possible users within an organization.

STEP #2: Think Like a Buyer. Put yourself into the mindset of each member of your target customer’s buying center in order to better understand what kinds of emails fit each role. The more customized your emails are to your targets’ actual needs, the more effective they’ll be.

STEP #3: Use Email Segmentation. So you did the legwork in the first two steps to understand custom messaging and separating your product information … make sure to send emails appropriately. Utilize email segmentation tools to send content that’s customized to their interests and needs.

STEP #4: Plan Your Campaign in Stages. By planning your campaign around the stages of the customer journey, you can ensure that your emails are relevant not only to who your target is and where they are at in a journey. To review, those basic stages are: awareness, consideration, decision-making, retention, and advocacy.

STEP #5: Use Templates. We’re not talking about pre-built templates from your email platform. Build a library of distinct templates for each type of email you send using the same brand elements across them. Building high-quality templates is a labor of love, but it’s worth it for your email-building process. 

STEP #6: Save time by automating. If you did Step #3 correctly, the automation portion of your email marketing should have everything it needs to work effectively. With a robust tagging system, you can target hyper-specific audiences.

Check out the full article by Zapier for helpful graphics on these strategies, landing page advice, and stellar email examples from other brands.

It’s hard finding tools that please all areas of your business needs. There are so many platforms out there that handle email automation, lead management, CRM, SMS messages, the list goes on. While so many of them claim to do it all, not all of them can do it well. Often times, brands are left using multiple platforms and integrating them together. Or worse … different teams use different platforms and neither of them are integrated to talk to each other.

Using multiple Email Service Providers (ESPs) and sending through multiple Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Secure (SMTPs) can have some inherent risks.

1. Sending Duplicate Emails: If you are using multiple providers to manage lists, you may end up with recipients receiving multiple messages from the same campaign. This can put you at risk for a spam complaint. Make sure to clean lists well and remove all hard bounces immediately and check your list segments for duplicate email addresses.
2. Sending Emails to Unsubscribed Users: When a customer unsubscribes from receiving emails from your company, it is your responsibility to make sure their unsubscribe request is fulfilled through all providers. Much like the risk of duplicate emails, having a single source for contacts reduces this sending.
3. Lower Cost-Efficiency: Every email service provider charges different rates, so some of your email sends will generate more revenue and be more profitable than others. There may be higher operational costs involved with using multiple email service providers if your lists are growing, so it’s good to review budgets and expenses regularly.
4. Inaccurate KPIs: Especially when sending out larger batches of emails at a time – your numbers may be all over the place among different ESPs, so even averages may not be a good indicator of success or failure.

In summary, it’s best to have a centralized hub of all email addresses as a master list and that all segments are created from the scrubbed master. Check out the full post by Ongage for more risks and solutions to multiple ESPs.