Because Email Marketing has been around for decades, many marketers assume it has lost marketing relevance. After all, something that's “old” surely has lost its luster and effectiveness, right? Not at all.

According to eMarketer, email marketing delivers the highest median ROI of all marketing channels at 122% -- more than four times higher than social media (28%), direct mail (27%), or paid search (25%).

Due to its evolution as a channel, email marketing is experiencing a resurgence. If you aren’t getting enough value out of your campaigns, then you may not be taking advantage of the latest strategies.

To revitalize your B2B email marketing efforts and increase email marketing effectiveness, consider the following:

Segmentation

Sending the same email to everyone is a thing of the past. Smart marketers know that they need to be providing unique content to different segments of their database. Campaign Monitor reports segmentation strategies can increase open rates, click-through rates, and increase email revenue up to 760%.

There are four basic segmentation strategies:

Behavioral
Demographic
Psychographic
Geographic

For behavioral segmentation, recipients can be placed into groups by engagement metrics (opens, clicks, conversions, etc.). The other three segments can be determined based on commonalities. Content can then be produced to speak to those common elements.

Personalization

Marketers know that relevant emails always perform better than broadcast emails, driving higher open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. MediaPost reports Personalized emails can see a 26% increase in unique open rates, a 14% increase in click-through rates, and a 10% increase in conversion rates resulting 17% more revenue.

Revenue from personalized emails is 5.7 times higher than non-personalized emails. Go beyond the first name by using deeper data including the recipient’s business name, job title, geographic location, previous event attended, downloaded content, or some other data point in the subject line or message body copy, creating more interest and delivering better results.

Automation

Automation is when email communications are delivered at predetermined intervals. Messaging can be specific to the call-to-action from which the lead came, the timing of the acquisition of the lead, or based on user behavior or activity.

Automated messages can include anything from a welcome email sent after an opt-in, an on-boarding series, an anniversary email, or a triggered email from a nurturing campaign that is sent based on behavior from a previous message.

The beauty of automated emails is that once they are set up, they run without manual intervention. This reduces manual processes while providing relevant, timely communications, and that is why automated emails have a 197% higher open rate and 406% higher click-through rate than broadcast messages.

Re-targeting

You can do a lot more with your email address list. Tie email addresses to other channels and serve targeted ads to that contact. For example, using Google Customer Match, advertisers can upload email lists to target customers and similar audiences with ads on search, Gmail, and YouTube. When an email campaign is followed by targeted advertising you can significantly increase your chances of generating engagement or a conversion.

Data Appending

An email address can be a key to unlocking a wealth of information, giving marketers access to an arsenal of options to learn the who, what, when, and where about each subscriber. The address can also be used for postal appending to gather the subscribers mailing address as well as social appending to gather a subscriber's social channel profiles.

With email marketing seeing the best results coming from hyper-personalized messaging, an email address with accompanying profile data can be used to create personalized segments and message content, which results in a more relevant message. And increased relevancy means increased conversions.

Artificial Intelligence

You may not know it, but you’re probably already using a form of artificial intelligence (AI) in your email marketing already. If your email software is helping you optimize delivery times or predicting what products recipients may want to purchase next based on their purchase history, then you can include yourself in the AI user camp.

AI’s future in email marketing will help marketers deliver more personalized experiences. AI can generate effective copy for subject lines and message body text, help analyze data and behavior to find patterns and trends, and help optimize every aspect of your campaigns.

When it comes to email marketing, you can teach an old dog new tricks. There will be more opportunity coming soon, with real-time messaging, interactivity, and advancements in audio and video arriving in your inbox.

If you think email marketing is a thing of the past, think again. You may be missing your biggest marketing opportunity. Leverage everything email has to offer and you’ll maximize your marketing effectiveness.

I welcome your comments, and invite you to share this information.

Adam Q. Holden-Bache, Author
How to Win at B2B Email Marketing
Director of Email Marketing
Enventys Partners

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