Email automation for B2B campaigns is essential in making B2B email marketing a force to reckon with.
Many marketers may believe that email marketing is a dead channel. However, that couldn’t be further away from the truth. The famous saying, “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” is entirely applicable when it comes to modern email technology. With social media’s boom in recent years, the B2B email marketing landscape has changed. Thanks to social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, marketers across industries are enjoying a world of unlimited possibility.
Naturally, there are still many people who don’t see the power of email. They believe that email marketing is outdated or irrelevant in the growing face of social media platforms. Interestingly enough, email marketing is one of the most direct communication channels between you and your customer or prospect. When it comes to the B2B industry, email marketing is undoubtedly significant and essential.
Recent findings reveal great news for B2B marketers. Marketers who incorporate marketing automation into their email outreach efforts, increase the overall contribution to the sales pipeline by an average of 10%
Email automation for B2B companies enhances the effectiveness of email marketing as a communication channel. In this article, let’s take a look at what email automation encompasses. We’ll look into what it can do for you, and how you can incorporate it within your B2B business’s marketing operations. This article will help you turn your email marketing campaigns into a personal, revenue-generating business channel.
What Is Email Automation?
Email automation is used to describe email communication that is triggered by a particular action that your customer takes.
Some email automation sequences that you might be familiar with include –
- Abandoned cart emails: Emails sent when a customer adds items to their cart but doesn’t complete the process of purchase.
- Order confirmation or Order update emails: Emails that contain details about a specific order’s placement or updates about any changes in order.
- Newsletter signup email: Emails are sent as a means to confirm when a visitor signs up to your mailing list.
- Re-engagement emails: Emails sent as a subtle reminder that the customer has not purchased from you in a given period.
Apart from these triggers, there are many actions taken by your B2B customers. No matter what the trigger is, email automation is much different compared to email campaigns. It differs from mail blasts to an entire email list of contacts.
The organization’s actions trigger promotional emails — however, transactional emails are triggered by something that a shopper does. You certainly have a lot to gain by automating promotional email marketing. But, email automation of transactional emails is equally essential.
B2B Email Automation: An Asset
Types of Email Automation for B2B Customers
Welcome Emails
What Welcome Emails Can Do For You
Studies on the subject show surprising facts. They state that welcome emails receive, around two to four times the engagement rate, as compared to regular promotional emails. Studies also show that welcome emails can cause subscribers to remain a part of your list for longer. Welcome emails can make customers interact more often with your brand. It nudges them to spend more money on your products or services.
In short, the first impression on subscribers made by emails reaps long-term returns. This makes welcome emails a vital part of your email automation strategy. Using email automation for B2B welcome emails has many benefits.
This welcome email from plumbing supplies distributor Ferguson is an excellent example of welcome emails that are warm and friendly. It is essential to use the right language in your email communication, especially in welcome emails. Moreover, you should always try and ask for more information in your email communication. Ferguson’s email is an excellent example of asking for the subscriber’s information to tailor content to the subscriber’s tastes and interests.
Product Review Emails
There is another advantage for B2B marketers asking for product reviews. With the information and feedback you gather, you have all you need to make your marketing communication effective. Social proof has the power to influence buyers like few other things.
Thank You Email
By using email automation for B2B to send thank you emails, you are helping your customer build a stronger relationship with your brand.
Order Status Email
Webinar Invitation Emails
Online webinars are awesome. They double up as a way to build authentic relationships with customers, subscribers, and prospects. Webinars are a great way to establish your brand as an authority as well as for making you credible. Most importantly, they do not aim at selling you something. Instead, they help you learn something new, it shows that you care about giving back. By showing audiences that you care about helping and not just selling, it helps build loyalty.
When it comes to organising webinars, email automation for B2B clients is especially useful. The best part is that you can send emails to anybody interested in being a part of the webinar. No matter if you have a monthly webinar to talk about industry news, a weekly skill-training webinar or an educational series; email automation can help rope in more people.
Webinars offer prospects the opportunity to get familiar with what you have to offer. If they have been delaying the purchase process, a webinar is a reason not to.
Free Content Email
B2B customers today are seeking out highly customised digital experiences that cater to their needs without much effort. Directly speaking, a customer is more likely to do business with you if they receive personalized communication and information based on their physical location. Personalize your marketing communication so that it is relevant, useful and exciting to consumers. This attention to detail is a great way to bring in a higher ROI.
Email acts as the perfect support for any campaign-based marketing activity you take up. With email marketing, you have the opportunity to carefully plan things. Right from the delivery time of the content into your subscriber’s inbox, to its frequency, everything can be customized.
Well-written, relevant, customized content can help in driving traffic, inspiring action, and achieving other crucial campaign objectives. With email automation for campaign emails, you can help bring in new clients by offering something useful for free to strengthen the customer bond.
With marketing email automation for B2B, you can nurture long-term advocacy by providing personalized, relevant content to your B2B customer. By utilising customer segmentation and profiling tactics, you can make sure customers receive targeted emails about offers and promos.
Trial or Demo Email
Let’s be honest. We all love free stuff!
When it comes to the B2B sector, the purchase process requires a little more effort and convincing. With more gatekeepers, pricier products, longer sales cycles and fierce competition, there is a significant need for you to stand out among prospects.
One effective way of targeting prospects on email is by offering a free product trial or free demo session. This gives them first-hand insight into what your company can provide to them. By using email automation for B2B, you can even target the recipients who do not sign-up and follow-up with limited period offers or special discounts.
KISSmetrics uses email automation to encourage customer sign-ups for personalized demos. Not only do they make the prospect feel valued by offering to arrange a free demo, but they also accommodate the client’s schedule.
The Multifaceted Ways of Using Email Automation
As you go ahead pursuing email campaigns and flows, remember that transactional emails come with an opening rate of about 33 percent. This number is way higher than you would expect from0 promotional campaigns. Transactional emails are famously known to have higher click-through rates than any other type of email.
This means that customers are more likely to read an order confirmation email or free content email than a monthly promo coupon. For best results, use transactional emails as a chance to market your other services or products. No rule prevents you from going the extra mile. Rather than merely sending a run-of-the-mill confirmation email, send one that also includes a personalized discount code and other touches to reinforce brand identity.
Email is indeed a measurable, lucrative, and cost-effective marketing channel for B2B companies. Back by figures, statistics as well as professional opinions, email marketing has a lot to offer businesses when it comes to gaining ROI. It is also a big asset when it comes to improving lead generation, creating opportunities to upsell or resell, and even client retention.
Using email marketing to streamline your email communication helps you make the most of an already lucrative channel. By delivering information that is engaging to a targeted list, you can enhance your client base. In this manner, email automation can positively impact your company’s bottom line. Since this is the end goal of any B2B email marketing efforts, it makes sense to rope in the powers of email automation for B2B to achieve better growth.
Conclusion
While email automation sounds like a dream and promises to bring in increased profits, there is a lot to consider. ‘Automation’ in email automation can’t be interchanged with ‘easy’. While email comes equipped with fancy triggers, it also has many challenges and drawbacks just like Facebook or Instagram. So while email automation helps you get the most out of email marketing, it is not the only channel you should be focusing on.
Don’t think of it as ‘email vs other channels’.
When it comes to B2B marketing, each marketing channel has some superpower or another to help rope in more customers or prospects. Some channels are best used to create meaningful conversations with your user base while another one is useful when it comes to keeping your subscriber list supplied with content.
An Example of Email Automation’s Effect
Let’s look at the example of an online seller. He uses the existing customer info he possesses to create a Facebook ad to target lookalike customers. Once this is done, he creates a well-optimized landing page to enlist them. He might even offer some relevant information. Maybe the customer in question is even browsing through the seller’s online store.
In such a scenario, email acts as a powerful tool to stay connected to customers. Maybe it is easier to rope in new customers through another marketing channel. But you can always enhance the relationship by utilizing email marketing and email automation.
Many marketing channels are comprehensive all by themselves. However, when they are combined or coupled together, their powers combine to drive value for the end customer. By merging marketing channels and creating a comprehensive marketing strategy, you can offer your customers an experience that is relevant to their needs, past purchases and behaviour. Such an amalgamated approach helps your customer make smarter purchase decisions.
Final Thoughts on Email Automation For B2B Organizations
What this means is that while email marketing is a compelling channel, it cannot be a standalone tactic to drive sales. Email automation for B2B marketing is best utilized as a part of an ecosystem of communication channels. It helps you offer personalized content. The tool also offers format flexibility so that you can experiment with what brings in the highest returns. Automation acts as a deliberate form of communication with customers and allows for higher engagement.
However, the real power of email as a channel is harnessed best in collaboration with other platforms including mobile notifications, Facebook ads, PPC, Google retargeting and so on.
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