Today, we look at a topic known to many but is rarely seen as a tactic to boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in B2B businesses. I mean, everyone is using email marketing. Everyone knows the best practices – whether it’s about improving deliverability, increasing open rates, or getting more responses. But what is often forgotten or ignored is that email marketing is a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other marketing channels.

In this article, we look at that aspect of email marketing, My post on integrated marketing is a great precursor to this article. Check it out using the link below:

7 reasons why you should understand integrated marketing

Setting the context

When I say ‘using email marketing with other marketing channels’, it means 2 things:

1. Using email as a tool to boost the effectiveness of other marketing channels
2. Using other channels to improve the results of your email marketing efforts

We will cover both today as we do it using 8 different practical tactics where integrated marketing shows its strength using emails.

Note: We will skip tactics that every other article on the topic is talking about (like adding social sharing buttons to emails, making emails mobile-friendly, and starting blog subscriptions). Rather, we will focus on tips that not many discuss or are unaware of.

8 ways in which email marketing can be integrated with other channels

The best way to understand the concept is by looking at scenarios or tactics where this idea can be practically implemented. Let us first list down all 8 of them. We will then delve into the details of each.

1. Email to boost YouTube videos
2. Email with LinkedIn outreach and cold call for lead generation
3. Email signature marketing
4. Email with paid ads (beyond just Google and Facebook)
5. Email to enhance organic social media posts
6. Creating supporting assets for email campaigns
7. Having the right checks on your email collection methods
8. Collecting email IDs within a video

1. Email to boost YouTube videos

Email to improve the reach and engagement of YouTube videos? Yes.

Like any other social media platform, YouTube also takes early engagement and views as a signal of good content. While for most social media platforms, that period is around 1 to 2 hours, YouTube has a longer window of about 24 hours.

If you are able to utilize this window and push your video out to as many people as possible, the platform is going to give a boost to it organically. This is where you can use email as a tool.

To put this in perspective, if you have an email list of 10K people and an average click rate of 2.5%, every time you send out an email, you get 250 views to the page you link to. This means that if you link to a video in an outgoing email right after publishing it, you get 250 ‘easy’ views early.

Now, you might also want to link to other assets (say, a website landing page, webinar registration page, etc.) in your emails. The idea is not to ignore them completely and focus only on videos. A best practice would be to keep it an even mix of everything (say, if you linked to a YouTube video in one email, the next one could be a webpage).

2. Email with LinkedIn outreach and cold call for lead generation

This is not a marketing tactic alone. Salespeople can use this technique very effectively, especially when they have a focused set of accounts to target.

Here is how the technique goes.

Instead of using one channel alone for outreach activities, use multiple channels in combination in your sequence of messages.

For example, start with a personalized email, follow with a LinkedIn message, and maybe a couple more emails post that. As a final step, you can try cold calling.

The objective here is that you go omnichannel in your outreach. It improves recall and context, thereby offering a higher probability of getting a response.

In effect, you improve your email metrics and the overall success rate of your campaigns.

Check out our newsletter edition that discusses this topic in detail here. 

Also read: 9 Unconventional B2B Lead Generation Techniques

3. Email signature marketing

Email signature marketing involves using the signature section of an email to promote your company’s assets and events. In a way, it is as simple as adding some links and banners to your signature.

But there is more to ESM than simply adding them to all the emails you send out. For instance,

• How do you easily track the views and clicks in a consolidated manner for all the emails and different signatures you send out (using bitly links or metrics from your email service provider is not a convenient and scalable way of doing it)?
• How do you segment your audience and run email signature campaigns accordingly?

These can be done easily using specialized email signature marketing tools like Terminus email experience (previously Sigstr), Mailtastic, Opensense, etc. Again, we have discussed this in detail in one of the editions of The Skalegrow Newsletter. Check it out here.

4. Email with paid ads (beyond just Google and Facebook)

This probably is known to many. I am referring to using your email lists in your paid Google ads and Facebook campaigns. Both platforms allow you to create custom audiences by uploading email IDs.

You can also indirectly use LinkedIn to target these people by uploading an account list and choosing the job titles of the people in the list to target them (you will not be able to target exactly the same people, but you will still find a hit rate of about 30 to 40%).

But integrating email with paid ads doesn’t stop there. What if I tell you there is a tool that will help you target specific people across platforms without violating data privacy rules?

Influ2 helps you achieve this. Check out the below video to understand how it works:

With GDPR in play, you get relatively lower success with people in the EU using Influ2. However, you get a success rate of about 50% in other geographies, especially the US.

As a matter of fact, email IDs are not a must to run campaigns on Influ2. First and second names are enough. But having email IDs will improve your chances of discovering people on your list.

Related: Using Paid Ads For B2B Demand Generation – Doing It The Counterintuitive Way

5. Email to enhance organic social media posts

This is similar to tactic #1 we discussed in this article. While on YouTube you have a window of roughly 1 day to get early engagement to boost organic reach, on social media platforms like LinkedIn, you have around 1 to 2 hours. The earlier you get high engagement, the better.

If you can embed the link to a post right after publishing it in your email, it will help you get that early push.

6. Creating supporting assets for email campaigns

This tactic is not a channel-only thing. It involves leveraging other channels as well as content types to enhance the effectiveness of your email campaigns. It is also an example of other elements of marketing supporting the growth of the email marketing channel.

This is also one of the most overlooked aspects of emails. Many think that email marketing is just about:

• Having the right subject line, sender name, and preview text to increase open rates.
• Using warm-up tools and optimizing the number of links to enhance deliverability.
• Using great hooks to encourage recipients to read the full email.
• Personalizing the content to improve response rate and engagement.

While all these are important and should be done, email marketing is less likely to work if you don’t have supporting content.

Now, what do I mean by supporting content?

Firstly, you need to have a proper website that talks clearly about your products or offerings (trust me, even today, many companies don’t have this). You also need to have other content types like blog posts, videos, case studies, webinars, etc., that give a sense to your prospects that you know your space well.

The next question is, how is this related to email marketing?

It is because you need to include these content types in your emails as supporting content to share info, build trust, and establish your authority in your domain. Email is more about your business as a whole than the email content alone.

7. Having the right checks on your email collection methods

What I mean by this is that for your email campaigns to be working well in the long run, you need to maintain a clean list. There are multiple steps you need to take to do this:

1. Do a check at the time of form entry on your website: This involves defining rules in the marketing automation tool (if you have used it to create the website form) or tools like Data8 to ensure you take in only the types of email IDs you need.
2. Use an accurate B2B database: From ZoomInfo to Hunter.io and Apollo.io, every tool says it is accurate. The best way to maintain a clean email list is to combine 2 to 3 tools rather than depending on one. Some tools are better in certain geos and industries. You can also use a validation tool like CaptainVerify to ensure you have an accurate email database.
3. Keep a watch on inactive email IDs: There usually are email IDs in a list that have been inactive for ages. They don’t open your emails. They don’t engage with them. Sometimes, your emails don’t even get delivered to them. You can either add them to a different list or completely remove them from your campaigns.

By following these best practices, you will be integrating email with channels like websites, events (when you collect emails at a live event), webinars, etc.

8. Collecting email IDs within a video

This probably is my favorite on the list. Not because it is effective for every type of business. More because very few try it.

This involves collecting email IDs from the viewers of your video. You can use Hippo Video to do this. It helps you embed a form into your video on your website where viewers will be asked to enter their email IDs to continue to watch the video,

A viewer is asked to share email only from the second view. This ensures the viewer is familiar with your brand before you ask for their information.

More about this here.

Final words

There are a few other ways to integrate email marketing into your overall marketing ecosystem. I have kept them intentionally out since they are discussed in multiple other articles and videos. In addition to the ones I mentioned earlier, here are a few such:

• Email marketing and marketing analytics: this involves making sure that you have the right measurement and analytics methodology followed to assess the effectiveness of email marketing
• Growing your email list using other channels
• Launching a newsletter
• Properly setting up the website to collect and segment your emails
• Using emails to promote other content types or to increase event/webinar registrations

Make sure you think of all the possible ways in which you can utilize the potential of email as a tool to the fullest. What I covered in detail in this article are tactics that are not discussed very often.

Looking to grow your B2B business with marketing? Try Skalegrow

With marketing getting tougher and tougher, every wrong foot you make might hamper your growth. What you need is the right guidance and a helping hand. This is where Skalegrow can make a sea of difference.

Skalegrow helps IT, tech, SaaS, and embedded systems companies leverage new-age marketing tactics to grow their business. Check out the below intro video to learn more about what Skalegrow brings to the table:

Alternatively, you can visit our services page or write to us at info@skalegrow.com.