Email Marketing - Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win

In a digital era where email inboxes are battlegrounds for attention, how can B2B marketers not just survive but thrive?

In this episode, Matt Treacey, known for his unique approach that combines scientific principles with marketing savvy, shares his perspective on crafting winning B2B email strategies.

Matt, a consultant, draws on his background in ecological science to approach email marketing. His best-selling book, Natural Orders, proposes that the most successful strategies mimic the growth patterns observed in nature.

Matt discusses his framework, which is based on the ecological concept of succession:

Dispersal: Focus on growing your list and ensuring subscribers look forward to your emails.
Recruitment: Convert subscribers into engaged community members.
Establishment: Create a sustainable ecosystem where data drives personalized, high-conversion strategies.

Email remains a critical channel for B2B marketers. By using strategies that reflect the natural order, marketers can enhance their approach to not only attract but also retain customers in a way that feels both organic and engaging.

Check out the video for more details, and the full podcast (link below the video) for the entire insightful conversation.

Don't miss future episodes: Subscribeto the Marketing Smarts Live Show on YouTube. And to catch up on all previous episodes, check out the full playliston YouTube.

Episode Details, Guest Information, and Referenced Links

Episode No. 78

Live date: April 22, 2024
Episode link: youtube.com/watch?v=jDWSnHZJymI
Original podcast episode: Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win: Matt Treacey on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]

Guest's social media profiles:

Twitter: @matt_treacey
LinkedIn: Matt Treacey

MarketingProfs resources referenced in the show:

"In B2B News" article referenced in the show:

Email Marketing Is the Most Impactful Channel for B2B Marketers

"From the #mpb2b Community" links referenced in the show:

LinkedIn post

Transcript: Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win, With Matt Treacey

Hello to all my Marketing Smarts Live viewers today. I'm super excited to bring you another episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show.

This week's topic is all about Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win.

So, if you're ready to get your learn on, buckle up and let's get ready to rock and roll.

Hey, I'm your boy George B. Thomas, speaker, trainer, catalyst, and host of this here show, the Marketing Smarts Live show, as well as the Marketing Smarts podcast found on your favorite podcast app.

Our guest clips today are brought to you by none other than Matt Treacey.

Matt Treacey is the go-to email marketing consultant for the world's top business authors. Equipped with praise from industry leaders such as Nir Eyal, Perry Marshall, and Michael Bungay Stanier.

Matt combines a track record in email marketing with an academic background in ecological science.

In his best-selling book Natural Orders, he describes how to develop a healthy, engaged, and portable email marketing database, mimicking the timeless growth strategies used by the most successful systems of the natural world.

Engaging and thought-provoking, Matt's writing and speaking inspire his audiences to think differently and to consider the multidisciplinary approaches that will help them take their businesses to the next level.

Now, remember the clips of Matt Treacey today are pulled from the full Marketing Smarts podcast episode, and if you want to listen to the full interview with Matt Treacey and myself, make sure to tune into the Marketing Smarts podcast, link to the full show will be in the description below after the live show ends.

In this episode, I'm again talking with Matt Treacey about Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win.

Matt: There are two ways to approach this. Number one is just your high leverage, easy wins. That stuff I was talking about earlier with your traffic to subscriber conversion, that is so super high leverage. If you crack that, you can grow your list much faster.

The second thing is, again, not spamming people as soon as they sign up. Meeting people where they're at, that's also super high leverage. What that's going to do is set your foundations for your ecosystem, it's going to set a really strong engagement baseline, it's going to stop people churning out immediately. It's going to set a strong foundation for your whole ecosystem.

That leads pretty well into the next thing I was going to say, which is use this framework that I talk about. I break it down into three stages, so it broadly follows the way that an ecosystem develops over time, it's called the stages of succession. It's actually what started the field of ecology. The terms are actually still debatable, but I've broken it down into dispersal, recruitment, and establishment.

In the dispersal stage, what you're really trying to do is get people on your list and make that a good environment where they want to stick around. You want people looking forward to your emails. The Hooked model by Nir Eyal is a really good resource for that, a book called How to Build Habit-Forming Products also applies to your email marketing. Look into that. You want to build that foundation for your ecosystem. The metric that you're optimizing for at that stage is engagement.

From there, you move over to a stage called recruitment. That's when an organism comes into an ecosystem and then becomes a permanent member of that ecosystem. In other words, that's conversion. The way that you improve conversion with email marketing, going back to the reason that it has such high ROI, is because of the specificity, the segmentation, the personalization that we were talking about. There are specific ways you can do that that I talk about in the book, but you really want to find ways to make your communication more specific with your audience and that's going to be what leads to high conversion.

The final stage of your flourishing ecosystem in your rainforest is establishment. That's where you have all of the data built up, you have your little walled garden, and you can start doing really interesting things. You can follow Jay Abraham's advice of increasing repeat purchases, increasing your average order value, and increasing more initial purchases by putting more traffic into the system. It's a fully optimized self-sustaining thing at that point. You'll have the data to look in at who your top subscribers are and then target them with specific offers, and that's when the magic really happens.

We'll get back to Matt Treacey and his thoughts on Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win, But first, I have to ask...

Are you part of the MarketingProfs community? If not, become part of the MarketingProfs community by heading over to mprofs.com/mptoday - That's mprofs.com/mptoday.

Now, it's time for one of my favorite sections...

In The B2B News - Where we talk about breaking B2B news or really important tips we find on the Google news tab related to you and your B2B business. This week, the title is...

Email Marketing Is the Most Impactful Channel for B2B Marketers

So let's get back to Matt Treacey and his Marketing Smarts podcast episode.

Matt: If I'm talking about the two biggest mistakes that people typically make with email marketing, I break them down into this ecosystem thing. One is called the top-down cascade and the other is the bottom-up cascade. The systems is either going to collapse in on itself or the floor is going to get pulled out from under it.

In the first one, the top-down cascade, I touched on it a little bit earlier, it's when you don't set these strong foundations from the beginning. If you take the typical email marketing approach and you start sending people a lot of offers and putting people on the list, you're going to end up with poor engagement, and what comes with that typically is high unsubscribes. What that means is the dynamics of the list and it spirals out of control into itself, the snake eating the tail, it starts eating itself and the list collapses into nothing.

What compounds this further is the fact that your sender score in your email marketing system of your choice—this isn't official, but it is what happens—they'll put you on their junk servers. If you're consistently sending terrible emails, they're going to give you the crap servers and your deliverability is just going to get worse and worse, and that's going to be a very hard situation to come back from. That's the top-down cascade.

The next one is the bottom-up cascade, that's basically going back to platform risk. If you fail to actually build this walled garden, this email ecosystem of your own, then inevitably there is going to be a policy update, there's going to be an algorithm change, and you're going to have no recourse.

We will get back to Matt Treacey in a few minutes but first it's time for some...

Dope B2B Learnings From The Vault of MarketingProfs Articles

That's right, It's time to dig into the treasure trove of valuable information and pull out two pieces of gold to help you be a better B2B marketer.

Article one this week is:

Email Optimization: How Simple Changes Increase Open Rates, Clickthrough, Response, and Average Order Size

Article two this week is:

The Most Important KPIs to Track the Effectiveness of Your Email Marketing Strategy

Want to keep learning more? If so, check the links in the description below after the live show to get access to both amazing MarketingProfs articles.

OK, back to Matt Treacey... Let's dive back into this conversation of Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win

Matt: That is such a good question, and not one that I've actually been asked before. It's a really good exercise, actually, to visualize what this would look like. Do you know what a good successful healthy email marketing system looks like to me? Number one, good list health dynamics, which I referenced earlier. Your unsubscribes are somewhere beneath 0.35%. Your open rates are 35% or above. Caveat to that, open rates are increasingly unreliable, they're not a good measure. They're only a good lagging indicator. We can go into that in more detail, but to stick to the point here, list health dynamics are really strong.

The second most important thing, and this is part of that recruitment stage I was talking about earlier, is you have data about your subscribers that is being automatically collected. One of the big things you want to do is you want to track the interactions of people. Whether they open email A, B, or C, and what that means for them. You want to set up a tagging system so that you're collecting data that actually has meaning for your business and your goals in your business.

That's what a really successful email marketing system looks like. Once you're six months down the track and you've built up all that data, that is what allows you to move into that third stage where you can make those really interesting strategic decisions.

We're going to get some words of wisdom from Matt Treacey here in a few minutes but right now, it's time to turn the spotlight on you, the MarketingProfs community. Yep, time for...

From The #MPB2B Community

We searched far and wide in the #MPB2B universe to find amazing information and conversation to bring to the masses.

So, first, make sure you are using the hashtag, and second, make sure you have fun and add value to the community.

Then, we'll spotlight you or your crew on the show. This week, it's...

LinkedIn post

But you need to check out the description and click that link to check out the post and read or learn more!

Marketing Smarts viewer, I have to ask... are you going to be next to get the spotlight?

Remember, community, use the hashtag #mpb2b on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and get the light shined on your awesomeness in the next episode or a future episode of the Marketing Smarts Live show!

Pro-tip, it won't hurt if you tag me in your post as well I'm @georgebthomas on LinkedIn and Twitter.

OK, let's kick it back to Matt Treacey and some words of wisdom around this topic of Effective B2B Email Strategies for the Win.

Here is what Matt Treacey wanted to leave us with...

Matt: I'm not going to pretend to hold any wisdom myself, so I'll use the words of someone wiser. I think I've actually mentioned him already. "Enter the conversation going on in the prospect's mind." Those are Robert Collier's words. I think that's invaluable for any type of marketing, B2B or B2C, emails especially. Heed those words.

Have you enjoyed today's journey? Let us know, use that hashtag #mpb2b on whatever platform you are joining us on.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

George B. Thomas is a marketer, video Jedi, and HubSpot certified trainer with 25+ years of sales and marketing experience. George is owner and HubSpot Helper at georgebthomas.com. He has a record-breaking 38 HubSpot sales, marketing, service, CRM, and CMS certifications. George harnesses his expertise in graphic design, Web development, video editing, social media marketing, and inbound marketing to partner with, teach, and develop solutions for companies looking to develop their businesses and increase their revenue.

LinkedIn: George B. Thomas

Twitter: @GeorgeBThomas

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