Marketing has come a long way since the 50s when all forms of marketing were limited to the level of existing technology; conveniently excluding the internet, which was still fictitious at best until the 90s when it became available to the public. These days, everybody is into marketing; traditional marketing, digital marketing, affiliate marketing and so on.
It is undeniable that email technology radically changed how marketing was and is done. Email marketing is the act of sending messages to large groups of people with the aim of getting them to purchase a product or service from you or your affiliates. Many people still don’t know the full potential of email technology, meaning that there are still lots of opportunities to be leveraged with email marketing.
While the prospects of email marketing sound fantastic, people who have run manual email marketing campaigns in the past will tell you that it is time-consuming, stressful and not easy to manage. Imagine having to send the same email to 3 thousand recipients and keep their correspondence; replying to each message individually, answering questions and sometimes making cold calls. All these tasks are repetitive and can get mind-numbing quickly. (Thank goodness for marketing automation)
B2B email marketing is usually a commercial correspondence between two companies, where one company is trying to convince the other to purchase a product or service. B2B companies know all too well how email marketing works. They are often engrossed in a long process of maintaining communication with potential leads while also dealing with long sales cycles. These activities require a lot of effort to nurture potential customers into converted leads, meaning the use of marketing automation is inevitable. In this article, I am going to show you 5 ways to automate your B2B email marketing.
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Link all your channels to a sign-up funnel
Whatever channel you use for your visitors to interact with your business, it is a good idea to funnel them to your sign-up form. When you include a CTA for new users to provide their emails, you are conveniently building your email list so that your email marketing campaigns can reach more potential customers.
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Use email drip campaigns
The beauty of marketing automation is the ease with which you can set-up the whole framework and allow it to work according to your preset parameters. An email drip campaign is an email marketing tool that automates the whole process from start to finish. When setting up an email drip campaign, you can easily search for people who are interested in a particular niche, import their email addresses at the push of a button, use pre-designed email templates or customize your own, and add action-based trigger emails that are sent automatically to the recipients based on their interaction with your first email.
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Use autoresponders
It’s a great idea to send a welcome message to new subscribers immediately after they sign up to your newsletter or other subscriptions. However, using autoresponders also helps you get your products in front of them even when you’re not actively marketing anything to them. For example, you can set a confirmation email that is triggered when new users sign up, in that mail, you can then inform your subscribers about other products and services you offer similar to the one they just subscribed to.
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Automate the segmentation of your subscribers
It is important in B2B email marketing to know the interests of your targets. If you don’t know which ones are more likely to buy and what each potential customer might be looking to order, you may end up sending the wrong message or wasting resources on dead-end leads. To avoid this, it is necessary that you begin segmentation as soon as possible. This can be done through your sign-up form or welcome email. You can include an actionable opportunity or CTA for a few of your products. You can then automate the segmentation process based on the choice of each subscriber. With proper segmentation of your audience, you can offer a more personalized touch in each marketing email you send their way.
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Automate cold calls to non-openers
No matter how personalized your sales copy is, there will definitely be a few non-openers. This, however, doesn’t mean they are not interested in purchasing your products, it just means you have to nudge them more than others. This can also be done through B2B marketing automation. Using relevant software, you can resend your marketing email to non-openers after a preset number of days without any action on their part.
Apart from these suggested automation ideas, you can also tweak a few other things to ensure that you are not only targeting new leads but also retaining old customers. This can be done through automated emails to remind your old subscribers when their subscriptions have expired. Reminder emails go a long way to help B2B businesses with customer retention.
