Businesses talk about recession and cost-cutting in all departments. It’s a good idea to save money for the company and its future.
Should we cut the marketing budget also?
Experts suggest that it’s not a good idea to stop marketing during a recession. Doing so may leave your business in a less competitive position when the economy recovers. In the 2008 recession, Starbucks could’ve been a spectacular brand fail. However, their smart marketing strategy at a crucial time made it a brand to be remembered.
If you are a small B2B company and don’t have the budget for SEM but still want to market your product or service effectively, you can consider email marketing as an alternative to SEM. It will be a highly cost-effective lead generation program.
SEM/Email Marketing
| Factors | SEM | Email Marketing |
| Budget | High | Low |
| ROI for every $1 | Average $2.72 | Up to $38 |
Actually, Cold email works for any small B2B companies If you follow industry best practices, you can get a great ROI
How do you ensure if email marketing works for your business?
These are KPIs for lead generation through cold emails
| KPI | Criteria for Success |
| Accuracy of target accounts | Greater than 95% |
| Accuracy of target contacts | Greater than 95% |
| Bounce rate | Less than 3% |
| Open rate | Greater than 50% |
If you can achieve these metrics, you will be seeing good results. If you don’t achieve these, your cold email process should be audited by an expert who can then improve the Performance and get results for you.
Let’s see these KPIs at a high level.
Target accounts and contacts
Account-Based Marketing An account-based marketing strategy is important in your email marketing and it is completely dependent on how effectively you choose your target accounts and decision-makers. So Account and decision-maker selection are critical steps in your strategy and it hinges solely on customer data analysis.
How do you build accounts and email addresses of decision-makers?
You can build accurate marketing data through an in-house team or vendors like DataDriven. There are directories such as ZoomInfo, Adapt for data. The problem with these types of directories is that your KPI for success may not be met. So, the best practice is to go with an in-house team or a vendor.
Bounce
This happens when you send mail to an incorrect address or if your mail is blocked by the client’s firewall. To have a successful campaign, the bounce rate, should always be less. You can make this happen by removing invalid emails from your list and you should write messages in a way that bypasses any firewall.
Open rate
It is nothing but, how many people opened your mail against how many emails you actually sent. This is very important and you can have an ideal open rate by taking care of
- Your domain settings
- Sender Score or Reputation
- Staying away from IP Black lists
- Bypassing Spam filters.
An accurate list, an ideal bounce, and open rates can yield you, meeting or trial requests, Price, or product inquiries. In short, you can get at least 10 marketing qualified leads from every 100 accounts targeted. Again, it is very important to note that an accurate list, an ideal bounce, and open rates are very critical to the success of cold emails. So, we have learnt that with Ideal KPI, we can grow our business with small spending on email marketing
