Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy by Avoiding These Mistakes
77% of B2B buyers say they prefer to be contacted by email than any other channel. In order for your emails to effectively engage your audience and drive results, it is essential to have a strategy in place.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for B2B businesses. But common mistakes can hinder your efforts and lead to a disengaged audience.
Whether you’re struggling with low engagement rates or high bounce rates, understanding these issues (and how to address them) is key to improving your email marketing efforts.
Let’s dive in and discuss five common email marketing mistakes and what to do if you’re making any of them.
B2B Email Marketing Benchmarks to Strive Towards
After perfecting your email and sending it out to your subscribers, how can you be sure that the results were actually good? It’s important to be aware of the latest email marketing benchmarks for metrics like open rate, click-through rate (CTR), unsubscribe rate, and more.
Here are some B2B email benchmarks as of 2024:
- Average open rate: 15.14%
- Average CTR: 2.44%
- Average bounce rate: 2.48%
- Average unsubscribe rate: 0.24%
If your email performance is falling short of the above metrics, there’s a chance that you’re making a common email marketing mistake. Read on to find out what those top 5 mistakes are and start engaging your audience better than ever.
Mistake 1: Not Testing Subject Lines
First impressions matter! 47% of recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. A well-written subject line provides a preview of what the reader can expect and helps increase the likelihood that they’ll engage with your email content.
A compelling subject line can grab your recipients’ attention and entice them to open the email. On the other hand, a bland or irrelevant subject line can result in your email being ignored or deleted.
But different audiences respond to different triggers, whether it be urgency, personalization, or value proposition. A/B testing your subject lines helps you understand what resonates best with your audience.
Here are some ways to test your subject line when sending your next email:
- Send two versions of your email with different subject lines to a small segment of your audience. Analyze the open rates to determine which subject line performs better, then use the winning subject line for the rest of your list.
- Test subject lines with and without personalization.
- Experiment with different lengths of subject lines.
- Vary the tone (formal vs. casual) and style (question vs. statement) of your subject lines.
- Test subject lines with and without emojis.
Don’t be afraid to conduct multiple tests to see what works best for your audience. investing time in testing and optimizing your subject lines will only help your business improve your open rates and enhance email engagement.
Mistake 2: Neglecting Email Calls-to-Action
Once your recipients have opened your email, it’s time to drive them to take action. Whether your goal is for your readers to visit your website, download a resource, or make a purchase, adding calls-to-action (CTAs) can significantly impact your campaign’s success.
However, many businesses only include one CTA at the end of their email. If your readers don’t make it that far, you’ve lost your chance of getting a conversion.
Including multiple CTA’s helps reinforce the action you want the reader to take. Each CTA serves as a reminder, increasing the chances of conversion without being overly repetitive if they’re presented in varied formats.
Without clear and compelling CTA’s, your readers might appreciate the content but be left wondering what to do with the information. It’s like walking into a store without any signs directing you where to go. Would you spend time going through each aisle to find what you need, or would you just leave?
It’s best to avoid confusing and frustrating your customers. Here’s how you can include multiple CTA’s in your next email:
- Use a combination of hyperlinked text and clickable buttons.
- Use contrasting colors for CTA buttons and concise text that tells the reader exactly what action to take.
- Strategically place CTA’s throughout your email.
- Ensure the messaging of your CTA’s is consistent and clear.
- Optimize your CTA’s for mobile devices by making them large enough to tap easily.
Implementing a mix of CTA formats and messages in your next email is a great strategy to cater to the different preferences of your readers. Just make sure that the messaging of your CTA’s is consistent. The action you want the reader to take should be clear and uniform across all CTA’s.
As a result, you can enjoy higher click-through rates and leverage the data to build automated email drip campaigns.
Mistake 3: Not Leveraging Automated Email Workflows
Maintaining ongoing engagement with your subscribers is key to building lasting relationships and driving conversions. One powerful tool for achieving this is launching automated workflows based on your subscribers’ interactions, such as the links they click and the emails they open.
Over 68% of marketers believe that automation improves the targeting of email messages and 80% have seen an increase in qualified leads from using email automation. Workflows help guide your audience through the buyer’s journey by providing them with the right content at the right time.
Without setting up automated workflows, you miss opportunities to engage with your subscribers at critical moments. Manual follow-ups are time-consuming and prone to delays and inconsistencies. Any errors can lead to missed chances to connect with your audience when they’re most receptive.
Some examples of effective automated drip workflows include:
- A welcome series that introduces them to your brand, sets expectations, and provides valuable resources to start the relationship on a positive note.
- Behavioral triggers that respond to specific actions taken by subscribers, such as clicking on a product link or downloading a resource.
- Re-engagement campaigns for subscribers who haven’t interacted with your emails for a while.
- Abandoned cart emails for e-commerce businesses designed to encourage recipients to complete their purchase.
Automated workflows are ideal because they allow you to scale your email marketing efforts without also increasing your workload. Once set up, workflows can drive consistent, personalized communication across your entire contact list – all while you work on other tasks.
In short, email workflows powered by automation will help you nurture leads and maintain strong relationships with your existing customers.
Mistake 4: Having Unsegmented Contact Lists
Not segmenting your contacts is another common email marketing mistake that many businesses make. Segmentation involves dividing your subscriber list into smaller, more targeted groups.
This can be based on buyer personas, industries, stages in the customer journey, and any other criteria relevant to your brand. Segmenting your contacts can be time-consuming when you’re first starting, but the potential results are well worth it.
Segmentation is an email marketing best practice for a reason – it allows for highly personalized emails. And personalized emails can increase open rates by 26%, increasing the chances that recipients will engage with your email content.
Here are some examples of effective segmentation to help inspire your next campaign:
- Demographic segmentation – Divide your list based on demographic factors like age, occupation, or marital status.
- Behavioral segmentation – Segment your audience based on behavior such as past purchase history, website interactions, email engagement, or product usage.
- Lifecycle stage segmentation – Segment your subscribers based on where they are in the customer lifecycle, such as new marketing qualified leads (MQLs), first-time buyers, repeat customers, or disengaged subscribers.
- Geographic segmentation – Tailoring your campaigns based on geographic location is particularly useful for region-specific promotions and events.
On the other hand, generic emails sent to an unsegmented list are less likely to capture the interest of your subscribers. When recipients aren’t interested in your emails, they won’t stick around in your contact list for much longer.
If you’re noticing high unsubscribe rates, try segmenting your lists to increase the impact of future email campaigns.
Mistake 5: Failing to Clean Up Email Lists
Last but not least, maintaining a clean email list is a fundamental email marketing best practice. Since this process can be tedious, it often falls by the wayside. However, the longer this essential task is ignored, the more difficult it will be to sort through your disorganized contact list.
Failing to regularly clean your email lists can lead to several drawbacks:
- A high bounce rate as a result of a significant number of your emails not being able to be delivered. This can happen due to invalid email addresses, full inboxes, or other issues.
- Negatively impacts your sender reputation, making it more likely that your future emails will be marked as spam or blocked by ISPs (Internet Service Providers).
- Your domain or IP address can be blacklisted, significantly reducing your ability to reach your audience. Blacklisted senders often have their emails automatically filtered out or rejected.
- Your open and click-through rates will appear lower, making it harder to gauge how effective your email marketing campaigns truly are.
You can avoid these negative impacts by periodically reviewing and cleaning your email list. Remove invalid addresses, correct typos, and eliminate duplicates. Email verification tools can help you check the validity of email addresses before adding them to your list.
Also, many email providers charge based on your number of subscribers. Removing inactive or invalid addresses will reduce any unnecessary costs associated with sending emails to non-responsive or non-existent recipients.
One way to avoid users submitting invalid email addresses is implementing double opt-in. Anyone who signs up for emails will receive a follow-up email with a link to confirm their subscription.
While double opt-in will help keep your subscriber list cleaner, it can also discourage some users from signing up for your emails. The fewer steps that people have to go through, the more likely they’ll be to complete a desired action.
So, if you want to keep your single opt-in settings, just remember to regularly clean up your subscriber list. Making updates once a quarter, biannually, or once a year (depending on the size of your email list) will help keep your customer relationship management (CRM) software accurate!
Get Better Results with a B2B Email Marketing Agency
Partnering with an expert B2B email marketing agency is the best way to avoid all of these common mistakes and ensure your campaigns achieve maximum impact. Entrusting your email marketing strategy to our experts will help you save time and resources while also gaining a strategic partner dedicated to driving your success.
At BNP Engage, our email marketing experts can help your business with everything from optimizing subject lines to maintaining a clean email list. Contact us today to get started!