Every so often rumors spread around alleging email marketing is dead—but that claim is far from factual. The truth is, email marketing is continuing to expand, and will for years to come. However, there are still many businesses that don’t understand or overlook the potential of email marketing, which is counterproductive knowing email marketing produces the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel.
We often see businesses investing minimal time and resources into their email marketing campaigns. Rather than investing in a long-term email marketing program, we see companies choosing to focus their marketing efforts on channels that they believe produce quicker, more immediate results.
There is more to email marketing than just hitting the “send” button and delivering a generic message to your marketing email lists. It is about delivering a seamless customer experience by building trust, engaging with your audience, and nurturing those relationships. In addition, building the right email contact lists begins with targeting the right audience and segmenting your consumer groups into specific email lists based on their needs and the solutions you are able to offer them.
The Benefits of an Email Contact List in Business Marketing
If you have ever received a marketing email, it’s easy to tell if it was relevant to your needs based on previous interactions with their brand, or if it was just general information about a new product or offer. Content that doesn’t bring value to a contact easily gets unsubscribed or is blocked. Once you lose that touchpoint channel, it’s even harder for your brand to build a relationship with a contact. This is why it is important to find validated email addresses, vet your contacts, and create contact lists that are targeted instead of generalized. Well-built email lists have other benefits as well, such as:
Increased Sales, Customer Retention, and Higher ROI
While marketing professionals often think about pay-per-click advertising (PPC) having the highest ROI or search engine optimization (SEO) bringing in the most traffic to a website, email marketing surpasses both when it comes to Return On Investment (ROI). In fact, email generates $42 for every $1 spent. That is a 4200% ROI—higher than any other marketing channel!
This is because when email messages are well crafted and target a properly segmented contact list—regardless of their physical location—with communications that bring value to them. A properly sent email can drop into the inbox of a prospect at a time when they are searching for a solution to a pain point, even if you as the sender, have no clue they are looking for help. Email marketing also allows the opportunity to A/B test messaging, graphics, subject lines, and send times on your carefully built contact lists. This also allows you to easily continue crafting messages that resonate the best with your target audience—driving more engagement and, eventually, closing deals.
All of the above also helps cultivate increased customer retention. With strategically built contact lists and targeted messaging, you’ll develop better relationships with your customers, build trust through something as simple as email marketing, and create a better overall experience for your customers. That, in turn, leads to customer loyalty and trust.
Increased Brand Awareness
The number one goal for B2B marketers? Increasing brand awareness. When we think of brand awareness, we typically turn to social media channels, or public relations activities. But, email is also an excellent source.
Brand awareness begins with trust. Email marketing is a highly effective way to build brand awareness and connect with potential and existing customers. By creating, engaging, and informative email content, you can reach a large audience with your message and create a positive association with your brand.
When done correctly, email marketing can be an extremely powerful tool for building trust, cultivating relationships, and driving sales.
So, how can you use email marketing to build brand awareness for your business? Here are a few tips:
- Use a consistent branding strategy across all of your marketing channels, including email. This will help create a cohesive and recognizable brand identity that will stick in the minds of your readers.
- Make sure your email content is interesting and informative. No one wants to read a boring email—make sure yours stands out by offering valuable information or insights that your readers will find helpful.
- Use striking visuals to grab attention and make your emails more visually appealing. Adding images, infographics, or even videos can help make your emails more engaging and enjoyable to read.
- Segment your email contact lists so that you can send targeted content to specific groups of people. This ensures that your recipients are receiving content that is relevant to them, which can help increase engagement and conversion rates.
- Take advantage of email automation to send timely and relevant content to your subscribers without having to manually send each email yourself. This can save you a lot of time while still allowing you to reach a large audience with your message.
Email marketing is a highly effective way to build brand awareness and connect with potential and current customers. By following these tips, you can create engaging and informative email content that will reach a large audience and help to establish your brand identity.
Email Nurture Campaigns Build Better Relationships
It is no secret that B2B efforts have a long sales cycle. Building relationships with prospects, leads, and customers is an essential part of the customer journey. Email communication is an excellent way of nurturing those relationships, as long as the content you are promoting or sharing provides a solution to your audience.
While many B2B sales and marketing teams do utilize email marketing in some way, they don’t always use it to its full potential. At the most basic, many companies are not even sending out email newsletters. In fact, 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads—or utilizing nurture campaigns to convert marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads.
Depending on your brand tone and voice, a brilliantly planned email nurture series with a properly timed automated workflow can build a strong relationship with your audience. However, it all stems from your—you guessed it—contact lists. A nurture campaign is put into place to send automatically timed emails to your contacts, but the contact lists themselves should be broken out based on the goal of the campaign. Are you targeting one of your buyer personas? Do you want to drive the contact to take an action after they have filled out a form on your website for a resource download? Do you want the messaging to hit the top, middle, or bottom of the marketing funnel?
All of these questions are great things to consider when developing your nurture campaign strategy and deciding which method is best for your targeted contact lists.
5 Steps to Building a Reliable Email Marketing Engine
1. Developing Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Buyer Personas
We’ve mentioned buyer personas, but why are these so important? A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your targeted audience within your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you could describe your ideal customer, this would be further defined by the target companies you want to focus on. The buyer persona is a fictional character that has been created based on deep research from your sales, customer service, and marketing team.
Getting the creation of your buyer persona right is essential to building email contact lists that drive results.
2. Choosing an Email Provider, Marketing Automation System, and CRM
Choosing the right platform to store and send to your soon-to-be email list(s) can be challenging as there are so many options. You will need to have an email solution that can integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) software or have a built-in CRM to manage your email lists. An email marketing solution, like MailChimp, is a software solution built to store your contact lists, send one-off emails, and may even include built-in automation features—if you’re lucky. There are also marketing automation systems, such as Hubspot or Marketo, that provide an abundance of options such as automated email workflows, lead scoring, built-in CRMs, 360-degree view of the customer journey, social media scheduling/monitoring, and more. These options are often paired with a CRM such as Salesforce to create a more seamless, omnichannel experience for the customer as well as the marketing and sales teams.
RocketReach integrates with email powerhouses like HubSpot, Outreach, Salesloft, and many others through Zapier. This allows you to find an email address with our email lookup and move it directly into your email solution and contacts for an even more seamless experience. Interested in how simple this process is?
3. Data Collection To Build Your Email Contact List
Crafting your marketing email lists begins with data collection through the use of your ICPs and buyer personas. There are many services available where you can buy a one-time generalized email list. However, this method can be costly and doesn’t allow you to filter through the contact information of those that fit your buyer personas. The contact information you collect through your blog, website, social media, and other marketing and sales channels also help build reliable email marketing lists that you can use to market your services with confidence.
Once you’ve determined which email marketing software, marketing automation solution, and CRM solution you’re going to use and have set it up to suit your needs, it’s time to start the data collection process. There are several ways you can go about this with B2B marketing.
Email Lookup Engine
Using an email lookup engine to find email addresses as your prospect is an excellent way to start building up your email contact lists. An email lookup service gets its information from publicly sourced data, tying together 100s of pieces of data using learning algorithms. RocketReach is a good example of this type of service.
Lead Magnets Through Gated Content
Lead magnets are one of the more common ways you will see emails being captured in both B2C and business marketing. These can be:
- eBooks
- Whitepapers
- Case Studies
- Checklists
- Promo Codes
- Webinars
All of these resources should require the prospect to fill out a form with their contact information to access the content—hence the name gated content.
Pop-Ups & Embedded Forms
Pop-ups or embedded forms on your webpage are excellent ways to increase your email contact list. These can be forms on a landing page, a “contact us” form, a newsletter sign-up form, forms on your blog pages—anything that has a strong CTA, letting the prospect know what they’ll be receiving when filling out the form and why it benefits them.
Social Media
You can capture emails from your social media pages as well. With LinkedIn, which is commonly used in B2B marketing, you can capture contacts’ emails directly in the platform with their In-App Lead-Gen Forms, or if someone has an open profile and you are using Sales Navigator In some cases, more people will fill out an in-app form versus a form on a redirected landing page because it is more convenient, can be done in-platform, and has the option of autofill. Utilizing contact databases such as RocketReach, which integrates directly with LinkedIn, you can also pull emails from the contact lists you built within LinkedIn or RocketReach.
Outside of actually building your general contact list, segmentation is the most essential part of any email marketing strategy. HubSpot found that the “biggest determinant of effective marketing is your audience”. If you aren’t sending relevant information to your contacts, then your efforts will go to waste.
4. Segmentation To Increase Engagement & ROI
We keep emphasizing that, “personalization is king when it comes to marketing.” However, when you think of personalization for email marketing it’s typically only just content and graphics. Segmentation plays a huge role in effective email marketing for any industry. Segmentation is so effective that many businesses are finding success with micro-segmentation. Microsegmentation involves segmenting your audience into even smaller segments for an even more personalized customer experience. This isn’t just a smart tactic, it is essential to your ROI. In fact, segmenting can increase your revenue by as much as 760%.
Segmentation allows for consumer-driven content. You will be able to focus on the specific pain points and needs of your leads and customers. You no longer have to guess what is important to them. Instead, you can use data and customer-led segmentation to deliver the content customers want and need.
When segmenting your marketing contact list, you should be including “business-oriented” data as well. Things like industry, company size, decision-makers, business needs, and budget should be considered when segmenting your list.
You will also want to utilize your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to segment your lists. Each persona will likely focus on different aspects of your business and need entirely different information and interaction.
As the B2B buyer’s journey changes, with more independent research being conducted, delivering the right content at the right time can be the difference between a won and lost deal.
Studies have shown that 67% of consumers believe brands should automatically adjust content based on the current context. And, when brands don’t make those adjustments, 42% of consumers “get annoyed” that the content isn’t personalized to them.
5. Healthy Email Contact Lists To Improve Data Integrity
To maintain healthy email lists, you will need to keep clean data. That means prioritizing data cleanliness by removing contacts that frequently hard bounce, updating old contact information, and cutting unengaged contacts loose (after attempting to re-engage them of course).
B2B marketing becomes increasingly difficult the longer you let your contact lists get out of hand. Both the sales and marketing teams need to work together to ensure all intent data that is found within the CRM system is updated and accurate. Data should be audited regularly—at a minimum every 6 months. This allows for more fruitful marketing efforts and better time spent when a qualified lead makes it to the sales team’s pipeline.
Reliable Data Collection With RocketReach
Email marketing isn’t dead—or dying—and, as we have illustrated, it’s a viable method to grow your revenue and build brand awareness and brand affinity. Though email inboxes are getting saturated and it is getting harder to reach your target audience, following best practices when building your email contact list, focusing on getting reliable reliable data and customer-driven marketing can help you stand out.
Having resources such as a reliable contact database to help you secure the right contacts for your email marketing campaigns will help you streamline the contact data collection process used during your business marketing efforts.
RocketReach helps sales and marketing teams find better emails, phone numbers, and contact information that better fits their buyer personas—making building the right email contact list to drive email engagement simple.
FAQs
What marketing tactic has the highest ROI?
Email generates $42 for every $1 spent. That is a 4200% ROI—higher than any other marketing channel.
Where do email lookup engines find their information?
An email lookup service gets its information from publicly sourced data, tying together 100s of pieces of data using learning algorithms.
Does personalized marketing work?
90% of U.S. consumers find personalized marketing content to be appealing.
