Email Deliverability Best Practices

When you’re doing email marketing, there are a lot of layers that you have to get through, and when you’re doing it for a B2B industry, it becomes even more challenging. The sales cycle is longer, and the reputation score hurdles are high. You’ll probably also encounter a lot of inactive addresses due to high employee turnover. There are, however, best practices that you can use to make your B2B email deliverability more effective.

Value Quality Over Quantity

What this means, basically, is narrow your focus. You want to direct your emails to the people who are going to deal with you right out of the gate, as opposed to those whom you are going to end up chasing. Value your time, and target your efforts to the recipients that are the most engaged – in other words, the ones who are actually opening your emails and then clicking on your links.

Does this mean that you’re cutting people out? Yes, it does. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re losing revenue – it means that you’re not wasting your resources on people who aren’t really all that interested in what you have to offer.

Segment Your Consumers to Shorten the Sales Process

With B2B, the sales process is longer and more complex than it is with B2C. However, you can streamline the process by segmenting your market according to things like job title, downloads, website activity, and product affinity. This puts you in a better position sales-wise, because you know your leads are “clean” from the outset. You’ll also end up with far fewer complaints from people who are receiving information that they really don’t want. Those who remain are getting relevant content, not spam.

Accept High Turnover

You may send emails only to find out that no one is receiving them – the person you were targeting has moved on to greener pastures. Don’t give up on the company, though – turnover is a harsh reality in today’s world. Try to find someone else in the same company, and target your emails toward them.

Make the Right Choice

Ask people to opt in to your email marketing list. This way, you’re giving them a choice. If they want to hear from you, they’ll let you know. If you send marketing emails to people who actually have no interest in your product or service, you’re just going to end up being sent to the spam folder.

Choose a Dedicated IP

When you’re selecting an IP (Internet protocol) for your company, you can choose between dedicated or shared. A shared IP hosts a number of different sites, and what that means is that what one company does affects all of the others on the shared IP. Sometimes, that’s good. Other times, not so much. If you are sharing an IP with a company that has a bad reputation, then you are going to end up tarred with the same brush.

A dedicated IP, on the other hand, gives you considerably more control over your reputation. You don’t have to worry about someone else spamming people, for instance, and lowering everyone’s reputation score.

Shared IPs are cheaper, though, and if you can find one that strictly regulates spamming, it could be the better choice for a smaller business that might find the cost of a dedicated IP onerous. Find out what the rules are before you make your decision.

Optimize for Mobile

These days, hardly anyone uses a desktop computer, and laptops are also falling by the wayside. Most likely, people are going to be receiving your information on a smartphone, so you’re going to have to structure your emails with mobile users in mind.

Keep in mind that an email that looks great on a laptop or desktop might not look quite so good on a mobile. Studies show that you have five seconds or less to engage your user, so make sure that your emails look great on mobile devices.

Analyze, Analyze, Analyze!

It’s easy to send out emails, but not so easy to determine if they’re working for you. You have to measure the success of your email campaign. Are you getting hard bounces? Are people just clicking through? Is the issue your list, or your content?

You want to analyze immediately – start doing it the day after you send your emails. Don’t wait until a problem becomes painfully obvious.

Conclusion

Is all this going to be easy? No. But if you’re going to market B2B effectively via email, these are the best practices you need to understand and implement. Your email marketing campaign is only good if it is deliverable.

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