Data can be extremely beneficial for those looking to get more out of their B2B email marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re tracking general metrics like open and click-through rates or want to dive deeper and learn how users are interacting with your B2B website after receiving your communications, here are 5 key data points. We recommend reviewing these metrics when crafting and monitoring your clients’ B2B email marketing experience.
Email Open Rate
Open rates are one of the best and easiest ways to tell whether your B2B email marketing strategy is working. The number of contacts that open your emails compared to the total number of contacts that your email was sent to determines your open rate.
One way to encourage better open rates is strategically coming up with clever subject lines that resonate with your audience and get them to click on your email. Subject lines should be concise, but also effective enough to communicate what the user can expect in the email. You can A/B test different variations of subject lines to gather more data and effectively improve open rates for future email sends.
Click-Through Rates
Your list’s click-through activity provides you with a great deal of information about the material that they are interested in. Greater number of click-throughs indicates that the featured material is important to your target audience. This information, whether it’s from a website page or a blog post, will be useful in the future when you’re adding more related topics to your content schedule. Click-through rates can be improved by experimenting with different Call-to-Action variations.
By utilizing Google Analytics, you can see what kind of actions visitors are taking once they click on your email link to learn more about them. For example, you may look at your “Email” source in the Acquisition Overview report and see things like your “Bounce Rate,” your “Average Session Duration,” your “Pages Per Session,” and finally how many conversions may have came through emails during this time period. More information about specific pages included in your email as well as the performance of those pages can be found by digging deeper into your Landing Page report and sorting it by your Email source. You now have a better understanding of what material performs well and what content does not when you combine this information with the information you obtained from your original click-through report in your email marketing platform.
Sending Emails at the Appropriate Moment
We recommend that you try multiple days and times when sending emails because this can be a vital step that is overlooked. Certain days and times of the week may be more conducive to receiving emails from certain people, and B2B marketers can only learn this through various email tests. Emails are most effective when sent between Tuesday and Thursday mornings, taking into consideration any Monday holiday breaks and additional time off on Fridays. In some cases, an email that you believe would perform well on a Tuesday at 8 a.m. may perform even better on Thursday at 10 a.m. Also, keep in mind that you may have clients in different time zones and change the time at which your emails are sent to reflect this.
Being Aware of Your Unsubscribe Rate
According to industry standards, an unsubscribe rate of less than 0.5 percent for an email campaign is considered normal for any email campaign. Keep in mind that brand new lists can have a higher unsubscribe rate than established lists, and that this can be expected, particularly with new B2B marketing email campaign launches. Despite the fact that these folks may be familiar with your brand, if you haven’t particularly targeted to them in the past, the new emails may come off as surprising, resulting in higher than typical unsubscribe rates. As your highly interested and engaged audience continues to engage with you, the quality of your list should improve over time. The unsubscribe rate for these readers should also decrease as they become more familiar with your brand’s messaging and messaging strategy.
From one industry to another, the rates of open, click-through, and unsubscribe differ significantly. For example, a manufacturing firm may experience an average open rate of 19.82 percent and a click-through rate of 2.18 percent, whereas a government-based B2B company may get substantially higher open rates and click-through rates, such as 28.77 percent and 3.99 percent, respectively.
Creating Audience Demographic Segments for Your Mailing List
Now that you have a better understanding of the quality of your list and the demographics of your target audience, you can begin segmenting your list based on criteria that are different but similar amongst contacts.
You can segregate your list by industry, for example, if you have a product or service that only affects a specific industry. You can then send these folks on your list a targeted email with blog material or downloadable resources they will find more useful than your general list of contacts.
As a result, segmenting contacts can help you increase your open and click-through rates. The more exact your targeting, the more targeted your content is, and the more personalized your material appears to users. Do you have the names and/or corporate information for your potential connections on hand? You can also customise emails even further by including merge tags in them. Most B2B email marketing platforms, such as MailChimp, allow you to include a tag, such as |*FNAME*|, that allows you to dynamically incorporate a contact’s name into an email, giving your mailings a more personalized touch. This level of personalization can make a significant difference in terms of engaging your contacts with the appropriate content at the appropriate time.
In Conclusion
To summarize, data is your ally, so make certain that you are taking advantage of it to your advantage. Open, unsubscribe, and click-through rates are all easily consumable data points that can be used to fine-tune your strategy and get your brand in front of a larger proportion of your target audience. Using timing and segmentation in your email communications can help you display a more personalized approach to your email communications and connect with your readers.