Creating B2B Email Campaigns That Convert (Part Two: Crafting Your Message)

IndustrySelect’s three-part series is designed to help you reach out to your business customers through a successful email marketing campaign.

In Part One of this series we covered the essential steps leading up to your launch, including the most effective ways of understanding your target audience and building the right list.

Cultivating the right audience is at the heart of any successful email campaign. We discussed how IndustrySelect can supercharge your email marketing campaigns by helping you build a powerful list of contacts. Click here to learn more.

A well-crafted email should create more leads, increase conversion rates, increase the number of subscribers, and ultimately lead to more sales. In Part Two, we are going to show you how to craft a message that will do just this.

The Header

Your email campaign needs to do more than reach your targets; they must open and read your message. The first step is creating a great header.

If your email appears to come from an anonymous account, chances are it won't make it past the spam file. You need a recognizable name that inspires trust.

Once you've identified yourself or your company, your subject line must grab your reader's interest. It should be short but sincere and action-oriented. Keeping it below 50 characters will increase the open rates by 12.5 percent.

A short preview of your message, called a preheader, can be created using many email clients. If this option is available, you should customize it with six to 11 words that encourage the recipient to read further.

When succinct, honest and to the point, this preview can make a huge impact.

The Body

Here's your chance to use every tool at hand to get your message across. If your company has a recognizable or exciting logo, you should include it.

If you have a website, you can increase responses by making your logo a click-through.

Your text must convince your reader of its value. Every word must count. Studies suggest that for most industries, emails with about 20 lines of text, or about 200 words, and three or fewer images elicit the most robust response.

An effective arrangement of your email is an enticing image followed by punchy explanatory text. Finish with a link, and your reader will be drawn to explore further.

The Footer

The body is not the end of your story. Your footer can call your recipient to further action. If you have social media links, include them here.

You should also list your contact information by email and any other method that works for you. Finally, you must add your company's physical address to avoid violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Images

The images that you include in your email should not only be interesting and to the point, but they should also be of high quality. Nothing screams amateur more loudly than a fuzzy picture.

You want your images to harmonize with your text rather than distracting from it. The eyes of your reader will move smoothly on a page with enough white space to allow them to rest naturally on the meat of your message.

A picture can be worth a thousand words if it enhances your text. One method of doing this is by an infographic, a chart or diagram that conveys data. A well-crafted infographic will present information quickly and clearly, avoiding the glazed eyes that can result from a confrontation with lists or tables of statistics.

Essential Tools for Success

Every excess word is a chance for your reader to stray. Programs such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice have word-counting functions that you can easily use by highlighting the relevant text.

Microsoft Word will also give you a character count, with or without spaces. You may also copy text from an email platform onto a site such as Lettercount or CharacterCountOnline.

In a perfect world, you might have a full-time photographer or graphic artist to create the perfect images for your campaign. If you don't live in that universe, help is available from many locations on the web. Resources include:

• Visme
• Unsplash
• Pixabay
• Google Images

Royalty-free images are also available by subscription from depositphotos®.

In the third and final part of this series, are covering the essential steps to executing your campaign. Read More.