If you've landed on this article, you're probably worried about your email marketing. Perhaps you're doing everything "right"—following best-practices, considering email deliverability, and creating engaging content—but you're still not cracking the inbox.

You're not alone. It's harder than ever for B2B and B2C marketers to reach their prospects and customers through email.

However, rather than over-relying on email, marketers should use their marketing automation platform to reach their audiences in new and better ways.

The crawl, walk, run approach outlined in this article will help you slowly diversify beyond email so you can test as you go and avoid overwhelm.

Crawl: Add on-site or in-app popups

When email isn't bringing the returns you hope for, a first step to diversifying your efforts is to implement on-site or in-app popups.

Popups are widgets that appear on-screen to prompt a visitor to take an action. Depending on your product or service, you can experiment with different types of popups:

• Discount or offer
• Newsletter signup
• Demo or trial (SaaS products)
• Webinar/event invite
• Gated content
• Feedback capture

Generally, popups have an image, eye-catching copy, and a CTA button or short form. They can be very effective when used correctly.

How to improve the effectiveness of popups

Before implementing a popup, consider the user experience. An ill-timed and irrelevant popup can be annoying. And if you hinder a visitor's experience, Google will penalize you.

Instead, maximize the effectiveness of your popups by considering these tips:

• Use behavioral triggers to improve relevancy. Personalization is key when implementing popups. Although behavioral data of unknown visitors is limited, you can still look at things like geographical data, the types of pages they look at, or the actions they take, and then design a popup that speaks to those behaviors.
• Consider timing. The timing of a popup is a fine balance: too early, and you risk disrupting the visitor's browsing journey; but too late, and you risk that they leave before they've seen it. Look at the average time a person spends on various pages, and test and learn.
• Test creatives across devices. Optimize design for different devices. For example, a quote from a satisfied customer may be more effective on a desktop popup than a mobile popup, because there is more space.
• Write clear CTAs. "Subscribe to our newsletter" or "Claim discount" are clear CTAs that will be more effective than a waffly spiel about your product or service. You have a matter of seconds to tell a visitor what you're offering, so make it count.

How to measure the success of in-app and on-site popups

Measuring the impact of your popups is easy with the right popup software, as you can report on and visualize key metrics like click-through rate (CTR).

Walk: Adopt SMS

SMS is a rewarding marketing channel because open rates are high (a whopping 98%, compared with email's 26.8%) and high open rates equal high engagement rates.

Through SMS, your audience can connect with your business at their fingertips.

Though SMS marketing is a key channel in B2C marketing, it hasn't quite penetrated the B2B space, but that doesn't mean there isn't a place for it.

B2B marketers can use SMS to send invites to events and webinars and welcome/onboard new customers to help them get the most out of your products and services.

Another plus: not all B2B marketers use SMS, so it's a surefire way to stand out.

Best-Practice SMS Marketing Tips

To help your SMS marketing go the distance, consider these tips:

• Spend time on the set-up. Setting things up properly will save you headaches down the line. So include things like sending opt-in SMS reminders enabling recipients to unsubscribe at any time—and making sure you honor their preferences. The same goes for setting up your SMS sender ID, which is the name that displays when someone receives an SMS from a company. Registering your sender ID will help people recognize your brand.
• Follow deliverability best-practices. Although SMS marketing promises high open rates, it doesn't come without risks. The more often prospects and customers see your messages, the more likely they will tire of you and opt out of all communications. Therefore, use SMS sparingly and consider deliverability. Focus on timeliness (for example, sending during promotional periods) rather than frequency to avoid appearing spammy.

How to Measure the Success of SMS Marketing

Key metrics to measure the effectiveness of your SMS campaigns include clicks, conversion rate, deliverability rate, and unsubscribe rate.

Use UTMs in your links so you can attribute success to certain messages.

Once you have a benchmark of success, you can experiment with copy, send times, offers, and more.

Run: Explore targeted social platforms

The next step on your journey to expand your marketing channels is to explore targeted social platforms. The intent is to reach particular audience segments based on their demographics, behavior, and other data through in-feed ads on LinkedIn as well as Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram, and possibly WhatsApp.

B2B marketers—and especially those taking an account-based marketing (ABM) approach—will benefit from delivering personalized campaigns on specific, best-fit platforms, because they can align sales and marketing strategies and shorten sales cycles.

In this competitive landscape, targeting helps to improve personalization so you can deliver bespoke ads. It's about speaking to a small volume of your audience in a high-value way.

How to Get the Most Out of Targeted Social Platforms

Optimize your efforts on targeted social platforms with these tips:

• Use dynamic audiences to ensure relevancy.
• Test creative and messaging across platforms.
• Consider messaging within the wider customer journey.
• Use behavioral data to trigger ads.
• Start small, learn, and keep iterating.

How to measure the success of targeted ads

Measure the effectiveness of targeted social ads by looking at engagement rates. Is your audience liking, commenting, and sharing your posts? If so, it's a good indicator that your messaging is on point.

Keep email running in the background, but shift your efforts to new channels

Email is a legacy marketing channel, but as audiences evolve, so must marketing. B2C and B2B marketers should experiment with popups, SMS marketing, and—when you're ready to run—targeted social ads.

The main thing to remember when you're expanding beyond your usual channels is to go slow and test and learn along the way. By doing so, you'll understand and connect with your audience in new and better ways.