Best practices for an effective lead follow up
B2B email marketing has always been critical to any successful B2B organization. Today's organizations focus on increasing their customer outreach, but they should remember that email marketing is the most effective and result-oriented marketing technique. It is a highly intelligent way of digital marketing that always satisfies marketers. Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that utilizes customized email to make aware customers of products and services. It is always used for targeting the email list to convince the customer for taking necessary actions like purchasing, subscribing, signing up for a trial, or registering.
Despite numerous ways of marketing like social media marketing, influencer marketing, and others email marketing still is the most effective and reliable way to generate leads and customer outreach.
Strategies to design an effective email marketing campaign:
- Make a profile of the target audience
This should be the first step to carrying out an email marketing campaign. When targeting a B2B company, you have to first create a profile of customers or buyers whom you are targeting or want to reach. Any profile should include several key roles that can be targeted for a successful email marketing campaign.
Initiators are the first people who got aware of your product or service and take an interest. Users are the ones who will be finally using your product frequently once the company is ready to purchase. Buyers are the people who will be managing administrative tasks like records, logistics, contracts, and everything else. Deciders are the ones who take decisions on whether to forward the buying procedure or not. Gatekeepers are the people who carry information to the concerned people. Lastly, influencers are the ones who can influence the decision at any point in time.
- Think like a buyer
Once you are done with the profiling of customers or target audience, you can smoothly analyze and understand the mindset of each customer. This is because the profiling matrix is now in your hand and you can easily evaluate how a customer or buyer may think. So, customize your email as per the profiling matrix for each customer.
- Email Segmentation
Email segmentation is also an integral part of any email marketing campaign. You should use email segmentation tools to bifurcate and categorize your audience properly. Instead of grouping contacts, you can categorize them as per the buyer's persona.
- Campaign planning in phases
It is very crucial to create a plan on the basis of the stages of the purchase. By planning email marketing campaigns in stages, you will ensure that your emails are reaching relevant audiences at the right time. Here are some stages:
Awareness: At this stage, the customer or target audience is aware or is learning about the product or service, but has not thought of going further.
Consideration: The audience is considering the product but will need some more time to reach decision-making. They collect data and other information during this phase to be more confident about buying the product.
Decision making- Now, the target is interested in your product and is working on certain factors like purchasing, investment, and return on investment. They will soon decide to buy.
Retention: Now once you have turned your potential into a customer, it is now important to retain them with after-sales service and other services.
- Using templates
Templates are the raw format that can be used anytime. You can prepare a deck of high-quality email templates. This will take time as you have to make sure that you don’t compromise on the quality. But this hard work will pay off and you will think thank god that you were having ready-to-use templates.
- Use automation and save time
Manual work is good but can be very time-consuming. And in fast running business landscape, you have to adapt to changes on a daily basis. Automation cannot be ignored because the task your team is doing in three days can be completed in a single day. Use email automation tools and train your team so that you are not behind in this business environment and all your emails are sent on time without fail. It is really helpful when you have heavy targets.