5 Email Marketing Practices To Boost Open Rates

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Email Marketing

The results are out—emails are exceedingly influential after colleague recommendation and thought leadership content. Up to 77 per cent of audiences prefer receiving permission-based promotional emails over other communication tactics like texts, social media, and direct mail.

Despite the lovely numbers, marketers still struggle with low email open rates. The average person receives 120 emails daily. Do they read them all?

Many promotional messages sit in inboxes untouched, worse find themselves in the spam folder.

If you’re looking to improve open rates, read on. In this post, we’ll cover five email marketing practices to bump up open rates alongside other digital strategies for growing your business.

1. Top Email Marketing Practices for Better Open Rates

Email Marketing

Let’s check them out, shall we?

  • Zero in on subscribers’ interests. Keeping subscribers interested and engaged as you lead them through the sales funnel will require focusing on what interests them. It assures them they will find value in those emails and not just overly promotional messages.
  • Add quizzes and ROI calculators to boost engagement. Quizzes are fun while ROI calculators pique interest in subscribers as they imagine various scenarios and work out the outcomes. Analyzing the quizzes and ROI calculators may provide insights into consumer needs, gaps in knowledge, preferences, and challenges.
  • Beware of spam filters. We love words like “free”, “bonus”, or “incredible deal” but you’ll want to avoid those as they attract the attention of spam filters. Work with lowercase letters in your subject lines and authenticate your email account. Authentication helps keep scammers and other malicious users from using your email to contact audiences.
  • Don’t overwhelm your subscribers. Have you ever subscribed to something and received three emails in quick succession? Another three the next day, and the next? How quickly did you ignore the emails or unsubscribe? Give subscribers reasonable time to read and digest your content so they look forward to the next email.
  • Work with the professionals. A professional SDR agency lends its expertise in identifying and tracking KPIs. They know how to drive email marketing campaigns that generate high click-throughs and conversions.

2. B2B Hyper-Personalization

B2B Hyper-Personalization

A survey revealed that 80 per cent of people are likely to work with a brand that provides personalized experiences.

In an environment where competition is increasingly fierce, applying hyper-personalized tactics may help you secure loyal customers and increase their lifetime value as well.

With hyper-personalization, you leverage AI along with real-time data (internal and third-party) to discern customer engagement and behaviour. You look at:

  • Consumer attitude towards your brand and solutions
  • Consumers’ overall knowledge of your business
  • How they use your solutions
  • Purchase tendencies

You then personalize every touchpoint along the sales funnel in line with their needs. Every interaction (including all content pieces) speaks your customer’s language and deals with their needs.

An account-based salesforce approach in this case can be quite useful. Managers allot accounts to individual staff who assume responsibility for all outreaches from start to finish.

This eliminates the vagueness prospects experience when dealing with organizations. They don’t know who to contact specifically or receive responses from multiple staff, or worse, they have to explain themselves every time.

Internally, this approach ensures that only the staff in charge of an account can update activities on the system, effectively eliminating tampering.

Managers can view progress, advise the staff on best practices, and receive organized transparent weekly/monthly reports.

3. Video Marketing

Video Marketing

As with email marketing, video is a highly effective marketing tool. According to a recent survey, more than 80 per cent attributed improved ROI to video.

Their websites enjoyed greater traffic and increased dwell time, consumers better understood what they were buying, and more importantly, sales increased.

Before diving into video making, consider the following:

  • Know your audience. Videos that connect with audiences are those that match their tone and buying preferences. Come up with buyer personas that uncover your ideal video consumer’s needs and create compelling video messages.
  • Ideate stage-specific videos. You’ll need videos that cater to all stages in the journey, right from awareness to consideration and purchase. Each of these videos has specific goals—a how-to or industry news video is for driving awareness while a case study or customer testimonial video works at driving sales.
  • Check metrics. Checking engagement rates, click-through rates, view count and comments is important, but you also want to go deeper and look at quantitative and qualitative KPIs. Consider the leads generated, products/services sold, brand reach, and customer understanding of your solutions.
  • Promotional planning. Think about the channels you want to distribute your videos under (relevant to your industry) and optimize the videos to enhance visibility. We typically associate SEO with blogs, yet it also works for videos to maximize traffic and leads.

4. Cold Calling

Cold Calling

A RAIN Group study on sales prospecting tactics that work revealed that 27 per cent of B2B sellers found cold calling customers extremely successful.

If cold calling is dead like so many naysayers want you to believe, where are these 27 per cent getting their success from?

We must tell you though that simply picking up the phone and dialling numbers on your list won’t yield much. You’ll need a plan going in.

A plan that considers the following:

  • Do your homework. Successful cold callers don’t just wing it. They research their prospect’s industry and business drivers and pick up the lingo. They look up the company, its potential value, and the contact person. When making the call, they are perceived as insiders and not someone simply trying out their luck.
  • Time is everything. Unless you want to call the same prospect repeatedly with no luck, you’ll need to determine the ideal calling times. Look through your records for days and times that registered successful cold calls and maximize them. Where relevant, go for early mornings or late evenings to bypass gatekeepers.
  • Break down your cold calling targets. Yes, we know, that looking at your monthly quota can overwhelm you, so break it down to weekly and daily targets. It will feel more manageable and you can calculate conversion rates, tweak your strategy, and celebrate small wins.
  • Leverage trigger events. Keep an ear out for companies that are expanding, merging, diversifying, or implementing new legislation and if these events present opportunities you can grab.

5. Podcast Marketing

Podcast Marketing

From filling up the time on long commutes, at the gym, or while relaxing, podcasts are quickly becoming the voice of the modern business.

They provide unique vehicles for industry experts to share their expertise with relevant business executives and owners.

Unlike other communication strategies that require people to carve out time to read, executives can derive value from this strategy on the go.

Best practices include:

  • Understand your audience. Your listeners are busy people with little time to spare even as they juggle other tasks, so ensure your podcasts are concise, informative, value-laden, and easy to consume. They should focus on helping businesses solve the challenges they face.
  • Incorporate a variety of voices. Incorporating an array of guests, both as interviewees and hosts, may help turn non-exciting podcasts into engaging audience-luring shows. Give your guests free rein to share candid insights, experiences, and lessons.
  • Be professional. Your target listeners comprise senior management execs and business owners, so it pays to do things professionally. Quality standards of production say you take your brand and listeners seriously. The opposite is also true—poor production may see you lose listeners and potential buyers.

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