The Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the easiest marketing methods to start-up in your business, while consistently generating the highest ROI of all marketing channels. Moreover, 95% of consumers check email everyday (Optin Monster, Consumer Email Tracker), so whether you’re B2C or B2B, targeting teens or middle-aged CEOs, email will undoubtedly prove an effective channel for marketing. Read on to learn about how to get started with email marketing, what email software to use, how to measure success, and more.

 

 

 

 

What is email marketing? 

 

Email marketing refers to when companies use email to promote sales, share content, and strengthen relationships with customers. Typically, email marketing consists of a mix of regular email newsletters sent in bulk, personalized emails that are relevant to a specific segment of customers, and sales approach emails.

 

You should note that email content really differs between B2C and B2B businesses. In the case of B2C, emails are strictly aimed at encouraging fast action from the customer, so they are typically promotional like emails sharing a Black Friday sale or exclusive coupons. 

 

However, when it comes to B2B, the buying process can take multiple months to over a year - people don’t make impulsive purchases like in B2C. Further, the majority of your list will not be immediately ready to buy when you approach - so you don’t want to come on too strong with frequent sales promotions like in B2C.

 

Instead, the focus of email marketing in B2B is on lead nurturing. This means sharing content that is useful and interesting to your customers for the sake of strengthening your relationship, establishing yourself as a thought leader, and gently encouraging an interest in your services.

 

In this article, we’ll focus mainly on email marketing in B2B, but the majority of the info we’ll cover is transferable to B2C.

 

 

Why email marketing is still important in 2022

 

In a time where augmented reality, super-responsive web design, and viral tiktoks are all the rage, people tend to have their doubts when someone suggests something as old and traditional as email marketing. But email marketing isn’t dead.

 

Email marketing remains a staple in digital marketing in 2022 and for the foreseeable future. By the end of 2021, the total number of email users is expected to be 4.1 billion, surpassing the most popular social media platform, Facebook, by over a billion. Moreover, email is central to both personal life and work life, no matter your age. Further, according to Forbes, 66% of people check their email first thing in the morning, revealing how major email is as a communication platform.

 

It may be frustrating at first. When you’re still figuring out what content resonates with your audience and hardly anyone is opening your email or visiting your site, you may not see the value of email right away. But by analyzing the results each time, and making a long-term commitment to optimizing your strategy as you go, you will eventually get to experience the high ROI that email marketing is famous for (an average of $36 back for every $1 spent).

 

 

Email marketing advantages

 

1. Minimal cost required to get started.

 

Compared with most digital marketing methods, you can get started with email for little cost. The only real expense is the email marketing software, but you should be able to find an affordable option within your budget.

 

2. Increase traffic to your site.

 

With every email campaign, your goal is to inspire the customer to make an action, or have a conversion after opening. In each email, you’ll include a unique CTA (call-to-action) that encourages them to download your ebook, signup for a webinar, download a free demo of your product, etc. In other words, you offer your customers something of value in return for visiting your site and filling out a form, or making some specific action. This gives you a whole new source of web traffic. 

 

3. Close sales more efficiently.

 

Email marketing is also a great starting point for inbound sales. After analyzing the results of an email campaign, you can go through and approach the list by order of engagement. Prioritize the leads that had a conversion first, then the leads that visited your site but did not make the end-action, then finally leads that simply opened the email. 

 

In inbound sales, you only approach leads after they have clearly indicated their interest by engaging with your brand. And by incorporating email results in sales, you can approach the customers that have actualized needs first, and see a more positive response when you call - thereby making more appointments and closing deals faster.

 

4. Build brand awareness and customer relationships.

 

Email marketing is the ideal channel for sharing interesting or simply useful content to provide new value to your customers. You can also get your brand name noticed and remembered, if you’re regularly sending them quality content. According to the mere exposure effect, the more often an individual sees something, the more they develop familiar, positive feelings towards it - so simply by sharing decent content, you can influence your target audience to build a positive image of your business.

 

5. Provide a better customer experience with personalized emails.

 

One of the best practices in email marketing is personalization. With the help of marketing automation, you can analyze your customers’ past online activity, and base future marketing emails on the topics they’re interested in, as well as on how far they are in the customer journey. 

 

You can also segment out groups of leads by demographics, industry, size of company, geographic location, and more, in order to provide content that is more finely-tuned to their situation, thereby leading to a higher open rate as well. Moreover, by personalizing your touchpoints, you can show that you treat all your customers as individuals with unique needs, and offer them the best customer experience in your communication, since everything will be centered around their actual interests.

 

 

How to get started with email marketing

 

First you’ll need to choose an email marketing service, and this can either be a tool specifically for email like MailChimp or some kind of marketing automation, which provides an email feature on top of tracking customers’ online activity, letting you measure their level of interest with lead scoring, create forms for your website, and more. With a marketing automation tool, you can keep all the data more centralized so that you don’t have to deal with too many programs. In a later section, I’ll suggest some email tools and marketing automation for both large and small businesses. 

 

The next step is building your email list, or your list of contacts to regularly distribute emails to. Use the tactics in the next section to grow your subscribers, and import their information into your email software (this may be automatically done depending on your service). 

 

Next, set up a form on your site, titled “subscribe to our email newsletter!” and proceed to set up a welcome email to be immediately sent every time someone signs up. Welcome emails improve the customer experience and make sure your new customers have a great first impression of your brand.

 

Continuing on, draft an email marketing plan and lay out the following:

• What is the ultimate goal you’re trying to achieve with email marketing?
• Who on your team is in charge of this project, and who will be involved?
• How frequently do you plan to distribute email newsletters?
• Who are your high-value customers, or core targets, that you want to segment out to send more personalized email?
• What sort of content will you mainly be sending? (Pro tip: try creating a content calendar, and figure out when you’ll be sending each email campaign, and if the emails are cohesive and focus more on lead nurturing rather than promoting sales)

 

Once you settle on a plan with your team, you can get to work creating email content and putting the plan into action. Keep in mind that when you’re creating email templates, you don’t need to stress about coming up with a stunning, super original design. You should prioritize having quality content over the appearance. Even plain text emails have their use sometimes, since they look refreshingly simple and inspire trust.

 

 

How to grow your email list

 

Email signup forms

 

The most obvious way to passively grow your email list is by setting up CTAs on your website. Traditionally, marketers use pop-ups to capture the user’s attention, but this also disrupts their experience on your site. Here are a couple alternative ideas for your email signup form:

 

 

Source: Social Media Examiner 

Social media examiner, arguably the best social media marketing blog around, has set up a cute email signup box on their homepage, complete with an offer of a free industry report. By promising them something of value like an ebook or research, you can easily improve your conversion rate and gain more subscribers.

 

 

Source: SalesForce

What’s unique about SalesForce’s signup form is that they let you choose exactly what kind of content they want to receive, from IT to small business. This allows them to cultivate a more personalized email experience, and undoubtedly leads to more subscriptions.

 

 

 

Source: Unbounce

Similarly to SalesForce, the SEO blog Unbounce lets users choose the frequency at which they wish to receive their newsletter - daily or weekly. By adding this option, it prevents the possibility of you overloading the customer with emails, which usually leads to them unsubscribing. Also, this signup form can only be viewed from the sidebar of blogs, so that it doesn’t disrupt your activity and it’s only suggested to people that are already enjoying the blog.

 

Methods for building your email list

 

• Take advantage of your social media following and advertise your email newsletter to them. Check out how SEO blog Moz promoted their newsletter on Twitter:

 

 

• Turn downloadable resources into gated content. 
• Offer a limited-time-only discount for your services if they subscribe.
• If your website includes direct orders, then add an email subscription option at checkout.
• Similarly, add an option to subscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of your inquiry form, like you see in ConversionLab’s example below.

 

 

 

5 main types of marketing emails

 

1. Trigger email

 

Trigger email refers to an automated series of emails that are sent out over a set period of time after a user makes a specific action, triggering the emails to be sent. Typically the trigger is a conversion, meaning the user submitting a form on your site, be it an inquiry form or a form to sign-up for a webinar. 

 

With trigger emails, you can design the set of emails to be customized to the user’s interests. For example, if they downloaded one of our ebooks, our  Email Marketing Guide, then we could send a thank you email, share this very blog on email marketing, share a case study of our marketing automation tool BowNow that highlights the email feature, and then finally send out a sales promotion letting them know about our free plan.

 

Example of a trigger email scenario:

 

2. Segmented email

 

A segmented email, or targeted email, refers to when you split your list into categories and send out emails that are personalized for that group. 

 

For example, in account-based marketing (ABM), you’re trying to target the accounts that bring the most value to your business. So if your high-value target is small IT companies in Southeast Asia, for example, then you could segment out this small sliver of customers and create content especially for them. For instance, if you share a case study of other IT startups in your client base, then you can expect your target audience to engage and read your email since it’s personalized for them.

 

3. Email newsletter

 

The email newsletter is the basic email you’ll be sending to your subscribers regularly. This can be sent out daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your resources. Here’s a great example of a B2B newsletter from Junction Consulting:

 

The Brief

 

 

This award-winning newsletter, “The Brief,”  is sent out every Monday. Their newsletters are a nice round-up of their latest articles and inform the subscriber about new trends in the digital world. Clearly, this newsletter provides unique value to the reader and will easily encourage them to visit the site, thereby increasing traffic.

 

4. Promotional campaign email

The classic sales promotion- the kind of email where you share a campaign, a limited-time offer, and attempt to encourage the customer to make an action. These are important and necessary at times, but be careful not to overdo it with promotional emails, and do not send them to your cold leads that have been inactive for several months. This will just lead to them getting annoyed and unsubscribing, because they aren’t aware of any present needs.

 

Instead, in your marketing automation tool, check intent data for users that have been engaging with your brand in the last few weeks, whether by visiting your site, opening your emails, or downloading resources from you. These are the users that are likely currently researching your business and considering a purchase - so it makes sense to direct the sales offer only to them (as they will actually appreciate it).

 

5. Re-engagement email

 

A re-engagement email is sent to users that haven’t opened any emails for a long while, and confirms whether they still want to be subscribed. This is an important practice in marketing - you should only be sending content to the customers who have opted-in and actually want to receive them. 

 

Duolingo is infamous for their many notifications reminding users to get back on the app and continue studying, but in this case, they make a great example for the simple re-engagement email we should aim for. In this email, you understand the intent immediately and it gives you a clear CTA (to jump back on Duolingo). 

 

 

 

How to do A/B testing to optimize your emails

 

A/B testing, or split testing, refers to the process of sending two different emails, with a single variable changed, in order to figure out which variation generates better results. Small adjustments to your emails can make a huge difference in the email open rate and conversion rate, so A/B testing is crucial to continually improving your emails. 

 

What sort of variables should you test? 

 

→ Subject line length

 

If your customers tend to check their work email on mobile, then a shorter subject line is ideal since important keywords could get cut off on the smaller screen. This study by Return Path shows that a subject line between 61-70 characters yields the highest open rate. 

 

→ Subject line phrasing and keywords

 

According to Return Path’s research, keywords that express some kind of benefit (“best,” “easiest,” “fastest”), and keywords encouraging action (“open,” “add,” “register,” “download) had a positive effect on email open rates. On the other hand, clickbait-y words (“secret,” “shocking,” “you won’t believe”) and keywords announcing discounts (“2 for 1”, “half off,” “clearance”) were not successful in getting people to open emails. 

 

Aside from finding the keywords that best convey your message, you can also look at the whole phrasing of the subject line. For example, you could test whether posing a question or a statement works best, like “What big marketing trends can we expect in 2022?” vs. “Digital marketing trends you can’t ignore in 2022.” You could also just rearrange the wording, to “2022 Digital Marketing Trends to Expect” so that the reader sees the year “2022” and knows this is the latest information.

 

→ Time of distribution

 

The day of the week and time of day is also a critical factor in email open rates. If you were to send an email on Friday night, for instance, then it’s bound to get buried under the mass of other promotional emails the customer receives from then till Monday. 

 

Generally, research has shown that the best time to send an email in B2B is on Tuesday or Wednesday, around 10 AM or later in the afternoon at 3-4 PM. This is because at 10 AM, you’ll have given your customers a chance to get settled into work and finish the urgent tasks, and then they have time to go through the rest of their emails, with yours right at top. And 3-4PM is when people are checking their emails after lunch and before they go home from work, more leisurely. 

 

 

Source: Sendinblue

 

While this data is a good point of reference, keep in mind that the time that your specific audience is most likely to check email can be completely different. If your target audience is medical professionals or hospitals, then they likely are working at irregular hours so you’ll have to search up (or make an educated guess) when your niche is most likely to open up email, and conduct A/B testing to see what works.

 

→Calls to action 

 

In every email campaign, you will need one enticing CTA (call to action), whether it be encouraging the customer to download your ebook, visit your site to check out more blogs, or sign up for the free trial of your product. Conduct A/B tests to test out different CTAs to see which leads to the most conversions, and also play around with the design and placement of the CTA. For example, you could add in “Click here to download the report” as a bit of text with a link to the download page, or you could add a colorful button so their attention goes immediately to the CTA.

 

→Personalization

 

Test how personalization affects engagement. Of course, you can simply try including their name in the subject line or in the email itself, but you can also show that this content is specifically meant for them by sending “Ecommerce Marketing Tips” to customers involved in ecommerce, or “Advertising in ASEAN: Trends and Best Practices” to your customers in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. You could also segment your email content by needs, based on observations of intent data, and send an email titled “Inbound Sales: Download our Guide to B2B Sales Strategy” to the customers that have looked at sales-related blogs in the past.

 

Further reading on how to optimize your email content:

Six Strategies to Improve Your Email Open Rates

 

 

Recommended email marketing tools

 

 

Email Marketing Tools

 

 

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email tools, and considered a thought leader in email marketing. You can test out the basic features like email creation and scheduling in their free plan, and get a feel for the platform. One unique feature of MailChimp is its “smart recommendations,” in which it automatically identifies areas for improvement in your emails with AI- this could be really useful if you don’t have much experience with email marketing.

 

 

Drip is a flexible tool with customizable forms, SMS text automation, and detailed email reports. Drip is also perfect for businesses doing ecommerce, because of its many EC site integrations, like with Shopify, Woocommerce, BigCommerce, and more. With Drip, you’ll be able to see exactly how your email campaigns are driving sales via these EC sites.

 

Moosend offers over 70 different email templates, which are completely responsive, so that they’ll adjust to any size screen, mobile or desktop. Also, Moosend comes with additional features for building landing pages and customer relationship management. 

 

Marketing Automation 

 

While email marketing services are typically solely meant for email, marketing automation is a tool that allows you not only to create and send email campaigns, but also track the users’ actions after they visit your site. With marketing automation you can also automatically determine the level of interest of each customer, depending on their past behavior (such as email engagement, website visits, and conversions). 

 

 

BowNow is our original marketing automation tool, specifically designed for SMEs with limited marketing resources. With BowNow, you can easily create finely-segmented lists to send personalized emails, automate a series of trigger emails, and then go on to track the customer’s online behavior after they click on a link in your email.

 

As of December 2021, BowNow has been adopted by over 7,000 companies, 80% of them in the B2B sector. Click here to request a free demo account and try it out for yourself.

 

 

Email marketing KPIs

 

With the email marketing service you choose, you need to be continually tracking KPIs, or metrics, that reflect the success of your email campaigns. Analyze the results of each email based on these metrics and if it’s a worse score than you’d hoped for, identify the potential problem and optimize so it’s higher next time.

 

Metric	Description	Why it’s important	What to aim for
Delivery rate	The percentage of emails that get delivered	When sending from an external server like an email marketing tool, or due to other technical problems, emails can get blocked or filed away under spam. You need to identify the problem and address it if the delivery rate is too low.	Aim to keep it between 96%-100%
Email open rate	The percentage of recipients who open an email	If people aren’t opening your emails, then they’re not generating any results. Test various subject lines and sender names to see what works best in order to raise the open rate.	Depends on industry, but 15-24% is thought to be the average, and any score above that is exceptional
Click-through rate (CTR)	The percentage of people who click on a link after opening the email	Each email should have a practical goal- like to guide the user to your website and encourage a conversion. CTR helps you determine if your CTAs are working or not.	Again, depends on the industry, but 2-3% is average and anything about 4% is great
Conversion rate	The percentage of people who visit your site from an email and make a specific action (like fill out a form)	This metric is also necessary for measuring the effectiveness of your CTAs.	The final conversion rate tends to be lower than the CTR, but 3% or more is considered a good score

 

 

Summary

 

Email marketing is one of the easiest digital marketing channels to get into, in terms of both cost and difficulty, yet you can expect a high payoff from your investment. However, email marketing is a long-term commitment, as you won’t have amazing results right away. With each email, track the results in your digital tool of choice, and continue optimizing to create email content that best resonates with your audience.