Email remains one of the most effective marketing channels that, according to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), boasts a 4200% ROI ($42 for every $1 spent). No other marketing channel comes close. When asked how important each marketing channel was to their organization’s overall content marketing success, 91% of B2B marketers said email. With statistics so strong, how can marketing teams without an email plan develop a revenue-driven email strategy?
Let’s take a look at how Fastbase helps B2B marketing and sales teams develop and automate email marketing campaigns.
Starting from Zero – Building a Pipeline & Warming Up a Cold Audience
Whether you’re a large marketing team or a solopreneur, you must identify your ideal customer avatar (ICA). Haven’t yet? Who are your most profitable customers? Based on market research and historical data, start creating representations of the people you engage with directly during the sales process. Once you’ve outlined your ICA, it’s time to build your pipeline with quality prospecting lists.
With Fastbase’s InMarket leads, identify prospects that are ready to buy and at the bottom of the sales acquisition funnel. With over 228 million searches on Google per hour, InMarket Leads discloses the specific keywords businesses are searching for while listing their contact details for immediate outreach. To start using the service, enter a time period, location, and add keywords. A list will populate containing detailed information including company name, contact person, website, industry, address, email, phone number, and, most powerfully, specific searches performed with the search date. Use this data to create highly targeted and segmented lists based on companies searching for brands, products, and services.
Another tool, Similar Leads by Fastbase, quickly and economically builds a prospect list based on specific criteria: country, region, and industry category. Once the search criteria have been entered, a list is quickly built and displayed. Download these lists and add them to your CRM to start your email marketing campaigns.
Send Your Hottest Leads to Sales and Nurture the Rest
Now that you have targeted email lists, segment out your hottest leads and send these to sales. Your sales team will then send personalized emails to the leads most likely to convert. The rest of the leads? Add them to your email marketing list to nurture. We’ll later explain how to use Fastbase’s LeadScoring software to notify sales of the hottest leads, but first let’s discuss how to develop your email marketing campaigns.
Engage Authentically and Provide Value
According to research from SuperOffice, a top priority for email marketing in 2020 is to increase subscriber engagement, stating in their 21 of the Best B2B Email Marketing Examples article that, “it’s even more important than segmentation, email marketing analysis, and lifecycle messaging.”
The fact is that engaged subscribers equates to an increased average revenue per customer and overall company profits. So how do you engage subscribers? First, you must segment your audience based on industry type, product interest, etc. Once you’ve segmented your lists, it’s important to understand that different segments want to read different content. If you have B2C and B2B buyers, send out different nurturing campaigns and newsletters that are relevant to each market. Develop content that guides your prospects through the buyer’s journey, which includes the awareness, consideration, and decision stages.
Common examples of content for the awareness stage include reports, eBooks, editorial content, expert content, whitepapers, and educational videos. For the consideration stage when prospects have clearly defined their problem, common content to send include expert guides, live demos, videos, podcasts, comparison charts, and whitepapers. And finally, once your prospect has decided on their solution strategy but not yet their provider, it’s important to send out vendor comparison data, product/tech comparison charts, case studies, free demos, product literature, and free product walk-throughs. Successful context marketing helps to engage your audience and get the right message across at the right time.
Now that you have segmented prospect lists and created content for each stage of the buyer’s journey, how often should you email your contacts? The answer is it depends on where the prospect is on the buyer’s journey.
Marketing and Sales Work Together to Drive Revenue
According to CoSchedule, start sending marketing email automations once a month and if you want to be more aggressive, test results before standardizing that new cadence. And what you should send? Mix it up. Have you been sending the same old newsletter template for months? Have you seen an increase in engagement? Unlikely. Change your templates based on the content you’re sending – webinars, videos, promotions, case studies etc.
As you start sending out email marketing campaigns once a month, some prospects will naturally view additional webpages, downloadables on the site, and fill out forms to read case studies, whitepapers, etc. These are the leads that need additional follow-up and nurturing. Using Fastbase’s LeadScoring, create workflows that send automated emails based on user activity, guiding them down the sales funnel. For example, if a user views a video on a specific webpage, you can create a workflow that automatically sends a link to a similar valuable content. This workflow will guide the lead down the sales funnel, notifying the sales team when a lead hit a certain lead score and is most likely to buy.
By sending out email marketing campaigns on a regular cadence, creating automated workflows that drive the hottest prospects down the sales funnel, and notifying sales teams when prospects are likely to buy, you’ll stop chasing the wrong leads and help to control the pipeline with prospects most likely to convert.