For years, email marketing response rates have been declining for B2B marketers that are not segmenting their prospects and customers.

Why?  NOISE!!!  We all get so many emails per day and so many other inbound messages (social media, phone, office meetings, mail, etc), it it increasingly difficult to keep up.   Many have revolted against receiving any emails from unknown sources or that they are not actively reading on a regular basis.   Think about it.  Hasn’t one of your better customers unsubscribed recently and you wondered “why would they do that?”.  NOISE – that’s why.

So what can be done?  Here are some appraoches that will help you improve your rates:

• Start segmenting - organize your audience into logical groups (by customer or prospect type, industry, demographic, firmographic characteristics, areas of interest, frequency of activity, recency of interest…)
• Get specific – send messages to each segment with content that relates to them directly. 
• Send original, valuable content – give them something they see as valuable (research you have done, commentary on other’s research or article, industry case study)

Start conversations before selling

Friends before funds 

Bulls-eye!!!

• Send personalized emails from the head of the company thanking them for their interest and, then, periodically asking for their feedback
• Send out surveys to ask for their preferences
• Do your own research; ask about industry trends and opinions
• Ask your audience what they would like to see next
• Engage your subscribers into your social networks
• Find out from your most regular readers why they read your emails

Segmenting…targeting…there are so many layers that can be peeled here that one could literally get a PHD in this area of marketing.  Just look at the retailers, search engines and social media folks.  So take a few steps in the direction of the pros and start improving your rates right away.