No one likes pushy salespeople. When you are constantly being pressured into buying something, it’s a major turn-off, and you are probably going to take your business elsewhere.
The same is true with your email marketing strategies. A good customer relationship relies on trust, and this is especially true for B2B marketers.
There is a way you can email your customers and offer valuable insights and information without coming across as self-serving. You need an email newsletter.
What is an email newsletter?
The first thing to remember in your email newsletter is that you’re not trying to get customers to buy anything.
The best email newsletters curate information instead of pushing products or services. You want to take this opportunity to educate your customers about industry trends or third-party articles that they might find interesting. This will help you build up trust, because your customers will see that you are putting their needs first.
However, this doesn’t mean you can’t have secondary CTAs for your products in your email. Take a look at this newsletter from Fitbit which provides interesting articles first but includes a link to the Fitbit store at the bottom.
Source: Really Good Emails
It is worth noting that some industries (like retail) might have more product-specific newsletters. This is to be avoided, if possible.
That doesn’t mean you can’t personalize the experience
Just because you aren’t expecting your customers to buy anything doesn’t mean that email marketing best practices go out the window. You still want to make your customers feel like this email is customized specifically for them because personalized emails are 26% more likely to be opened.
Simply adding in your contact’s name in the subject line can do wonders for engagement. It is also effective to customize the curated content in the email, so the reader sees articles or tips that are beneficial to them based on their behavior or purchase habits.
How to measure the success of email newsletters
An email newsletter is still an email, so you should measure them the same way that you would measure any other marketing email you send.
Specifically, pay attention to these four key metrics that determine success:
- Open rates: This metric shows the percentage of your delivered emails that are opened. Anything around 20% is considered average.
- Click-through rates: This will show the number of subscribers who open your email and click on a CTA. This average is closer to 4%.
- Unsubscribes: This shows how many of your contacts opt-out from receiving future messages. You’ll want this metric to be under 0.5%. Anything higher and you might need to re-evaluate your segmentation.
- Return on investment: This shows the amount of money generated by your email after factoring in the cost to execute it.
Your return on investment might be a little more challenging to determine because you’ll need to watch your contacts throughout their buyer journeys to see if they end up making a purchase.
Does it really matter?
Just because you likely aren’t getting a transaction from these messages doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
Email newsletters allow you to nurture your leads in a less in-your-face method than bombarding them with product updates. Providing insights and guidance about trends and information that might interest them is a better way to come across as a trustworthy and authoritative brand.
What now?
At this point, you’re probably eager to get started on your email newsletter campaigns. Before you start building your emails and searching the internet for informative curated content, consider your audience and how email segmentation can help make your newsletter even more successful.