Email marketing strategy for B2B & B2C audiences

Email marketing strategy – getting your campaigns working for you

What is an email marketing campaign strategy? Why should you use them? How do you know who you should be sending emails to? How frequently should you be sending emails? What content should the email contain? How do I design an engaging email campaign? How do you measure its success?

There’s a lot of questions here around email marketing, and here at Capella Synergy, we’re here to help. Let’s start at the beginning…

What is an email marketing campaign?

An email marketing is an email sent from a business to one or more customers or prospects. A successful email marketing campaign will get the recipients to take action, engage with your business, and help you to get more leads and sales.

Email is a great way of reaching an audience because it is widely accessible. More often than not, an email will be accessed via a mobile phone for both B2B and B2C audiences. This makes email marketing the perfect channel to build customer relations and generate new business opportunities.

It is also a cost-effective way of reaching a large audience.

Set yourself an objective

As with any marketing campaign you should set yourself an objective of what you want to get from your email campaign. Consider the following:

Is the campaign to welcome new subscribers and inform them about your business and build a relationship with them?
Do you want to boost engagement with your content? Are you promoting a webinar that you want people to join?
Is the campaign targeted at prospect clients to generate leads and sales?
Are you wanting to engage with an existing audience with an objective of maintaining relationships building opportunities upsell?
Do you need to re-engage with subscribers who aren’t currently active?

Understanding your audience for an effective email marketing campaign strategy

Once you’ve determined your objective, you then need to understand your audience. A successful email marketing campaign will contain an email list of qualified leads. There’s little point in creating an email marketing campaign if you don’t understand your audience. This should all tie in with your main marketing strategy.

You may already have a list generated that has developed through previous marketing campaigns, sales leads or subscribers to your website. If you’re starting from the outset, you can gather data from Google Analytics and your social media profiles. Both sources have data on demographics, location, and interests, plus a bunch of other metrics, that’ll give you a snapshot of who your customers are and what they’re interested in. That’s a good starting point for crafting successful email marketing campaigns.

You may want to consider purchasing reputable and qualified data that matches your target audience.

Once you have an audience it is possible to segment your subscribers allowing you to send more than one targeted email marketing campaign.

The difference in email messages

Have you considered the different types of email that you can send? The most commonly used is a promotional email that shares offers, sales and self-promotion. This would be used to generate new sales and/or business leads. You then have a relationship email, an opportunity for you to nurture your existing audience with a newsletter, a free-gift or relevant information that they can use for their own benefit. Finally, you have transactional emails which include:

Subscriber signup confirmations
Welcome messages
Order or purchase confirmations
Acknowledgements of changes to subscriber information
Transactional emails are usually triggered by subscribers’ actions and relate to an action they’ve taken on your site.

How should I be sending email marketing campaigns?

There are many tools available to help you create successful email marketing campaigns. It’s about finding the right one for you and your business. Things to look for when determining the right tool:

Easy campaign creation and automation, including templates.
Integrations with the software you already use such as WordPress.
Ways to segment your audience.
Detailed analytics on email campaign performance.
Ability to schedule campaigns in advance.

Planning for your email campaign

With your objectives, audience and email type ready, it’s time to start planning. Depending on whether you have a B2B or a B2C audience will determine: