It’s kind of a magical moment when someone types their email address – their correct email address – into that beautiful form, clicks the subscribe button… and even confirms.
This is an act of trust.
There isn’t a marketer that’s been around for a while that hasn’t heard that “the money is in the list.” The Internet is filled with statistics that prove it. But while these real life people who clicked the subscribe button are not ready to buy just yet, they are interested in deepening the relationship with you, and they are interesting in hearing from you, which has the potential of making your life easier.
Today is all about making the most of that potential.
What a Small Group of Marketers Can Teach Us
When Todd Lebo, chief marketing officer and partner at Ascend2, sent me his company’s research results, I knew I had to share them with you.
If you’re already on my email list, then you already know Ascend2, because I wrote about how they’re using their marketing efforts as a revenue center, but if you’re not, they help B2B marketers who market to B2B marketers develop original research. So they work a lot with AdTech companies and marketing agencies, among others.
The way that they create their original research is that they survey their own audience – Ascend2’s audience – of B2B marketers. Then, when you want to generate leads using the research, they give you access to that list.
And specifically in this project, they surveyed almost 300 marketers in 2018. I’m going to share some of the insights they found, but I really want you to pay attention to the *questions* they asked, because I think, if you ask yourself the same questions, it’s going to get easier to develop an email marketing strategy that’s tailored to your specific needs and not something generalized that worked for others, but you still don’t know if it’s going to work for you.
Obviously, test it out.
So what did the research reveal?
You can watch it here or read it below:
The Biggest Email Marketing Challenges – and What Marketers are Doing About Them
According to the survey, the biggest email marketing challenges that marketers face are, by order:
- Improving lead quality
- Improving subscriber engagement
- Improving conversion rates
This is what you need to understand too. Figure out what are your biggest challenges with email, and set a plan and take action.
The marketers in the survey said that all these 3 biggest challenges are their top 3 priorities… but in a different order.
Their #1 challenge was to improve lead quality, yet their #1 priority was to improve engagement and their #2 priority was to increase revenue, while increasing revenue is the least of their top 3 challenges.
Now, you could say that, if you improve lead quality, you’ll improve engagement, and they’ll convert better, because you’ll have more accurate subscriptions. But it’s possible that, because generating revenue is the least of their top 3 challenges, they thought that improving engagement with the subscribers they already have could amplify the proof of their contribution to the company’s bottom line with the minimum amount of effort.
And speaking of effort…
If Their #1 Priority is to Improve Engagement with Email Subscribers, What are the Most Effective Ways to Do it?
According to the marketers in the survey, the most effective ways to increase subscriber engagement are:
- Focusing on single-topic email campaigns
- Welcome emails to new subscribers
- Automated or event-triggered emails.
And the best part?
These 3 strategies – focusing on single-topic email campaigns, welcome emails to new subscribers, and automated or event-triggered emails… These 3 strategies also require the least amount of effort out of everything else the marketers in the survey do for email marketing.
How to Create Your Own B2B Email Strategy
Start by asking yourself what are your goals for your list, and what are the biggest challenges to get you to these goals.
Then, ask yourself what are the most effective ways to get there. It’s not always the best choice to go with the least amount of effort kind of strategy. You’ll have to look at your specific situation. But if you can figure out how to get the biggest results with the least amount of effort, test it out and see if you can scale it up.
As with any marketing strategy, always break it down to a game plan, to steps you can take, and figure out what resources you’ll need and how that plays into the rest of your strategy. 50% of the marketers in the survey, for example, said they’ll be using a combination of in-house and outsourced resources, while 20% are keeping it all in-house and 30% outsource entirely to a specialist.
Link Your Email Marketing Strategy to Your Overall Content Marketing Strategy
If you want to verify that you’re effectively linking what you’re doing with email to the rest of your content marketing strategy, check out his review of research from other companies about the most effective B2B content marketing strategies, and what differentiates the top performers, so you can make this year *your* content marketing year (no opt in required).
