Tips for creating compelling email newsletters for distributors

A couple of weeks back, we were in a call with one of our clients on how to help them increase eCommerce sales through digital marketing. They are a US-based distribution company, and we have partnered with them to build/maintain their eCommerce website.

This client sells complex automation products that need customization. The expectation of the client was simple – more ‘Request a Quote’ from the website. Among the many things that we discussed, one of the suggestions that came up was ‘Email Newsletters.’ Apart from other digital marketing activities, it was decided to fine-tune the retention marketing strategy through regular and relevant emails.

Email Newsletters can play a crucial role in relationship building and winning new business. This article explains and lays down the fundamentals of email marketing for distributors.

Why Email Newsletters?

B2B is usually technology-based and solution-oriented, where purchasing is less of emotion and more of a rational decision. In B2B, customer relationships are of paramount importance. The customer base is usually small, and an on-going relationship is indispensable, as well as a significant business asset. Email marketing is an integral feature of multi-channel marketing campaigns. It helps to retain, manage, and grow the existing clients. It also helps to find new ones.

Role of Email Newsletters

Email Newsletters are an effective means to reach target customers. Email Newsletters:

• Provide educational content 
• Create awareness about your new/updated products and services 
• Impart information on the orders bagged and executed successfully (case studies)
• Highlight business partnerships
• Feature your awards and accolades
• Create a favorable impression before an engineer’s or salesperson’s call
• Are the salesmen and brand ambassadors in disguise
• Help in building your brand.

In his book “How To Win at B2B Email Marketing: A Guide To Achieving Success” Holden-Bache, Adam describes email marketing metrics as followed below. Identifying Goals:  Hard and Soft Metrics Goals can vary from business to business, but many campaign goals fall into either hard or soft metrics. Hard metrics are usually tied to financial success, while soft metrics are typically helpful for marketing insights.  Hard metric goals include:  

• Increase revenue/sales  
• Improve conversion rates (sales, opt-ins, downloads, sign-ups,  etc.)  
• Improve average purchase  
• Generate more leads  
• Generate better quality leads  
• Reduce acquisition cost (per marketing sourced lead)  
• Increase customer retention  
• Shorten the sales cycle  
• Lower internal costs  

Soft metric goals include:  

• Educate and inform (making a better subscriber or prospect)  
• Improve sales/marketing alignment  
• Improve insights on metrics and ROI  
• Increase speed and agility for marketing campaign turnaround  
• Improve internal resources (less time for campaign creation,  management, and analysis)

The Flow of an Email Newsletter

Email Newsletter Challenges

• Spam
• Software tools that filter emails
• Poorly targeted email lists

Note: In-house email lists are more effective than purchased email lists ((because of the opt-in audience)

Options to increase the effectiveness of Email Newsletters

• Subject matter: 55%  
• Subject line: 40%  
• Database relevance: 39%  
• Database accuracy: 38%  
• Personalization: 32%

Click-through rates

Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view an email. Click through rates for a legitimate email depends on:

• Personalization
• Targeting
• The product
• The promotion (the offer)

For those who are not satisfied with the results of their campaigns, B2B marketers have cited the following areas as options for increasing effectiveness:

Design of email newsletters

• Use headings and subheadings
• Break the copy into bullet points
• Be cautious of using multi-column layouts – multi-column layers were considered cluttered because of the high-density content. Multi-column layouts are difficult to read in mobile devices.
• Use clear images with the compressed version.
• Adhere to readability principles (No to too many colors or font variations)
• Responsive design is crucial
• Provide alt tags for the images in your email. An ‘alt tag’ is a description of what the image is about.
• Ensure the email/newsletter is responsive, that is, it is easily accessible in smartphones and tablets.
• Use font size variations for headings, sub-headings, etc.
• Use bold and italics to highlight important messages
• Use color to your advantage
• Use white space

Top four recommendations for the subject line

• Ensure that the subject line is not more than 40 characters
• Include content in the headline (E.g. Why Your Workers Aren’t Wearing Their Personal Protective Equipment?)
• Necessary content should be at the beginning of the subject line (like, E.g. Newsletter for the month of Oct 2019 is not a good example of a subject line. Instead it could be a Video on Personal Protective Equipment.)
• Don’t repeat sender information in the subject line. (E.g., Newsletter for the month of Oct 2019, instead have something like, Grow your eCommerce business with Email Newsletters.)

Email Size

• Emails that are too large translate into long loading times and run the risk of annoying recipients or of not being read at all.
• In the case of mobile-optimized websites, the W3C recommends a maximum email size of 20 kilobytes. However, it’s not always possible for emails to observe this limit. It’s okay for emails to be a little bigger.
• Under no circumstances should your newsletter exceed 100 KB.
• Attachments should be avoided whenever possible.

Email Width 

• A width of 600 to 650 pixels is optimal for desktop applications.
• By contrast, smartphone displays often only have a width of 320 pixels.
• It should, therefore, be possible for the width of your email to adjust flexibly to smaller displays. 

Email frequency

Businesses must do regular email marketing in order to have a high inbox placement rate and low complaint rate. Note:

• Inbox placement rate is the percentage of delivered emails that land in a subscriber’s inbox.
• Complaint rate is the percentage of delivered emails that result in spam complaints.

User behavior of email marketing – Scanning Text, Skipping Intros

1. Users are extremely fast at both processing their inboxes and reading newsletters: the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds.
2. “Reading” is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of newsletters. The predominant user behavior was scanning.
3. Often, users didn’t even scan the entire newsletter: 35% of the time, participants only skimmed a small part of the newsletter or glanced at the content. 
4. People were highly inclined to skip the introduction in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, eye tracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions.

Lesson Learnt

Make the email scannable by breaking it into bullet points.

Content Hierarchy

• Headlines
• Content that supports the headlines
• CTA

Have a look at the welcome email from Grainger below:

Key performance indicators of email marketing

• High deliverability rate  
• High open rate  
• High click-through rate  
• Low bounceback rate  
• Low number of spam complaints  
• Low unsubscribe rate  
• High number of forwards  
• High number of social shares
• Increased website visits

A few email marketing jargons that distributors must know:

• Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were sent to mailboxes, and that bounced.
• Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were opened/viewed by subscribers.
• Click-through rate (or click rate) is the percentage of delivered emails in which one or more links were clicked by subscribers. 
• Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of delivered emails, which resulted in unsubscribing.
• Spam rate is the percentage of delivered emails that were marked as spam by your subscribers by clicking on the button provided by your mailbox provider.
• Conversion rate is the percentage of opened emails, which resulted in a conversion on your website.
• Inbox placement rate is the percentage of delivered emails that land in a subscriber’s inbox.
• Complaint rate is the percentage of delivered emails that result in spam complaints.

CAN-SPAM Act – Ensure you follow the CAN-SPAM ACTSegmentation is the key. Segmentation is the process of defining and subdividing a large set of data into smaller portions based on similarities in data, actions, or interests.

Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.
It is vital to maintain the quality of the list.

 

Here is a sample newsletter from Fastenal:

Email Newsletters are very valuable for distributors because it helps in building relationships with prospects, leads, current customers, and even past customers. It gives distributors a chance to speak to them directly at a time convenient for them.

If you are a distributor and if you do not have an Email Newsletter. Start one now.

References