Into the Inbox: 7 E-Mail Marketing Tips for Enterprise Technology Companies

If you’re looking to grow your technology business, you’ve probably tried a range of digital marketing techniques to get results. SEO – takes a while to build up. Social media – tough to convert leads. Influencer collaborations – takes time to build traction and a lot of work to keep going. When you want to see leads coming in quickly, you don’t want to be wasting your resources on channels that won’t show results. There’s one channel with a larger ROI than any other, and it’s been sitting right under your nose the whole time: E-mail marketing!

E-mail marketing for technology companies has the highest lead conversion rate of any digital marketing tactic going. It boasts an impressive 2.9% conversion rate. In comparison, the same report found that social media had a 1.22% conversation rate. That’s over double the number of leads! 

That’s not to mention the ROI we mentioned earlier. For every $1 you invest in your e-mail marketing, you can expect to get $42 back. That’s a 4100% increase. Over 81% of SMEs rely on e-mail marketing as their primary customer acquisition channel and 80% use it for customer retention. With such stellar statistics, it’s easy to see why it’s savvy SMEs are taking advantage of e-mail marketing. All the top technology companies use e-mail marketing as one of their core pillars, too. 

So, let’s get your technology company started and get those leads coming in! Here are our top tips for utilising e-mail marketing for technology companies that want some serious lead generation: 

1. Nobody likes an unwanted guest.

Privacy concerns are set to be a huge trend that affects how we market to people. The occasional e-mail to a stranger is completely fine. They should be generally sales-oriented, saying hello, specifically tailored to the individual recipient. But more than ever, users are hyper-aware of where their data is being used and by who. There’s always a danger that you’ll put potential leads off your technology company if you send emails to people that don’t want them. 

That’s why you should never add someone to an e-mail campaign if they haven’t opted in. Technology companies are often communicating with busy professionals and the last thing they want is a clogged inbox. If you’re sent to spam, you’ve ruined your chances of reaching them again and negatively affected your delivery rate as a result. 

Make sure you’re always campaigning to users that have opted in to your e-mail marketing. You can collect e-mails through gated downloadable content, pop-ups on your site, forms embedded into articles, or through good old-fashioned networking. 

2. Hey [YOUR NAME], let’s get personal!

When someone shouts your name across a room, it’s sure to get your attention. The same principle applies to your inbox. Studies have shown that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transactional rates and e-mails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

 With such great statistics, you’d think that every brand would be scrambling to personalise every aspect of their e-mail marketing campaigns. In reality, 94% of organisations reported that they “are not doing any personalisation.” It’s likely that your competitors fall within that 94%, so personalising your emails is a great way to stand out in the market. 

There are several ways you can personalise your technology company’s emails. Here are a few of our favourites:

• Address the recipient by their first name.
• Utilise behaviour triggers. (Like if they’re a brand new customer, they’re downloaded one of your resources, or if they haven’t interacted with the brand in a while.)
• Send emails for memorable occasions. (Have they been signed up to your mailing list for a year? Thank them and celebrate your anniversary together. Is it their birthday? Say happy birthday!)
• Show the user how to best use your technology company’s products or services with some top tips.
• Suggest products/services that pair well with the ones they’ve already bought from the company.

We’ve got a whole blog post dedicated to e-mail personalisation if you’re after more tips, too!

3. Use seg-men-tat-ion.

Segmenting your mailing list is a kind of personalisation, but we think it’s so important that we’ve given it its own bullet point. 67% of people who unsubscribed from a brand’s promotional emails indicated that they received too many irrelevant emails. By segmenting your mailing list, you can make sure that your recipients are always receiving highly relevant emails. You can segment lists in a variety of ways. Here are a few of the most common ways to segment a mailing list for technology companies:

• Their interest in certain products/services.
• If they’ve participated in any events (like a webinar, for example.)
• If they’ve downloaded a certain type of content (on industry trends, or product news, etc.)
• Their current position in the sales funnel (first contact, discovery, purchase, post-sale…)
• Their last purchase.
• The pages they frequent the most.

4. First impressions matter: make sure your headlines and subject lines hit home.

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to read a boring e-mail filled with stuff they’re not bothered about. When so many e-mails flood into a person’s inbox every day, there’s only enough time to engage with a few that really stand out. 

That’s why you have to use your subject lines carefully. It might be tempting to push the hard sell to try and convince users to click, but that would be misguided. People want to know what’s inside and they want to know quickly. Save the flashy copy for inside the email, once the user has already clicked.

Your headline has a huge impact on your open rate, too. More often than not, people will read your headline and nothing else, so it’s important to get right! Make sure you’re utilising personalisation and creating a ‘curiosity gap’ (provide enough information so they’re interested but don’t give it all away.) You could also utilise FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to push deadlines, sales or any other time-sensitive event. “FOMO marketing is messaging that triggers your audience’s innate fear of missing out in order to make them more likely to take action,” says Sharon Hurley Hall in her piece for OptinMonster – and she’s right! FOMO is a powerful tactic to get clicks that you shouldn’t be afraid to use.

5. Don’t put recipients to sleep. Keep content interesting.

When it comes to actually writing your e-mail’s contents, you need to make sure you understand your target audience’s wants and needs. You should already have a good idea of who you’re selling to if they’ve interacted with your brand before and shown interest in your products, so build your content strategy from there. For example, if you’re an enterprise technology company that targets charities, you’ll already have a good idea about the market and how they’d use your company’s products.

Once you’re writing the e-mail’s copy, it’s important to use clear, straightforward language. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. (Cheers for that one, Bill!) E-mails aren’t the place for long-form content. If you’ve got a lot to say, create a dedicated blog post and provide a small sample snippet in your e-mail – don’t add paragraphs and paragraphs. To ensure your e-mails are engaging, use lots of visual content like photos and videos and add short copy to encourage clicks. Not sure how to lay all that visual content out? We’ve got you covered with loads of design examples to help you create your next template.

6. Take the next step with automation.

When there are only so many hours in the day, it can be impossible to keep up with all your e-mail marketing. That’s where automation comes in. By using automation, you can efficiently streamline your e-mail marketing campaigns and have more free time to dedicate towards lead generation as a result! There are plenty of ways to use automation tools, from auto-sending welcome emails to new customers to running multiple email campaigns at once. It saves time, money, and effort! What could be better?

7. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your techniques.

Like with most digital marketing, you’ll find that some things really resonate with your audience and others… Don’t. It’s all about trial and error to find out what your mailing list responds to. Experiment with the tone of the copy, with your personalisation techniques, how you write your headlines, when you send the emails, and more. You could even try split testing certain factors to get definitive results and data to really maximise your marketing efforts.

For more helpful email marketing advice, be sure to check out our ultimate guide to email marketing or if you are looking for that extra helping hand, contact us for a free consultation with one of our marketing experts.