As we talked about in how to “Help Boost Your Email Analytics”, there are possible services you can use in order to help automate your email marketing. Some of these email marketing tools and services benefit you in ways that others do not and visa-versa.
As much as it is helpful to have one-on-one relationships with customers and to be a part of online marketplaces like FindLight, sometimes email marketing is helpful to keep current and potential customers updated on your business. Let’s see what to look for when selecting an email marketing tool for industrial B2B businesses.
List of Email Services
There are many options and online services to choose from when trying to find email marketing help. Although we will not be breaking down each company you can find online, there are many places online that already have. Take a look at these sites if you want it broken down by each service:
- Beginner 7 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Business (2022)
- Investopedia Best Email Marketing Software
- Forbes Best Email Marketing Software
Email marketing software to help manage and create your email subscriber list is a great online tool to have. This is especially true as your business expands. It will create pleasing emails and help track how your email marketing is doing. You will be able to see right away your click-through rate or open rate. Some more advanced software will give suggestions on sending times based on your conversion rates and will try to boost your engagement.
We have come to find that email marketing can be an important tool in any industry. You can automate emails to check in on people that were lost in the sales funnel. You can also use the tools to key in older customers about new updates to your products. The best part about email marketing is that it is not a new technique by any means, which shows its effectiveness if it has stuck around all this time.
CRM Integration in Email Marketing Tools
Most industrial companies are engaged in B2B sales, which necessitates keeping a detailed record of the sales pipeline, prospect-by-prospect. This is typically done via a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Hence, your email list for outreach will probably come from your CRM tool. Therefore, a key aspect in choosing the email marketing tool for industrial companies is making sure it will be capable of quickly connecting and following your customer data. That is why we really stress considering finding email communications with CRM integration. Luckily, we already found the best 8 CRMs for email communications and selling!
Segmenting Capabilities
Most software will allow you to create emails, upload a contact list, schedule email campaigns, and schedule submission. The cost of these might vary depending on certain details like length of contact lists and amount of emails. One key feature that can be important for industrial companies is customer segmenting (grouping capability).
Advanced software can allow segmenting your contact list based on different interests. Paying for advanced functionality like grouping a subscriber list by interest can help your company market the right products to the right customers. This can help you manage and keep up high interest. You will not be sending out every email to every customer which will help them not move your emails directly to the trash. Relevancy will increase conversion rates.
However, if you are new to email marketing, you might want to start with a basic package. This way you can move your way up to more advanced software if you are finding splits in your email campaigns.
Other things to consider when selecting an online email marketing tool
We covered above some unique considerations specific for industrial B2B business. Below is a short list of aspects to consider when selecting the correct tool for email outreach in a B2B enterprise:
- Price: We speak about this in the following section, but in short, many online services come with a free or a trial tier. Take advantage of that!
- User Friendliness: If this is your first time using such a service, consider a software that is easy to use and which can be put to work from the get-go with minimal training required.
- Functionality: We discussed some of the functionality aspects important for industrial companies. You might also want to think about your business, your customer base and types of products or services you offer to think of what can be essential and what can be a nice-to-have for your specific situation.
- Length of a free trial: If you go for a trial period, consider the ongoing cost after the trial period is over. There could be a substantial upfront cost in spending time to learn the tool and switching over to a different tool at the end of the trial period can be a hassle.
- Customer service: Does the company offering the service have good customer service? If you are a big enterprise and might have custom requirements this might be an important consideration for you.
The Cost of Email Marketing Tools
Budget is important when it comes to allocating money to marketing. The good news is that email marketing software and tools have a variety of plans. The cost of the plan usually varies due to details like contact list size. These can range from free software like Hubspot to around $50+ a month. Some even go up into the thousands. Our recommendation is to always use the free trial to its fullest advantage to see what you like and do not like on different software.
You will find the cost directly correlates with the features you need and how many emails you are actively sending out. Your price will move around based on contact lists and emails sent out. Check out your activity beforehand to see how much you might want to be spending on email campaigns. Since most companies in B2B space involve a smaller customer base (compared with that of a B2C business), your cost per email list should not be too high. Due to this, you might find that you can go to more expensive tiers that have more flexible offerings.
In Summary
Finding out your analytics for emails can be helpful in seeing how your customer engages with your company with simple analytics. Keeping customers in the loop about updates on your company and tech can also be nice.
Getting software to help you will also help your business create professional-looking email campaigns. Email marketing has proven to help create more leads for sales. As much as sales groundwork can be done at trade shows, it can also be done through emails to get customers’ attention. It can also be done to educate customers. You can let them know where you might be doing demos or where else your product might be shown beside your website.
We have come to find that email marketing can be a great way to add new customers to your sales funnel. It also helps keep your company’s products more active in their minds and at the front of their inbox. Finding an online tool that best suits your needs can help make your email campaigns more effective. Not only that, but it might even help generate new sales leads.