There’s no question that outbound sales marketing via email campaigns leaves a sour taste in the mouths of many who think about it, due to the early years of the internet, and the overwhelming amount of spam that is distributed from nefarious networks. In this article, we will debunk 8 myths about email marketing for B2C and B2B outbound sales that will make you reconsider any negative thoughts you’ve had about email marketing for your organization.
Emails should be Doused in Images
It is an easy assumption to think that everything should be represented with tons of graphics. However, many email clients like Outlook don’t open images by default, which may completely break your formatting. Overuse of images can also cause issues for the visually impaired who rely on text-to-speech services, and these applications are known for typically skipping images altogether.
This isn’t to say that images are bad, no, images can add a lot to an email. Yet, adding them as your primary method of presenting information may be absolutely detrimental to your campaign. Using text as your primary presentation is still suitable for email marketing, even in 2022.
Email Marketing is Low Performing
In regards to email users, there are approximately 3.9 billion users, adjusted for duplicate accounts; that’s more than Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn combined. Furthermore, most professionals (and a surprising amount of consumers at 49%) prefer receiving an email, it allows them to respond on their own terms. Additionally, the ROI of email marketing is a mind-blowing 4,200%, making it the highest-performing marketing channel available to any organization.
While this may seem counter-intuitive, take a moment to consider what’s also happening passively during an active email campaign:
- Free Advertising: by reaching out to a wide array of people, brand awareness is increasing;
- Metrics: once you’ve received your contacts from your marketing agency, you have quantifiable data from lead to close;
- Traffic: people who open your emails often check your website; and
- Future Leads: the absolute best method of sales is through word-of-mouth referrals, especially in B2B.
All Emails Sent are Received
In truth, not every email sent is received, or even noticed. Many of us receive far too many emails on a daily basis which leads to a drowning-out effect for anything we’d find truly inspiring or enticing.
Other circumstances can arise where an email provider has flagged your email as spam, every email provider’s algorithm and filter is different and this can lead to a number of lost emails.
In some cases, a potential lead may disregard or delete the email altogether. And finally, there will be emails that slip through the cracks that weren’t real, were misspelled, are hosted on a server experiencing technical issues, or their email app isn’t properly hooked up to their account.
Your Email List is Your Core Following
While this topic falls more in line with B2C marketing than B2B, it’s still an important one to note. Due to the complexities of networks many companies create, there can be circumstances where individuals were incentivized to signup for your mailing list.
As a result, some of those names on your email list don’t care about your company or service, and are there for occasional discounts for brands you’ve partnered with, information on affiliate programs, packages you offer seasonally, or for other reasons.
The Subject of an Email is the Most Important
It is often thought that the subject of an email needs the most focus, as a hook to encourage the recipient to open, and subsequently read, the email. However, it’s the sender’s email address that affects this process more than the subject.
By using an email with a personalized name, you can boost the open rate by 35%, generating more leads than with an email labeled “marketing”, “contact”, or “info@domainname.com”. That’s a very substantial figure that shouldn’t be ignored.
People Unsubscribing from Your Lists Hurts Performance
Of course, it always stings your outbound marketing research team to see your database dwindling in numbers after their long hours of digging up potential leads. However, this reduction in number is actually beneficial for your outbound marketing campaign.
One of the most important things to remember in sales is your target audience, especially in the face of the GDPR and other legislation, which pushes you to know your ICPs with a laser focus.
The more people that unsubscribe, or wish for you to cease communication, the better it is for your performance overall. These individuals associated with particular industries can be quantified over time to properly understand how to adapt your targeting strategy to further increase your ROI.
It’s also a good idea to have a short questionnaire asking the individual unsubscribing why they wish to do so, in the event that your emails may need to be rewritten.
In the end, a self-cleaning database of those who are simply uninterested helps you to improve everything about your process.
You Need as Many Emails to be Opened as Possible
While it’s possible to count how many times a particular email has been opened by tracking how many times specific images have been loaded, this is by no means a perfect metric. In the section about images, we discussed how many email clients don’t load images by default, which means that your emails may have been opened far more than your metrics show.
However, the numbers you do see do have value. You can compare these image open counts to various campaign subjects, headers, email addresses, and other key information to ensure that you are maximizing your ROI, and in turn, adapting to get the most out of your outbound sales campaign.
Email Campaigns Don’t Need to Worry about Mobile Responsiveness
In truth, according to some reports, 81% of emails sent by outbound marketing campaigns are opened on mobile devices. That’s quite a staggering statistic that is only going to continue to rise over the years.
With that information in mind, it’s easy to understand why ensuring that your emails are responsive on mobile devices is of critical importance. Having an email arrive with content extending beyond the edge of the screen, or zoomed out to the point of unreadability, will negatively impact your campaign significantly.
Conclusion
While there is a myriad of other myths that remain to be debunked, we hope that these points have been eye-opening for you and your team. Outbound email marketing doesn’t have to be ugly, it’s up to us to ensure that we do our very best for our clients, customers, and staff to uphold an ethical code of conduct while being productive and yielding results.
