The average business professional receives approximately 130 emails a day. That works out to roughly 16 emails an hour in a standard 8 hour work day. This is exactly what you face with your prospects each day. In such a crowded inbox, how can tech marketers ensure their messaging stands out and is effective in reaching and engaging the right buyers? TechTarget’s recent Media Consumption Study takes an in-depth look at how nearly 1,500 technology buyers around the world conduct pre-purchase research and provides a unique window into what buyers in purchasing cycle care about and actionable intelligence that can be applied to make your email marketing efforts more successful. Following are three simple tips based on recent research that you can use to increase opens, engagement and overall email marketing performance for B2B tech prospects.
#1 – Segment your lists – use activity as your guide
For the best results in email campaigns it is critical that you are segmenting your audience to ensure that the right message is reaching the right person. According to a recent Campaign Monitor study, marketers who use segmented email campaigns saw as much as a 760% increase in revenue. While it’s simple enough to segment your lists by standard demographics, better response comes when emails are targeted based on the activity of prospects. Make sure you continually refresh your database to cleanse inactive or dormant contacts.
#2 – Ensure that your subject lines are value-based and solutions-oriented
A compelling subject line is the most important element of any successful email marketing campaign. No matter how great your copy may be, without a compelling subject line, no one will even open your message. Our Media Consumption Study found 73% were likely to open an unsolicited email with a subject line that addressed how a particular solution delivered value for a company. Fifty-seven percent would be compelled to view an email that talked about a solution’s benefits for their industry. Compare that with the fewer than 10% who’d open subject lines offering up a coffee meeting or a requesting a meeting. You must show your value before you ask for the meeting.
#3 – Leverage intent data to personalize on recency and relevance
Personalization is essential to email success. A recent study of more than 6.5 million TechTarget emails shows that buyers are 12x more likely to respond to an email if the outreach is based on recency and topical relevancy.
Buyers expect you to know what their needs are. Use better data to build the right messaging that demonstrates that you can help them. Get right to the point – you cannot afford to waste their time, especially in the current business climate. For example, analyzing the emails sent to our own APAC membership, we’ve discovered that emails containing keywords like ‘study’, ‘problem’ and ‘business’ had much lower engagement rates than those reflecting a particular solution that a prospect had recently been researching: ‘cloud,’ ‘cybersecurity’ and ‘threat.’
TechTarget can help you better speak the language of your prospective buyers in every major technology market. Our Priority Engine platform reveals in-depth prospect-level behavioral intent data on topics, vendors and solutions researched by each individual buyer. Marketers and sales teams can leverage this intent to refine their outreach for maximum impact.
If you’d like to see examples of successful emails (strong subject lines, good use of keywords, personalized by activity) or want to dig a little deeper with the research we have available, please reach out to me.
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