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There are 4.35 billion email accounts worldwide,and 196 billion emails are sent out daily! Mind blown? With so many emails reaching our inboxes daily, no wonder B2B brands find it a real struggle to make their email messaging stand out. Nonetheless, email marketing can be a highly valuable tool to reach new potential customers and drive business value. Email is an effective and affordable channel for direct engagement and it can be used successfully to increase conversions and revenue per customers. This requires being smarter and adapting one’s approach to today’s user habits, specifically knowing that time and attention are both in short supply with most customers accessing email through their mobile phones. Integrating modern email marketing tactics into existing lead nurturing efforts can help deliver unbelievable results, thanks to the higher deliverability of relevant content and personalized communications directly to leads and better targeting.

1. Optimize Emails for Mobile

Mobile optimization for emails is a must these days or else you risk losing a substantial number of your audience. After all, nearly 68% of emails are opened on mobile devices in comparison to only 32% read on a desktop. To reach out to the 1.8 billion mobile email users, your email has to be written, designed and delivered to be as effective when read on a mobile device as on a laptop or desktop. There are a plethora of tools and information available now for mobile email, which goes to show how important mobile optimization is in the email marketing space.

Some good email optimization practices are:

· Use a short and enticing subject line to grab customer interest.

· Less is more when it comes to content. Focus on a single topic or idea and make sure to break it down into succinct paragraphs for easy readability on mobile.

· Using a single column layout allows the reader to scroll through the entire message with the least amount of zooming.

· Place the Call to Action/Offer near the top of the message. It is better to use buttons that are at least 40 x 40 pixels instead of hyperlinks because they are easy to tap on a phone.

2. Increase Conversions With Trigger-Based Campaigns

Behavioral email marketing enables automatic follow-up communications based on online customer actions or inaction to help boost conversions. The best thing about event-triggered e-mail campaigns is that once set up and tested for efficacy, they are low-cost. Adopting marketing automation to segment contacts into lists automatically and using data to deliver relevant emails based on a sequence you design up front can really help nurture leads.

There can be a sequence of messaging set up to be automatically generated in response to different triggers. For example, a trigger-based campaign could be used to:

· Send a welcome email with relevant next steps when someone signs up for a free trial or creates a new account.

· Welcome sequence for new customers to increase awareness of the range of commercial and informational offerings.

· Send Initial cross-sell message for 1-month-old customers to encourage membership and get feedback.

· Initiate a thank-you email with links to related resources when someone downloads gated content or fills out a form.

· Send follow-up emails with a reminder or discount code when someone abandons a shopping cart or leaves a high-value page without filling the form.

· Send out conversion email message to guest members or full members a couple of days after browsing content encouraging use for a range of services.

3. Engage With Personalized Emails

Personalized emails have higher open rates (29% higher) and better click rates (41% higher) than emails without any personalization. Creating highly targeted, well-personalized emails drive conversions, helps boost sales and provides some real value to your users in the form of relationship-building. But when you are throwing in personalization, remember not to overstep the line between helpful and coming off as creepy.

Use triggered campaigns to collect additional information about your prospects. For instance, when you send out a link to gated content, you can request additional personal information on the download form besides an email address. This kind of information-gathering strategy will help you develop different types of personalization that foster relationships and builds revenue.

Besides referring to leads by their names, there are many other personalization techniques you can adopt-

· Provide your users something valuable, including information on their recent searches, updates on items in their wish list, recommendations based on their past purchases or preferences. Do make sure that your specific content relates to your product.

· Use date of birth information to send users birthday messages or exclusive promotional offers.

· Consider personalizing your design as well, by changing up your email’s color based on a user’s likes and dislikes.

Personalization pays off well because you can send relevant content to the right person at the right time.

4. Customize Dynamic Content

It is possible to take personalization further with smart, dynamic content emails. Dynamic emails deliver open-time personalization by displaying different content to each recipient based on collected data. Data about the buyer’s journey can be used to segment email lists and automatically insert content into templates based on recipients’ current needs. Even age and gender data can be used to build buyer personas to push dynamic content decision-making.

An automated marketing platform can help marketers deliver one-to-one marketing messages, with content elements that update and refresh when opened to hundreds of subscribers, for a measurable uptick in engagement and ROI. For instance, you can add dynamic features like video content according to their likes, add a countdown timer to promote limited-time offers or upcoming events, inserting current blog posts and so much more. You can also jazz up your email design with special effect features that enable zooming, fading, and image animations to wow recipients. Dynamic code can be used to display relevant promotions based on past purchases. Geo-targeting can be used to personalize mobile emails dynamically to provide app download links, or to connect to the appropriate local store or sales rep.

Implement Email Marketing Today

Adopt modern email marketing practices to engage with leads in a more personal, direct, and engaging way. If you want to expand your email marketing tactics for 2018, get in touch with our experts at DirectiveGroup. We can help you grow your email marketing initiatives to boost engagement, build relationships and deliver personalized and dynamic content for lead nurturing.