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5 MIN. READ
In the ever-evolving landscape of B2B marketing, email campaigns remain a critical tool for reaching and engaging target audiences. However, as customer preferences and behaviors continue to change, it's essential to stay updated on the latest trends and metrics to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns. In this blog post, we will delve into the realm of B2B email marketing and explore the key metrics that can help you improve click-through rates in 2023. By understanding these metrics and implementing proven strategies, you'll be able to optimize your email campaigns and drive higher engagement and conversions. So let's dive in and discover the insights that will empower you to take your B2B email marketing to new heights in the year ahead.
Business-to-business promotions are marketing tactics driven by logic-based incentives. This type of marketing often uses content that communicates rational messages. They effectively persuade businesses to make a purchase based on a long-term incentive that benefits the company. This might include saving time, money or resources. In other words, B2B marketing assures businesses that they'll yield the largest ROI from the product or service they buy.
Now that you understand B2B promotions, you need to ensure that you fine-tune your digital marketing tactics to your audience. Email is still the king of B2B, utilized as a primary channel by an overwhelming majority of marketers. This is why it is important to familiarize yourself with email metrics as a whole:
• Deliverability - How many of your sent emails actually get to the recipient.
• Open rates - How often your emails get opened. Keep in mind that this metric is imperfect because many email clients obscure them by either hiding them or generating automatic opens.
• B2B email click-through rates (CTRs) - The percentage of people who click on your call to action link, such as a sales page, blog article or proposal for a demo.
• Conversions - Click-throughs that follow through with the above calls.
CTRs are arguably the metric that businesses have the most control over because they reflect the quality of your emails, the engagement of your readers and their interest in your offerings. When you measure CTR, you can use this information to determine how well your keywords and ads perform. Similarly, you can also use CTRs, open rates of email campaigns and other data metrics to help identify which marketing tactics are the most successful and which ones need improvements.
Further Reading: 117 Email Marketing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know in 2023
Once you have a basic understanding of important data metrics, you can develop a comprehensive data analysis or benchmark report. This will include your lead conversions and B2B content engagement. With this in mind, you can explore the benchmarks for your B2B email campaigns in terms of different metrics beyond CTRs.
For example, your CTR could fail to generate a conversion, but a lead might further explore your website - creating content engagement performance and eventually circling back to purchase intent. Similarly, you can go on to track visitor behaviors, traffic sources, user device types and so on. You can also utilize demographic data from your CTRs in your future B2B email campaigns to refine your content. From there, you can successfully cater your content to your niche audience and their preferences, creating a virtuous cycle.
When developing a marketing strategy for your business, it is essential to understand how B2B email CTRs tend to differ from B2C, or business-to-consumer. As mentioned earlier, B2B marketing primarily focuses on logic-based incentives, but B2C marketing tends to cater to the emotional appeal of consumers. B2C marketing is often simpler and more straightforward, and it usually has a quicker purchasing timeframe.
Based on this fundamental difference between B2B and B2C marketing tactics, CTRs will differ accordingly. While B2C email CTRs of 5-10% or more are quite common, B2B services tend to have a bigger entry ticket. For example, if you are selling to large manufacturers - busy purchasing executives and C-suite decision-makers who are flooded with communications - it's hard to be discouraged about even a 0.5% CTR. After all, you're likely selling a product worth six or more figures in recurring revenue to a small group, as opposed to focusing on mass appeal.
Understanding these differences will help you refine the key metrics for a particular email marketing campaign. It will also help you compare individual campaigns with the bigger picture of your marketing plan.
Many factors can impact the B2B email click-through rates of your marketing campaigns. Potential problem areas like poor content development, or clickbait tactics, can significantly compromise your CTRs. And this impact can be detrimental.
Other troubleshoot areas might include how you deliver content, a lack of personalization and being overly promotional in your message.
Nevertheless, you can easily mitigate these troubleshoot areas with a few simple tips:
• Keep your content concise, to the point and personal.
• Make sure that your email marketing content is high-quality. For example, if your email involves images and videos, they should deliver enough value to be saved and shared. Also, ensure the picture quality is clear.
• Think about SEO and keyword optimization for your marketing campaigns. Businesses often think that email has nothing to do with search engines, but it does have an effect.
• Take advantage of social sharing tools. Simply add a social sharing button to the content of your email campaigns and watch your B2B email click-through rates and engagement skyrocket.
With this kind of targeted email content combined with effective call-to-action buttons, your B2B CTRs are guaranteed to increase.
Further Reading: 3 Steps to Creating Powerful Story-Based Emails
And if you're looking for the right decision-makers to target with your marketing emails in the first place, their contact information is just a click away. Learn more about IndustrySelect or click here to try a free demo.
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