The "email marketing is dead" myth has circulated in digital marketing circles for several years. Yet, year after year, digital marketers still find email marketing to be one of the most-effective advertising methods for products and services, in B2C and in B2B contexts.
Email marketing remains very much alive in 2019, and here's a guide you can use to propel your business forward with the best services.
Marketing is a numbers game, maximizing how well you can get your products or services in front of target demographics while minimizing the cost of that exposure.
To that end, email marketing provides perhaps the best way for businesses to get a lot of eyes on their products or services while spending very little on advertising.
As of 2018, 3.8 billion people (half of the world's population) used email, and that number is expected to increase to 4.4 billion by 2023. In comparison, Facebook has 2.41 billion users.
More people use email than use social media platforms, meaning email has by far the largest pool of potential clients and customers for marketers to target.
Moreover, the return on investment (ROI) for email marketing far and away beats out other popular methods of digital marketing such as influencer marketing. In 2019, the average ROI for email marketing campaigns is estimated at a whopping 4,400%, or $44 for every dollar invested, a $6 increase in just a couple of years.
For B2B companies in particular, email marketing represents a font of untapped potential.
Despite the fact that those statistics hold true in B2B environments, a recent study found that 59% of such businesses don't use email marketing, either for prospecting for potential clients or for advertising. Yet, 45% of marketers say email campaigns are the most-effective method of advertising in the B2B space.
That means there's a lot of room for B2B to take advantage of email marketing, and there's no better time than now to do so.
Two key factors play into whether your B2B email marketing campaign will be a success in 2019:
1. Is it a choice? You must allow targeted clients to opt out of your emails, and easily. In addition, avoid flooding their inboxes with emails.
The logic is simple: if a potential client hates email advertising and finds opting out of your email campaigns difficult or inaccessible, you've likely lost a client forever.
2. Is it useful? The questions every client will have about email sitting in his or her inbox are: "why should I click on this email?
How will it help me if I engage with it?" Obviously, if your email marketing campaigns just consist of sales pitches, the answers will be "I shouldn't" and "it won't."
Establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche. Provide useful information to potential clients that will help them succeed in your industry regardless of whether they buy your service or product.
At the very least, you'll create loyal followers who respect your brand. Ideally, you'll create a clientele base that values your products and services, and your brand's opinion on the market.
When composing your email marketing campaign, ask yourself, "is my goal to sell to clients, or to prospect for them?" You'll want an email marketing service that applies just to one or the other.
All marketers have experienced the frustration of having a great list of prospects they can't contact because of an email provider's opt-in requirements.
In your quest for an Email Service Provider (ESP), you will quickly discover that most ESP’s such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, and SendGrid prohibit you from importing a 3rd party list.
They only allow you to import your own customers and prospects with an existing opt-in relationship.
IndustrySelect partners with two email service providers so that subscribers can easily import their prospects seamlessly to these platforms and perform non-opt-in-email blasts.
Clickback:
Clickback helps generate leads for to B-to-B emailers with non-opt-in 3rd party lists.
The text file that is exported from your IndustrySelect account can be imported into your Clickback account with ease.
IndustrySelect subscribers using Clickback can send up to 3 emails per month, can track essential analytics, and can even create a dowloadable “lead list” of hot leads that have opened and/or clicked on your email.
The service excels in customer care, providing onboarding/training and unlimited phone support.
Mail250
Like Clickback, Mail250 is among the few email service providers that allow non-opt-in email blasts. Users can import their IndustrySelect data right into their Mail250 account.
IndustrySelect users can utilize Mail250 to send up to three emails per month, and have access to the same types of analytics as Clickback users.
The service is budget-friendly but is more limited in its customer support (email support only; no onboarding). Mail250 also utilizes a dynamic pool of IP addresses to stay of blacklists.
Click here for a full list of pros and cons of both services and to find out about special pricing for IndustrySelect subscribers.
For prospecting potential clients in the manufacturing industry, there's simply no better service than IndustrySelect. It can generate profiles of your best industry prospects, including C-level contact information such as names and email addresses in manufacturing.
That allows you to target demographics that you know would find your products or services useful, resolving perhaps the most difficult part of running a successful email marketing campaign.
If your business needs a marketing solution capable of generating leads and contacting prospects in the manufacturing industry, look no farther than IndustrySelect. To learn more about what we can do for you, visit our website.