Creating B2B Email Campaigns That Convert (Part Three: The Execution)

For this three-part series on B2B email campaigns, we’ve gone through the steps of building a surefire email list and crafting a message that converts.

So now that you’ve got your campaign ready to go, how, exactly do you best execute it? In the third and final part of this series, we are going to show you how to do just that.

First, let’s recap:

In Part One, we discussed how IndustrySelect can supercharge your email marketing campaigns by helping you build a powerful list of contacts. 

In Part Two, we walked you through the essentials of crafting a message with impact, to help you increase conversion rates and ultimately score more sales.

Now that you’re all set up, let’s get your campaign off the ground.

Part Three: The Execution

No message can succeed if your platform doesn't ensure that it reaches its intended recipient. Your software must actually deliver your email.

You will want to check both its delivery rate and the process it uses to avoid spam files. Your platform should also provide an interface that allows you to implement the personalized elements explored earlier that will trigger responses from your targets.

To aid you in choosing the platform that will best fulfill your needs, BiznessAPPS compared the features of the six most popular email marketing platforms.

This blog lays out criteria that you can use to make an informed choice and describes four platforms in detail. FulcrumTech provides further insights on evaluating the specific needs of your company to better home in on your selection.

Creating Your Schedule

Many studies have been conducted concerning the best time to send emails. Unfortunately, they don't all agree. The results are analyzed here.

Since industries and customer bases vary, your company may have to do some experimenting on its own.

The data does, however, provide a place to start. Many sources cite weekdays as superior to weekends. Multiple studies picked Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays as the optimal day to put out your blast.

Most preferred morning as a launch time, but opens and click-throughs came later in the day, so you may expect a delayed response. Boiling down the mass of available data, Tuesday at 10 a.m. in the recipient's time zone is an excellent place to start.

Before You Hit Send

Opening an email with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes will raise red flags with many readers. At best, it shows that the sender is careless. Even worse, it suggests that the email is spam or an attempt by a foreign hacker to infect computers with viruses or malware.

Either way, the message will be destined for the trash and may even trigger a report to an email service provider.

There are many ways to avoid these errors. If you compose your emails in Microsoft Word or a similar program, you can use multiple tools to check your spelling and grammar.

To obtain a more intensive check, including suggestions for optimal word use, clarity and construction, you can use Grammarly. You can cut and paste text onto the website or use an extension that will work directly with Outlook, Microsoft Word or Google Chrome.

To further adapt your schedule to your targets, a valuable tool is A/B testing. This technique determines which of two options provokes the highest response. While often applied to popups and headlines, you can also use this analytical tool to test the success of the timing of your emails.

You can further amplify your message by cross-channel marketing, a seamless experience across multiple channels such as a website and mail on a mobile device. Seeing a message on a site that perfectly melds with an email that follows produces a combination can drive click-through rates and conversion to purchase.

A study showed that response to at least two channels was 166 percent higher than to one channel alone.

You can add a further boost to your campaign by remarketing. Cookies on your website can track visitors, even those who have made no response or purchase. By sending emails targeted to these potential buyers, you can encourage them to become customers.

You can also test the data obtained from remarketing to determine its effectiveness in building your list.

In your toolbox

• Grammarly
• Google Calendar
• Outlook Calendar
• Excel Templates that aid you in planning your scheduling
• Google Analytics

Many benchmark studies will help you understand the click-through rate in your industry. To ensure you are always working with updated data, use the weekly updated database of IndustrySelect.

Conclusion

While there are many avenues to market your business, an email campaign is essential whether or not it is combined with other methods.

Your starting point must be your list, and IndustrySelect is your most powerful tool to build it. This is how users of this service describe it:

"EZ Select (now IndustrySelect) is one of the best purchases we ever made for our project at Keystone. We have been using the database extensively for various analysis and tasks for the last 5-6 months." - Keystone Strategy

"We are using the EZ Select (IndustrySelect) database to locate and contact prospects. The database is easy to use and sort. Overall, we have found the database to be more accurate and reliable than other databases we have used in the past." - Combined Systems Technology

Try a free demo of IndustrySelect now and see how you can build the email list that will make your business.

Next week, we are going to take a look at some great email service providers. Stay tuned!