If someone asked you what was an important way to use content to market to their target audience, what would you answer?
Blogging, social media or maybe articles?
All likely answers, but email marketing is still a powerful way to market to your prospective audience. Although it’s not “new,” it still brings in a major ROI when it comes to lead generation.
In fact, in the 2012 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets and Trends Report, from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, shows eNewsletters as one of the top five ways marketers use content marketing in their marketing mix.
This means email is still alive and well, but it might not get the attention that others, like social media. With that in mind, there are still mistakes many marketers make when it comes to creating and maintaining effective B2B email marketing campaigns. These mistakes lead to unsubscribes and a lower percentage of prospective leads.
Now, unsubscribes do happen and if you freak out every time someone leaves your list, you need to get over it. With that in mind, there are a few things you can do to reduce your unsubscribe rates, including:
Create Relevant Content
If you sign-up for an email list and you get emails on a different subject or the content isn’t what you expected, you’re going to unsubscribe. That means you need to produce more relevant content for your list.
Look at what you offer on your opt-in page and other links to your email list, and then make sure it’s all related. If it’s not, revisit your B2B content marketing editorial calendar and make it so.
Keep a Consistent B2B Email Marketing Schedule
Business buyers lead a life that’s usually on the go. If you send out emails one week, but wait another month, they will forget who you are and unsubscribe. Yes, I’ve done this and I learned my lesson, too.
Along with consistency, stay true to your initial offering, at the time of opt-in. If you say you send out a newsletter on Tuesdays, send it on Tuesdays. Don’t just say something, actually do it and keep your credibility.
Creating Interesting B2B Email Content
Above all else, if you don’t have interesting content, you will really see a drop in your B2B email subscription list. There are LOTS of email lists out there and if you don’t have anything interesting to read, view, etc., subscribers will go to a list that does have content they look forward to.
It’s simple: create content business buyers want to get. How do you go about that? Here are a few tips:
- Take content marketing questions and develop emails with that data
- Subscribe to other B2B email lists and see what they offer – gather ideas
- Keep a swipe file of ideas in tools like Evernote or even on a notepad
- Always revisit your analytics and see what content marketing ideas come up
Just like any B2B content marketing endeavor, email is powerful, but only if you do it the right way. Don’t just create something, publish it and expect it to stick to the wall. Do some research, tie your content to business goals and measure what you do. Then, you can reap the rewards from your content efforts.
Your Turn
How do you create B2B email marketing campaigns? What comes first and what works best for you? Leave me a comment and let me know!
Want to know more about B2B content marketing with email and other content platforms, subscribe to my email list for more ideas!
Maybe one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The concept behind WRAPmail (OTC: WRAP) is to utilize the facts that almost everyone have websites, social network site(s) and also send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research. WRAPmail is available for free (with 3rd party ads) or for a small license fee at http://www.wrapmail.com. No routines change as users simply download a toolbar or routes emails via Google or WRAPmail’s servers.
WRAPmail also helps search for missing children with every email sent by free users incorporating an RSS feed from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children – see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rolv-e-heggenhougen/finding-missing-children_b_1540866.html
I unsubscribe when I get unsolicited emails that give misleading subject heading, only to find the subject matter is different after opening the email. Why? Because I don’t like anyone trying to manipulate me into reading their materials, and it reflects poorly on the sender that they have to resort to trickery to get others to read their email. I unsubscribe when I get far too many emails from one source. Once a month is best. Weekly might be OK if content is really helpful, but I don’t likely daily marketing from any company even if some of their content is interesting. I refuse daily emails from any same source except for some government sites and online media/news publications, and even some of these I delete without reading when I don’t have time.
Bottom line: Whoever sends e-news should not think people have all this free time available to read their nonessential e-news.
Thanks. I’m newbie