Guest post by Eduard Klein.

In B2B marketing, with the constant pressure to “do more with less,” optimizing return on investment (ROI) is crucial, especially regarding brand awareness.

You’ve probably seen studies and statistics on the enormous ROI (return on investment) that email marketing for B2B delivers compared to other tactics. But when you have limited money and time to spare, you want to be sure you’re spending it on the right strategies.

This post delves into ways to make sure your email campaigns bring the best results. Here are eight strategies to optimize your email marketing efforts and maximize your ROI.

What’s the Scoop on ROI for Email Marketing?

All of the money you spend on your email marketing campaign is included in the “I” part of return on investment (ROI). This includes advertising; developing email marketing campaigns with specific targeting; buying, renting, and building email lists; email marketing tools; and other essential marketing components.

Email marketing for B2B continues to be one of the most cost-effective channels for helping your company enhance its marketing initiatives and generate more revenue.

Out of all digital marketing channels, Statista reported that 30% of marketers worldwide consider email marketing to have the highest return on investment.

According to email marketing data from Litmus, $36 is made for every $1 invested in email marketing. That’s a 3600% return on investment results from email marketing initiatives. Other studies have reported similar figures, meaning the potential ROI for email marketing may actually be close to 3600%.

However, this varies among industries, so it’s still important to focus on improving email marketing ROI.

Calculating Your Email Marketing ROI: What to Keep in Mind

The return on an investment is calculated by deducting the investment’s beginning value from its ending value. The net return is then divided by the total amount of expenses incurred, and the result is multiplied by 100.

Here’s the equation:

ROI is calculated as (Final Value – Initial Value) / Costs x100%.

The initial value is the amount of money allocated to your email marketing campaign. Your ESP (email service provider) is the most obvious expense, and it is simple to calculate. You should also try to estimate the amount of time each team member devotes exclusively to email marketing and convert that figure to an hourly cost.

When we talk about the final value, it’s the amount of revenue that your marketing effort generates, which can be readily determined from point-of-sale data or your accounting system. One easy method is to figure out average value per lead. Track any conversion your email marketing contributes to, such as website traffic, using Google Analytics. Then multiply the conversions to determine the total amount of money your email marketing campaign brought in.

ROI can be expressed as a percentage (+3,600%) or as a ratio (36:1).

Eight Strategies That Can Boost Your Email Marketing ROI for B2B

To drive corporate growth and success, B2B product marketers must seek to maximize return on investment. Businesses can achieve increased profitability and efficient resource allocation by concentrating on optimizing ROI. To do this, it’s necessary to monitor and evaluate marketing KPIs closely, including the rate of conversion and the cost of acquiring new leads.

A high ROI in email marketing indicates that your campaign is working; the right people are seeing it and being compelled to take the intended action, which could be downloading a resource, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter.

So, how can you ensure your email marketing strategy will deliver a compelling ROI?

Personalization Is the Way to Go

Companies can improve their prospects’ chances of engagement and conversion by personalizing their messaging and services to appeal to particular target audiences. You may make your communications more relevant by segmenting your email lists according to industry, job description, or previous contacts.

Beyond merely addressing the recipient by name, personalization entails creating content that speaks to their unique problems and difficulties. There are several other ways to add personalization, such as tailoring sales pitch messages to a company’s unique requirements or leveraging customer data to provide targeted material.

A targeted email marketing message, rather than a generic one, is more likely to resonate with and elicit a reaction from a prospect because it specifically addresses their difficulties. Businesses can enhance their marketing campaigns and achieve better outcomes by understanding their ideal buyer persona(s) and utilizing data-driven perspectives. Here are some templates you can take a look at for inspiration.

Craft Compelling Subject Lines

Creating intriguing subject lines is essential to grabbing readers’ attention and persuading them to open your emails. Remember: The opening line of your email is the subject line.  Make them brief, captivating, and relevant to the information within.

According to Instapage, including just five words in your subject line can increase opens by 15.9%. Adding some personality to your subject lines is another crucial component. Personalization in subject lines increased open rates by 23.6%. Opens can also be increased by adding an emoji.

You can determine what appeals to your audience most effectively by A/B testing various subject lines—evaluating the effectiveness of your subject lines and tracking the open rates of your emails to observe the response from your audience.

Grow Your Email List

Getting new B2B clients is difficult. Patience and determination are necessary drive results over time.

Your marketing staff needs to develop a compelling acquisition strategy, and carry it out carefully. Moreover, your success mostly depends on the quality of your email list. There’s no return on sending emails to indifferent or irrelevant recipients.

Instead, concentrate on organic methods of increasing your subscriber base, such as sign-up pages, events, and free (but valuable) downloads. Make sure the recipients of your emails know exactly what to anticipate.

To minimize bounce rate, spend time validating and verifying addresses when creating or maintaining prospect lists. Additionally, you should keep it up to date by eliminating any pointless or undesired email contacts from your database.

By doing this, you can guarantee that future messages contain only legitimate contacts and not land in SPAM.

One of the best sources for B2B email marketing is to get emails from LinkedIn Sales Navigator because the users regularly update their data there.

Segment Your Audience

The key to successful audience segmentation is determining the best criteria to use for dividing your list of all prospects into groups. Interest in a specific product (if applicable) is excellent. Title, industry, even geographic region may be useful.

By using your newsletter tools, you may send communications that are more precisely targeted, increasing engagement and conversion rates. This raises open and click rates, and ensures the appropriate people receive your communications at the right time.

HubSpot revealed that segmented lists can boost income by up to 760% in email campaigns,

Although segmenting an email according to the desired target audience can be done in a variety of ways, here are some techniques to think about:

• You can target an audience by using the geographical data in your CRM.
• By resending the email or sending one somewhat differently, you might wish to target those who did not open the first one.
• Identify at what point in the customer journey can you tailor your emails to engage more frequently with clients who are still in the sales funnel than with those who have already completed a purchase.
• You can separate your email recipients into groups according to the form or survey they filled out on your website.

Experiment By Using A/B Testing

According to Campaign Monitor, split testing can raise the click-through rate to 127%. To increase conversions and discover more about their target audience, marketers and business owners use experiments known as split or A/B tests.

To continuously improve ROI for your email marketing, you can run an infinite (figuratively speaking) number of split tests. You can learn more about the success of your email marketing and make data-driven optimization decisions by monitoring important metrics like CTRs.

Conversion rate analysis also aids in determining the success rate of converting leads into clients, which enables you to optimize your approach and boost productivity. Try a few tweaks here and there to see if you can elevate a merely good campaign to a remarkable level.

For example, A/B testing various subject lines, email formats, or calls-to-action (CTAs) might help you determine whether your audience prefers plain-text messaging or highly visual emails.

This is important because boosting the effectiveness of your messaging and the ROI of your marketing initiatives enables you to experiment with various approaches to connect with your audience and develop a relationship with them.

Optimize for Mobile Devices

Given the continued increase in the share of mobile Internet traffic, it’s vital to optimize your B2B email marketing for mobile devices. Even in B2B, a growing number of people use their tablets or smartphones to open emails.

This means having quick loading times, utilizing responsive design, crafting easily readable content, adjusting subject lines and pre-headers for smaller displays, and making sure your CTAs are visible and simple to hit.

You can increase engagement and ROI by making it easy for subscribers to interact with your emails on mobile devices.

To guarantee a flawless experience for every receiver, test your emails on several platforms and email clients.

Automate Your Email Campaigns

Your ROI may improve dramatically if you automate your email campaigns using your software. You can send more modified settings based on user behavior (such as follow-ups after a purchase or reminders about abandoned carts).

This helps you send more individualized communications that encourage conversations and longer-lasting relationships with your subscribers in addition to saving time.

By automating repetitive operations, marketers can concentrate on analyzing information, formulating plans, and enhancing the overall effectiveness of their email campaigns. With email marketing automation software, you can also increase the precision of KPI measurement.

Ensure Reliable Deliverability

Timing can be very important in B2B email marketing. The optimal times to send emails vary depending on the audience and business, but you can use the data from your analytics to determine when to send them.

Knowing where your reader is in the purchasing cycle is another factor in timing. The type of follow-up emails that should be sent can then be determined by this.

Although it’s simple to think that a message will always get in a customer’s inbox once “Send” is pressed, this isn’t always the case.

Ensuring your communications reach the intended audience requires optimizing email marketing for email deliverability. It’s important to keep track of your emails from start to finish, whether you’re composing or sending them out.

It’s crucial to assess your return on investment by closely examining how your contacts respond to your emails, especially when making purchases, to determine whether your marketing efforts are effective.

The Bottom Line

Achieving a significant return on your marketing expenses and connecting with clients are crucial aspects of successful B2B marketing. Determine areas that need work, then test any or all of the elements above to discover which function best for your company.

For campaign management to be successful, there must also be smooth interaction between your B2B email marketing automation technology and CRM platform. It helps you enhance prospect behavior tracking, automate workflows, and synchronize buyer data across platforms.

Before launching your email campaigns, use A/B testing to formulate a hypothesis regarding potential campaign improvements, configure it as an A/B test, press send, and observe the results. Even when opens and click-throughs decline, you’ll still gain valuable insights about your audience you can use to improve future email campaigns.

Eduard Klein is an International Digital Growth Marketer, Blogger, and Entrepreneur with a global mindset. He is the founder of RocketGrowth and guides through the process of starting and growing a digital business, and riding the wave of digital technology and marketing without getting swept away.

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