It’s been awhile since we’ve talked about one of the most important marketing tools we have in our arsenal: email marketing. Email marketing is ever important in today’s marketing world, regardless of those naysayers who claim it’s dead. Every morning, you and I (and millions of others) open our inboxes out of necessity, habit, or possibly even enjoyment- MarketingProfs stated in a recent post that 91% of Americans want to receive promotional emails! In fact, on average people check their email 74 times a day. It’s been around for decades, and it’s not going anywhere. For this reason, it can be an extremely influential marketing tool for businesses in terms of communicating and connecting with their customer.  

Email is the top source of analytics data for marketers according to MarketingProfs. With this data, there are a lot of ways to determine success with email marketing. The most obvious factors to consider are the open rate of your emails and click-through rate. While these stats are important for all email senders to watch, there’s another factor to consider that’s specifically crucial for B2B businesses.

According to Emma, the most crucial stat to watch for your B2B business is the growth of your email list. If your email list isn’t growing, neither are your opportunities for new business through this channel. Therefore, continue to add quality prospects to your email database, emailing them immediately upon receiving their contact info to set the foundation for future communication. And get creative by providing gated content on your website and your blog where users are prompted to give you basic information including their email and company name in order to access your content.

We thought it’d be valuable to share with you a few of the latest email marketing tips and trends to keep your emails fresh, click-worthy, and help build a relationship with your customer:

• Make it Intriguing: A tried and true way to get your emails noticed amidst the clutter of your customer’s inbox is with a catchy or thought-provoking subject line. Depending on your network, you might prefer to keep these conservative. Keep in mind that 69% of email users report email spam based solely on the subject line. Make sure to think of the recipient, but don’t be afraid to test out different subject lines through A/B testing that most email services provide.
• Make it Personal: Regardless of whether it’s automated or manually personalized, receiving a personalized email makes everyone happy- and even increases open rates by about 15%. Consider implementing personalization into your next email marketing campaign, as it also ranks as one of the top marketing trends of the year!  
• Make it Short and Sweet: Keep your emails brief! Cut out long winded formalities, and create content that’s light, informative, and an improvement to your recipient’s job, or their day! We all get more emails than we want to read when your customer does choose to open yours- make sure it says something peppy.
• Make it a Newsletter: Newsletters are another 2017 trend in email marketing, as this form of curated information makes for industry relevant, skimmable content that readers want to be in the know about! If you don’t already have a company newsletter in place, it’s time to get started. We suggest aiming for a quarterly newsletter at first, and increasing the frequency from there if it seems to be of interest to your community.
• Make it Convincing: Whether it’s a newsletter, a promotional email, or a personal one, every email should have a goal, and that goal can most effectively be achieved with a call-to-action- either in the form of a button, a link to your calendar to set up a meeting, or simply posing a question to be answered. Whatever your CTA, make it convincing!

These are just a few of the many ways you can optimize your email marketing efforts. What are the ways you’ve found email to be most effective for your business? Let us know in the comments below!