People send 200 billion e-mails every day, yet many companies consider e-mail to be the “hidden champion” among the various means of communication. Business-to-business companies in particular pay little attention to this marketing opportunity. Yet e-mail can also enrich the marketing mix of B2B companies—at least if the content generates real added value for the recipients.
What makes e-mail successful as a marketing tool in the first place?
E-mail marketing works based on existing address data, for example, from customers or people interested in the company. Therefore, marketers can tailor content to target groups precisely, which makes the relevance of the content very high compared to other advertising media.
In addition, e-mail marketing is flexible and therefore super suitable for a test-and-learn approach: For example, you can test different subject lines or content against each other within a campaign. Proper tracking also provides insights for continuous improvement of future marketing e-mails. Finding out which personalized elements have the greatest impact on a particular audience in an e-mail becomes relatively easy.
Plan and implement an e-mail marketing campaign: Here’s what to consider
Before implementing an e-mail marketing campaign, there should be agreement on what the purposes are and what the use cases are. Two examples:
- E-mail push campaigns: Push campaigns refer to the classic sending of e-mail newsletters that pursue a predefined goal. This can be a one-time mailing or a string of several mailings.
- Drip marketing: Drip marketing is the sending of e-mails that are automatically triggered by a certain action by the user. In B2B, for example, this could be a confirmation e-mail for a webinar registration.
In the following best practice example, you will learn how to use a push campaign to bring users to your own website to trigger a certain action there. The step-by-step guide is based on a project that Webrepublic implemented for the international med tech company Nobel Biocare.