Emailing is the oldest digital prospecting method in the world. No wonder it continues! 80% of marketers consider emailing to be their best acquisition and loyalty channel.
But can we prospect today as we did yesterday? With the proliferation of digital channels and the development of marketing automation emailing practices are set to evolve each year.
On the one hand, it becomes more and more difficult to capture the attention of your prospects . On the other hand, you have more tools at your disposal to control the performance of your campaigns .
So what are the latest best practices and trends to follow in terms of emailing? How to optimize the key performance indicators (KPI) of your campaigns such as the opening rate or the frequency of sendings?
Email marketing, an essential communication channel
More than 300 billion emails are sent per day around the world. An effective and now essential , email marketing has many advantages for businesses. You can therefore use this channel, which is easy to set up, to acquire new market shares.
Last year, a group of companies managed to generate deliverability rates of around 89 and 95% during their email marketing campaigns. These same campaigns generated 3.2 million emails that achieved responsiveness rates of 10 to 25% .
The opening rate depends on the length of the email subject
Whether you practice cold emailing or warm emailing, the subject of the email must be written carefully . It will determine whether the recipient will open their email or not. Email subject lines with less than 25 characters seem to generate many more opens. So you need to keep it short and explicit.
Additionally, avoid selling yourself in the email title. Above all, you must make people want to read, and therefore write an attractive title . Personalizing the subject of the email with the name of your company also helps to optimize its opening rate to 30% .
What days and times to send professional emails?
Pay attention to sending times so as not to wake your recipient in the middle of the night, for example. The days on which emails are sent also impact the effectiveness of your campaign.
This study identified Tuesday and Thursday as favorable days for sending marketing emails. But you can also do tests to determine which days your emails are most read by your targets. We advise you to send them either at 8 a.m. or from 6 p.m.
To ensure an emailing strategy, BtoB players favor certain hours and certain days in order to communicate with their target audience. The observation is the same as in previous years: two thirds of shipments were made on Tuesday and Thursday .
These shipments took place mainly in the morning , well before 1 p.m. Note that there were fewer emails sent before 8 a.m. in 2021.
Regarding opening hours , a peak after 6 p.m. was noted. So, to have a greater chance of being read, your messages should ideally be sent either in the morning or late afternoon .
How to optimize your targeting in an emailing strategy?
One of the approach techniques favored by B2B players in emailing strategy is hyper-targeting . By classifying their targets into homogeneous groups, they were more likely to deliver a relevant message. This method allowed them to achieve a high level of performance .
We therefore advise you to qualify groups comprising fewer than 1000 contacts . This qualified targeting will help you increase your open rate . To succeed in your emailing strategy for this year 2022, we suggest that you:
- carry out qualified targeting;
- convey a powerful message;
- optimize the subject of your email and use a credible sender;
- test sending times and days;
- pay attention to statistics.
Do qualified targeting
Before starting an email communication campaign, you absolutely must define in advance the characteristics of the target you are targeting, their needs and the solutions you are able to provide them. There's no point sending messages if they don't meet the expectations of your target audience.
Indeed, the content of your email depends on the profile of your customers , your offers and the added value you want to bring them. An email that offers to answer their problems will make you want to read more.
Send a powerful message
Prospects who are increasingly in demand are becoming more demanding and are only interested in the most relevant advertising emails. And even if you manage to convince them to read your email, they only spend a few seconds reading your marketing email.
Your message must therefore meet two imperatives:
- it must be enriched with elements that will encourage clicks;
- it must be brief and personalized as much as possible.
You must ensure that you receive as many responses as possible , even if it is only a refusal. Don't approach with an obvious sales intention, but rather take an advisor approach . To gain the trust of your prospects, you must appear to them as an expert.
Optimize the subject of your email and highlight a credible sender
By carefully choosing the sender and subject of your message, you will make recipients want to open the email you send. So, prefer a natural person's name as the sender, if only to humanize your message.
You must give in the subject line an overview of the added value that the person reading the email would receive. Use A/B testing to determine which title would work the most.
Take the time to analyze your campaign statistics.
Use your campaign statistics to improve the elements mentioned above . Pay particular attention to deliverability rate, unsubscribes, open rate and click-through rate. From this analysis, you will know what is working or not in your marketing approach and will also be able to measure the achievement of your objectives.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is one of the best prospecting tools in BtoB . This emailing barometer will allow you to develop strategic approaches based on relevant figures. You also have customer databases to create relevant marketing scenarios and are able to ensure the quality of your B2B emailing campaigns.
You now have an idea of the most relevant days, dates and times for sending your messages.
You will need to adapt your actions according to the figures that appear as you advance your campaigns. These key indicators will help you understand the behavior of your targets .
Note that part of this data was taken from a recent study carried out by Nomination on the emailing campaigns carried out by its clients in 2021.
Then, find the best way to convert your prospects and retain your customers in order to increase your turnover. Automating your B2B email campaigns with Magileads will allow you to accelerate and optimize this process and gain efficiency. You will benefit from the email database of 20 million qualified prospects offered by the platform. The all-in-one SaaS software allows better customer file management for your marketers thanks to an PRM . Better yet, you can AB test your emails and personalize them before sending them to your leads at the right time .
