How to do B2B Email templates is like politics – everyone has an opinion. But what is the best way, or is there a ‘best’ way?
In this Blog I want to explore a couple of options and some surprising suggestion on how you can improve your email templates and most importantly your STATISTICS!
When searching ‘B2B Email Templates’ you get over 254,000 results telling you and offering options on how to get the best email template for your business. Every week I get people calling me saying “I can send your emails for you and get 1,000,000 leads” (OK maybe not that many), and I think, I’m just not sure about your approach. I send B2B emails regularly and I have tried many different methods to get my message across. Below I have tried to explain my approach over the more traditional email methods and why I think they are better.
Traditional approach:
- Anonymity – How many times do you get emails from companies that are from a donotreply@examplecompany.com? Well this is the traditional approach, not seeing any employees signatures on the email or from a specific person. Personally this makes me feel like a number. I’m not feeling any love from the company and they haven’t taken any time on me. It also means that if I would like to respond to the email and ask a question I cant, or at least I am discouraged to do so.
- HTML Overload – Complete HTML emails, colours, pictures and… doesn’t display in your email. You are faced with two options allow the pictures to display, or hit delete. Now as someone that does email campaigns myself, it takes a lot of time to create these emails and some of them are works of art and will never get the appreciation they deserve. There is a place for this, but lets keep it to B2C.
- Picture, Pictures Pictures – Similar to HTML overload. Are the pictures going to display correctly and will they bulk up the email causing it to be unnecessarily large?
- Headers, Footers and everything else in-between – This is a point that leaves me feeling indecisive. Headers and footers are essential depending on what you are trying to do. As a corporate email informing people about the business you should have a header and footer, but do you need it for every marketing email you send out?
- Mass emails – Are you sending out 5000+ emails and selling multiple products? Then its my opinion you haven’t segmented your data correctly. Not everyone is interested in everything you sell.
My approach:
- Personal – “You…Yes You in Marketing… Who are you?” Newsflash, people communicate with other people. I tell people who I am and give people the ability to contact me.
- 1 or 2 call to actions (hyperlinks). Multiple hyperlinks can land you in a spam filter and also make your email untidy. You only need a couple of hyperlinks, use the rest of the email adding value to why the recipient should click. Be concious of where you put the links. From my personal experience they should always be located in the bottom third of the email giving the customer time to understand why they should click.
- Less is more – “Help… my email is naked!” Its like you have cleaned a teenagers bedroom, look at all that floor space you never knew was there. By de-cluttering your email you free up an enormous amount white space. I keep referring back to the emails you personally send your customers, do you need to fill out all the available space?
- Make it PERSONAL – Yes I have said this twice, that’s how important it is. The email is from ‘Lee Goodenough’ and to ‘Mr Customer’. Most of my emails have my regular signature on them, I want my customers to contact me about my emails (that is the point…). Over time this also builds a relationship between you and the customer and if you are providing value in the emails this can be very important to your business.
- Keep it small – I don’t know what the correct number is. You need to ensure the recipient will gain value from reading your email and I am unsure that this can be done in large numbers. Data and Emails should be segmented as much as possible to cover the broad range of interest points you are trying to get across.
Summary
With Marketing Automation you can get the most out of personalisation by sending out mass emails. With associating attributes or shortcodes in your email e.g. Lead:FirstName, you can make sure that full personalisation can be sent to customers. The end result: Customer feels valued with a personalised email to them, meaning you haven’t had to send multiple emails out individually saving you a lot of time.
Keeping it simple is a big task. You have to constantly tell yourself, I must de-clutter my email because, if you are like me, you are always wanting to add one more picture or one more hyper-link. But remember this has to look natural. If you are emailing a customer on a personal note, would you add multiple pictures to that email all hyper-linked to a landing page? No I didn’t think so. I am not saying you shouldn’t use traditional approach, there is always a place for that, especially if you are selling high quantity items. In this case you should adopt a B2C approach. However, in other cases; keep it simple, personal and remember ‘Less Is More’.
I hope you found the blog useful. I am interested to know your thoughts, tell me more about your approach or have you found a formula that works for you?
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