By Chris Rack, Chief Revenue Officer, PureB2B

Email marketing can often times feel like an uphill battle. We’ve all been at the point where we’re lost with how to approach the ever-fleeting task of “email conversions.” That, coupled with the fact that over 30 percent of emails you automate to send won’t even reach the right person; the process of email marketing can be feel quite obtuse. Here are four best practices that will help you overcome the challenges posed by “unsubscribes,” crowded inboxes and digital fatigue.

Personalization at Scale

This, among all else, is the best thing you can do with emails. We’ve all been there – an email pops up in our inbox that screams painful “templated-ness.” There are about 100 different ways to approach personalization, but ultimately, putting yourself in the shoes of the person you’re reaching out to is the best first step. What does a director of finance care about vs a procurement manager? What competitors can you leverage to show you understand their space? Finding pain points or trends in the designated space will help you and your buyer speak the same language; ultimately talking about something they truly care about. Finding a good balance with personalization and scalability will help your email engagements immensely in the long run.

Points to think about include:

• In your research, what are trends that you see with your targeted buyers? How can you leverage that?
• What do your specific buyers engage with on a daily basis? What do they care about?

Tell a Story

Engagement can literally be defined as keeping someone’s attention, and your narrative can be a great way to do that. Your products tell a story, they have a purpose to them other than being a revenue generator, and telling that story is crucial to keep your buyers engaged and moving through the funnel. Think about the top problems that your products solve. What is someone with those pain points thinking about as they begin their workday? What does every great story have in it that makes it memorable? Emotion! If being personal is the most important thing you can do, being emotional is a close second. Leveraging the frustrations that your product can actually solve for, makes all the difference in having someone take the next step. Think about it this way, a story has a beginning, middle, and end – what emotions are you wanting them to feel at each point, and what are you going to do to leverage those?

Points to think about include:

• What are the pain points that your product helps relieve? Come up with 3-4-part story that culminates in your product solving those pain points.
• What emotions are you feeling when you choose to buy something? Are there any crossovers with the narrative you’re trying to tell?

Who Is Your Buying Group?

Decisions are rarely made by one single person. Be that a CEO or a manager, they have people they consult with prior to taking any next steps. Email outreach to the influencer should look different than your outreach to the decision maker. Getting an influencer’s attention and having them forward along the marketing materials can be a serious conversation starter, and arguably a win from a marketing standpoint. If your target buyer is a VP of sales, it’s then worth reaching out to the sales manager as they’re likely using the solution. That’s just one example, but thinking this way will help you move your leads down the funnel more effectively than just bombarding the buyer. It all seems a lot easier said than done. To yield the desired results you need to take the same buyer personalization and narrative approach and layer it with the rest of the buying group.

Points to think about include:

• Think about what will get your email forwarded. What call to action can you use for an influencer vs a buyer?
• Create a spreadsheet of what a buying group would look like for your product. What does it look like to speak to each of those people individually vs as a whole?

Meaningful Content

If you’re like most marketers, you have a massive library of content that may or may not be relevant anymore. If you don’t have that, you’re probably being tasked with developing something similar. If that’s the case, a question you’re thinking about almost constantly is “what content will perform and get the best ROI?” This can be a loaded question, but if looked at from a realistic standpoint, we can identify what content truly matters to your buyers. Content is often a fleeting resource that is read and forgotten in moments, yet incredibly necessary in moving leads down through the marketing pipeline. Do you remember the last whitepaper you read? If you do, it’s probably because the title of the content stuck out to you. Knowing this, successful content marketing can be a game changer for your overall success. Plan out your content and how it ties to your email outreach. In-email content engagement often looks like this: Prospect opens email, scans email copy quickly, engages with anything that catches their eye. This is all done in seconds. What does that mean? Your content title means everything, and is the only thing that matters when mixed with emails.

Points to think about include:

• How can you craft emails that are focused around your most valuable content?
• Where does content engagement fall in your marketing nurture? Create a roadmap of what each piece of content will lead to.

Email marketing can be overwhelming to say the least. One important thing to remember here is to focus on the long-term results. You will rarely, if ever, receive conversions on your first email campaign, but the more you put these practices in place, the faster your contacts will convert down the funnel. Lastly, always A/B test how you approach these. Just like all other facets of marketing, it’s important to filter and test what works with each process.