B2B Digital Marketing Agency: How to Optimize Email Outreach
Leads are prospective and potentially loyal, customers. So each business lead is precious and can’t be lost in the loopholes of imperfect pipelines. It is quite common, however, to see a seemingly promising email marketing campaign fail due to a lack of email outreach optimization, even if you are using a premium b2b leads database. Failure to adjust outreach to possible challenges will result in losing viable business leads through low open rates, unsatisfactory sender reputation, lost opportunities for engagements, and other ways all B2B marketers do their best to avoid. An experienced B2B digital marketing agency uses a professional approach to lead generation, not letting conversion rates slide and sales opportunities run through your fingers. Automate your lead management process by choosing a business lead generation service.
Business Lead Generation
Launching an email outreach requires a marketing team to not only outline a solid marketing strategy and timelines (what, where, when, and to whom to send) but also to account for potential disruptors. Your mailboxes can be too new to send bulk emails. Your sender reputation can be compromised by your earlier unwise activity. If you failed to account for bounced-back emails or acquired email lists from dubious sources, your email marketing campaign will be much less effective than it would otherwise be. When you know what to look for, you will find out how to optimize it. Here are the things you should take care of:
Email Service
Nowadays there is a wide selection of email services to choose from, depending on your requirements. You definitely wouldn’t want to use Gmail or Outlook for outreach campaigns because their functions are limited for sending emails in bulk. Being aware of the functions needed, you can choose an email service with free email templates and landing pages, including email automation, a built-in CRM tool, and many other integrated tools. What you need to adjust optimally in all email-related processes:
Email monitoring tools.
Categorize your email threads and improve email management. It’s easier when you can mark the emails according to the stages in the sales funnel. Look for segmentation tools to segment leads into groups. Navigate through your correspondence easily.
Customization of metrics.
A variety of email services have options of ordering emails the way you like it. For example, it is possible to order the messages in your Inbox the following way: Starred First or Unread First. Create as narrow filters as you need.
Email snoozing.
Remove the emails you will send later from under your way by snoozing them. If set up correctly, email automation will take care of them later.
Snippet creation.
Save your time by storing ‘snippets’ of your and your leads’ messages to prevent repetitive typing. Use a combination of keys to insert the text you need.
Email Tracking Tools
You obviously need to know how many people opened the email and clicked on a CTA. However, today’s email tracking tools are capable of more: let you know all the pages that caught the leads’ attention on your website; notify you when the lead comes back to your website; inform you when new persons come to your website from the lead’s company. Having more information on which of your messages engages readers and how they interact with them will give you insights on how to improve your email campaign.
How to use email tracking tools? Use metrics to your own benefit. Respond to each action by the lead correspondingly. For example,
- If the leads open your emails without a fail, notice the time frame and make sure your emails are scheduled for that time to ensure the highest Open Rate.
- If the leads open your email several times during the day and click on attachments, follow-up immediately, encouraging their interest.
- When the leads ignore your emails, send a discount code or a business proposal.
- If emails bounce back or get negative responses, remove their addresses from your database to avoid negative impacts on a conversion rate.
Top Three Email Tracking Tools:
- Mailchimp. Available a limited free plan and paid plans from $9.99/month
- HubSpot. Available a limited free plan and paid plans from $50/month
- Zoho. Available a limited free plan and paid plans from $6/email
Email Deliverability
If an average deliverability rate for your email outreach is lower than 50%, check out the following criteria:
Reputation Data.
Each IP address has a score assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), also referred to as an email sender reputation. If your score is low, there’s a high probability that your emails will be sent directly to a spam folder or blacklisted. To avoid being flagged as spam, take good care of your sender reputation:
- Scrub your email lists regularly deleting non-responders and invalid emails
- Keep your bounce rate below 2%, keeping an eye on bounce codes. Differentiate between a soft bounce (when a problem is temporal) and a hard bounce (when the address is DOA)
- Follow an IP warm-up plan. Especially if your email address is new, you cannot send bulk emails as you would do from an account with an established sender reputation. Increase workload on your mailbox steadily but gradually.
Email List Scrubbing.
Deliverability rates instantly go higher as soon as bad data scrubbing is removed from email lists. You can purge your email lists by manually deleting email addresses that responded negatively or bounced back. Or you can use an email list scrubbing system that will scan your databases and automatically remove suspicious email addresses. Also, avoid buying email lists from third parties. It will protect your deliverability and relieve you from the necessity to do additional scrubbing.
Spam Control.
Apart from obvious spam triggers (like many exclamation marks and the words ‘SALE’ and ‘FREE’ in all caps), businesses are also advised to make sure VPN settings they use do not flag them as spam. On the one hand, it is wise to use a VPN in email marketing campaigns to protect your online activity. On the other hand, an email service may not recognize your IP, if it is not a popular VPN and you get flagged. The best way to avoid such problems is to use an email service recognized by a large number of VPNs (i.e. MailChimp).
Keep an Eye on Lead Generation
In the meantime, make sure there’s no lull in the B2B lead generation process. What is lead generation in digital marketing? It’s a pool of actions a business does to encourage a consumer’s interest in a business’s product or service. Find out your major lead generators, see which one generates the most leads, and optimize lead generation even further.
Do you know your major lead generators?
In addition to email marketing we discussed earlier, social media, blog posts, and live chats can also generate prospects for your business. Users get interested in your marketing campaigns on Facebook or Instagram and go to your website to check out your propositions. Similarly, the highest-performing blog posts can encourage readers to check out your website where an effective lead magnet is set up and waiting for them. Once you know your best performing lead generators, make sure lead magnets and landing pages are fine-tuned and adjusted to welcome and further nurture prospects’ interest.
How well does each lead generator perform?
Grade your website with an online tool to see how it performs in terms of SEO, security, and mobile readiness. Website Grader, a free online tool, can also evaluate your business lead sources and give you feedback on how they can be improved.
Test the effectiveness of a few of your landing pages by comparing the better-performing ones against the worse performing ones. See how they differ and optimize the poorer doing landing pages accordingly.
Also, there are many analytic tools to run internal reports for each landing page and banner. See what gets more CTA clicks, visits, shares, loading time, etc., and then add changes to the existing website and landing pages.
How to optimize the lead generation process?
A typical conversion process starts with an attractive offer a user sees somewhere on your social media/live chat/website and clicks on the call-to-action button to get it. If the user fills in a form to get access to the offer when they visit the landing page, the conversion is complete and they receive the offer. If, however, you notice conversion rates lower than expected, something must have gone wrong along the way in the conversion path. By optimizing each step of the lead generation process, you will create an effective conversion path.
Context-appropriate content
. Conversions are higher if prospects find on your landing page exactly what they were promised when they had pressed the CTA button. Create unique content. And don’t fool visitors’ expectations: if you promised 10 Ways to Lose Weight, don’t expect visitors to convert into leads when you offer them 10 Ways to Remove Excessive Hair instead.
Buyer personas.
Even when your content is enticing and up-to-the-point, it should also speak to your buyer personas. Tailoring your landing pages specifically to different demographics and purposes will result in more conversions. For example, if you target a buyer persona who is just entertaining an idea of buying your services (i.e. SMM), they probably won’t be too interested in downloading a guide on creating entertaining Instagram stories. Instead, create for this persona a landing page that will highlight how to choose a professional social media manager.
Final Thought
Before starting your email marketing outreach, it’s essential that you first fully grasp all elements and details of lead generation and conversion path. Email outreach is much more effective and successful when the website is streamlined and all lead generators are optimized. Using the tips above, you can have tremendous performance and results without high bounce rates and low conversion rates. If, however, you find email outreach optimization too complicated and time-consuming, there are always ways to find someone to do this for you. The way many businesses supplement their inside sales teams with outside sales reps, lead generation, and appointment setting can similarly be outsourced. If you like the article then check Techdee
