How can you get better B2B email results? Pay closer attention to individual subscribers. While many B2B companies treat contact form submission as a gold standard for indicating someone may be ready to buy, that’s just one signal of buyer intent.
Your email campaigns generate many more signals. Here are some ways to mine that data and turn it into pipeline opportunities.
Keep an Eye on Engagement
Email marketers routinely keep an eye on certain metrics, including:
- Open rates, which indicate whether your brand is trusted and your subject line is compelling.
- Clickthrough rates, which indicates how often recipients click a link within the email.
- Click-to-Open Rate, which is a good metric for determining whether your content was compelling to the people who opened the message.
- Share/Forward Rate, which shows if recipients thought your message was worth sharing.
- Bounce Rate, which shows how many emails were undeliverable.
- Unsubscribe Rate, which can help you spot whether your messages are serving your customers or just annoying them.
Aggregate Data is Good; Account-Based is Better
Marketing Automation Platforms do a great job of providing aggregate information about campaign performance, but it usually requires a little digging to see how individual customers are responding to your emails.
By digging deeper into your contact lists, you should be able to spot which customers frequently open, click, and share your content. Focusing outreach efforts on this subset of customers is a great way to start focusing your revenue generation efforts.
To get even better results, you should make extensive use of audience segmentations that allow you to customize the emails you send to customers based on:
- Company characteristics
- How they have interacted with your campaigns and website
- Their online research activity, including keywords and competitor research
- Their role in the company, related pain points, and interests
But as you try to provide more specific content to subscribers, you’ll run into another challenge…
Frequently Update Your Audience Segments
Your customers are a moving target. Like you, they face a lot of distractions from work and life. They may look like a hot prospect, then ghost you for weeks or months. The keywords they research may evolve. The solutions they need to solve may shift.
A static email list that fails to capture these changes will underperform.
Many companies keep their messaging relevant by auditing their contact lists at least once per quarter — consolidating data from their various data platforms to create a better picture of the customer.
A better solution is to use a Customer Data Platform, which breaks down data silos by importing data from first – and third-party sources, and then pushes that consolidated data wherever you need it to go. The CDP becomes a single source of truth about your customers that you can then use to power marketing and sales efforts.
6sense software includes an embedded CDP that taps into buyer intent data in order to automatically update contact records and assign them to audience segments based on their latest behavior.
Send Emails at Milestone Moments
Milestone moments are usually moments of growth, expansion, and innovation — such as when a target account moves into a larger office, receives a P/E investment, launches a new product, or goes on a hiring spree. These are all signs that a company is investing, and may be ready to also invest in the solution you offer.
6sense helps its clients keep an eye on firmographic changes that indicate an account may be an ideal buyer. Reaching out to congratulate clients during their milestone moments helps you stay top-of-mind.
6sense Makes B2B Email Marketing More Powerful
6sense’s CDP, real-time customer intent data, and AI capabilities make it much easier to launch effective marketing campaigns that drive revenue. To learn how we can save your team time while boosting pipeline and average deal value, book a demo.
