Are you a B2B marketer? Are you struggling to make email marketing work for your business? Let's talk about the five B2B email marketing problems we see all the time. Of course, we won't leave you high and dry. We'll share the reasons why these problems are so common but also give you some practical tips on how to fix them.

Ready to get all the good stuff on this? 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:11) Join our FREE Facebook Group. 

(5:12) Check out our sponsor ZeroBounce. 

(7:00) What do we mean by B2B?

(10:40) Solve the problem of the PERSON working for the business.

(12:13) One - no one is joining your B2B email list.

(15:23) Kennedy's case study.

(19:49) Two - you're getting A LOT of unsubscribes.

(29:38) Three - you're not making enough sales.

(32:51) Four - your subscribers aren't opening your emails.

(38:29) Five - your subscribers aren't clicking on the links in your emails.

(40:25) Subject line of the week.

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What do we mean by B2B?

First things first, we have a slightly different philosophy on B2B. We actually think there are two types of B2B marketing - b2b (smaller business to smaller business) and B2B (business to big business).

We make this distinction because we believe that in b2b, the businesses you’re marketing to make decisions just like consumers. Take us, for example. We sell a business solution, but often our customers are people who are spending their own money on their businesses. They spend and invest money like consumers. In fact, some of the people who buy from us have such a small business (or their business is so new) that they’re not even making any money yet! They're investing their own money by putting it into the business.

So the first thing we recommend you do is to evaluate whether you fit in the traditional B2B category. Are you selling to someone who works for a big business (B2B) or are you selling to a small business owner who's currently alone in their venture (b2b)? 

The advice that follows is mainly about B2B. But if you’re a b2b marketer, everything else we talk about on our podcast and blog will apply to you. Focus on this, and we promise it'll change the way you communicate with your audience. It definitely did for us, and it made a huge difference.

Solve the problem of the PERSON working for the company 

If you consider yourself a B2B marketer, the first thing to remember is that you're still selling to human beings - people who have busy days and lives. They might have short attention spans, but they still have emotions! They have stuff they care about. And when it comes to the work they do, they still want to do a good job and get good results for their boss.

In fact, because they're so busy and pulled in all directions (in their personal and professional lives), they want to get their job done in the easiest way possible. Because that can perhaps relieve some stress and alleviate pressure. And this is where you come in.

So with that in mind, let's look at the 5 major problems we see with B2B marketing and how to fix them. 

Problem One - No one is joining your B2B email list

If people aren't joining your list, it's worth pointing out that the person you're talking to (i.e. the ideal prospect for your list) might be someone who works in a specific department for a big company. You want to get their attention so they join your email list. But getting your emails adds a new layer of distraction to their (already busy) personal and professional lives. In other words, they have a lot going on, and you're coming along asking them to join your list. 

Put yourself in their shoes. Why would they want to do that? You must present them with a really exciting reason for them to want to give you their work email address, which is already bombarded with a lot of other stuff.

If the reason why they should join your list isn't interesting enough, then you're fighting a losing battle. So you need the most compelling positioning and messaging to get someone to pay attention and then join your list. Simply asking a person who works in a big company to join your newsletter isn't going to cut it! However you position your lead magnet, quiz, newsletter, or whatever you're offering, needs to be more compelling than you think. You can't grab people's attention with something dull and bland - they simply won't care! 

Kennedy's case study 

When Kennedy first started working as an entertainer, he was selling to big corporations with multiple locations and over 200 staff. Typically, the ideal subscriber for his list would be someone working for the CEO of the company - someone with the job to organise a big sales or marketing conference, for example. 

Kennedy was aware that this job might not be that person's main focus - it was just something they were tasked with. So what would be helpful for that person? What might they need or want? Perhaps a lead magnet along the lines of “Six ways to get the most value from the next entertainer you hire for your conference.” Why? Because that’s the problem that the person is trying to solve! They want to organise an event as smoothly and easily as possible. They want to do a good job. 

So in order to grab someone’s attention, focus on the problem that the person is trying to solve. The reason for opting into your B2B email list doesn’t need to solve the business’s problem. It has to solve the problem that the individual within the business is facing.

Problem Two - You're getting A LOT of unsubscribers

If you’re seeing a lot of people unsubscribe from your list, one of the ways of fixing this is to have a lead magnet on a topic that’s a lot wider than buying your product or service. If your lead magnet is too specific, once people download it, they won't have a reason to hang around. But if you’re helpful in your email marketing and focus on solving the emotional problems that your subscribers are experiencing in their lives, you can be helpful above and beyond what you do.

Keep people in your world

Ultimately, you want to drive people to work with you. But the truth is that someone might not be ready to buy right now. For whatever reason, they're not prepared to solve their problem. But that's not to say they won't be down the line. So you do need them to stay on your list. And people are more likely to stay if you're generally helpful, rather than making your emails all about you. 

Another issue is that people move jobs and businesses. So ideally, what you want is for someone to give you their personal email address. That way, no matter where they go and work, they take you (and your helpful advice) with them. And this gives you more longevity in your relationship with that person. You want people to continue to know who you are and why they should read your emails regardless of whether they change jobs.

How do you do that?

• Give great advice.
• Make your emails about them and not about you.  
• Help people to solve their problems and nudge them in the right direction with your emails, regardless of whether they end up buying from you.
• Use our approach to email marketing, i.e. share hints, tips, stories, ideas, and things that connect with the human in the business.

These things will keep people subscribed to your email list because they'll know that they can go to the office (or log into their work email address) and look forward to what you're going to say. 

What if people don't remember who you are? 

If you think that people are unsubscribing from your list because they don't remember who you are, make sure you include your first name and your brand in the sender. People might remember the brand more than your name (in fact, they might not even know your name to start with), but they also want to know that the emails come from a real human being! So create a personal connection - it makes it more unlikely for people to unsubscribe from your list. 

Another reason why people might forget who you are and unsubscribe is that you don’t email often enough. In order to be remembered, you need to email often. If you’re not showing up regularly, people will simply forget who you are. And if you can’t remember who someone is when you receive their email, you’ll automatically assume it’s unsolicited spam. So, increase the frequency of your emails to at least a few times a week, so people can’t forget who you are. 

Unsubscribes aren't a bad thing! 

Generally speaking, unsubscribes are not a problem if increasing the frequency of your emails is part of your business model. But you need to be careful that unsubscribes don’t come from the fact that your emails aren’t good enough! You can either have high retention or high churn, and both models work.

We take the approach of high churn with our list (and clean it regularly and quite aggressively) because we want to keep it the leanest it can be. As much as possible, the only people we want on our list are hyper-fans.

So when someone joins our email list, we send them our Get to Know You sequence (which is our Welcome sequence). At the back of that, people will either decide to stay (and typically stay for a while), or they’ll immediately go. And that’s fine by us because it means we’re left with a small but super profitable list of active people who buy. It’s more profitable, it's easier to manage, and it makes our deliverability higher. The hygiene of that list is much easier to maintain. 

Watch out for surges of unsubscribers

While unsubscribes aren’t a bad thing, you want to avoid sudden surges of unsubscribes. If you send something out, and suddenly a lot of people unsubscribe (and that’s not a typical pattern for you), then you want to figure out what caused it.

But if you have a consistently high unsubscribe rate, it's not a huge problem if that’s by design, and your marketing and sales are making up for that. Keep your list clean by making sure that people either buy from you and stay on your list or if they're going to just grab your lead magnet and not buy, let them go. You're not for them, and they're not for you.

What you don't want to do is to cling to every single person on your list. Because you're probably spending money to acquire subscribers, and if some of them go, that's fine. Focus on nurturing those who stay and on turning them into hyper fans so they'll buy from you. In the long run, the amount they spend with you will more than cover the cost of the people who unsubscribe.

Both models (high retention and high churn) are valid and can be hugely successful. You just need to pick your path and make sure it’s profitable for you. As long as you’re getting results and hitting the income, sales, and profit target you set for yourself, carry on with what you’re doing. But don’t get too hung up on regular unsubscribes.

Problem Three - You’re not making enough sales

What happens if you’re not making enough sales in your business from your email marketing? We believe that if you’re not making sales in the first 60 days of someone being on your email list, the chance of them ever buying from you plummets down to less than 5%. That’s what we’ve seen in our business and a few others too.

And it makes sense. Because when someone joins your email list, they have a problem they want to solve. And if they haven’t decided to solve it with you within the first couple of months of being in your world, it means they’ve probably found the solution somewhere else or that problem isn't that important to them. 

The way to fix this is to make sure that when someone joins your email list, you have a bunch of email campaigns, automations, and systems in place to give them the best chance of buying from you within the first 60 days. Or, if you have a longer selling cycle, then account for that. Break that cycle down into key checkpoints to give yourself a better chance to hit your sales target at every milestone. And always remember that your job as a marketer is to get your emails opened but also to drive clicks, engagement, and sales. 

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Problem Four - Your subscribers aren't opening your emails

People often look at B2B marketing as this weird animal where you have to be super professional and use very benefit-drive subject lines. It’s easy to think that you can’t inject the same personality that you would in a B2C email. But that's simply not true because you’re talking to a human within a business!

So while you have to be professional to an extent (depending on what business you’re talking to) you can still have personality and use curiosity-driven subject lines. This is even more important in B2B because people's inboxes are full of random cold outreach emails from other marketers who are trying to get them to pay attention. And often, they use benefit-driven subject lines with no personality at all.

It's worth pointing out that a strong subject line isn’t what you write for the headline of a sales page (i.e. very benefit- and outcome-driven). You want to write subject lines that get people to open your emails to see what's inside. And they do that because the minute they see your subject line they feel something. They’re either confused, bewildered, interested, intrigued, or whatever. The point is that they’re feeling an emotion. And those emotions are more useful to you in terms of open rates and (down the line) sales.

Use curiosity-driven subject lines

So remember that you’re talking to a human within the business – not to the business entity. And as professional as they might be, they’re still people who can’t help but open an email with a curiosity-driven subject line because being curious is at the core of human nature – no matter who you are or what you do. So talk about things that are going to intrigue your audience – and not necessarily benefit them.

If you're not sure about this, split test. Grab two subject lines (for the same email) and send them to different sections of your email list. Then see which one performs better in terms of open rates. That way, you can start noticing patterns in your business and see what type of subject lines your audience tends to open more. What’s common about these subject lines? Do they all use humour? Are they all very short?

We find that the compound curiosity approach we use always outperforms benefit-driven subject lines. But by all means, test it out in your business and find out what works for you.

Problem Five - Your subscribers are not clicking the links in your emails

And last but not least, let’s talk about the links in your emails not getting clicked. When that happens, it means people can’t see your sales page or your appointment booking page. And a likely reason why this might be happening is that the call to action in your emails isn’t clear enough – or there isn’t one at all! We see that a lot, especially in the B2B world.

Remember that even in B2B you still have to ask people to go and do something. It could be to book an appointment, a demo, a free call, book a free trial, etc. But it needs to be something. And you also need to make sure that your call to action stands out. Because if it’s buried in the middle of paragraphs or at the very end of your email, you might find that people become 'link blind' – they simply don’t see it.

We have a FREE resource on this called Click Tricks. It’s a free PDF with 12 different ways to dress up and present the links in our emails. You can use it to make sure your calls to action stand out and are compelling and exciting.  

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Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “We are ranked 18,281,928!!” And the email was about the fact that Rob saw a tourist attraction that claimed to be one of the top 25 Wonders of The World. But aren’t there only 7 Wonders of The World? We can’t just make that list longer to make sure that everyone’s included – it loses its meaning!

So this subject line worked because it looks like a big proclamation of fame or achievement. But instead, it’s a weird backward flip on what people would expect. So check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Advanced Psychology: Using Compound Curiosity.

WTF Is An Automated Customer Journey? Use the SCORE Method.

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Your Unsubscribe Rate.

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Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to...

Unknown 0:31

Hey, it's Rob and Kennedy. Hello Today

Unknown 0:33

on the Email Marketing Show we're talking about major problems with b2b email marketing, and some really easy ways

Unknown 0:40

to fix them. Now, at the end of this episode, if you're thinking, Oh, that sounds great, I need to figure out how to do this even further in my business. And we've created a free Facebook group for exactly that purpose. It's a great community to ask questions, seek advice, make friendships, and really talk about the stuff that happens on this podcast and email marketing in general. So if you wanna join that group, just head over to Facebook and search for that email marketing show communities that email marketing show community, you can click join, we'll get you into the group, you can introduce yourself, have some amazing discussions with some incredible people and a lot of fun in that group as well. So go and search for the Email Marketing Show community and we will see you there.

Unknown 1:05

He has not been to the cinema for about six years. It's comedy hypnotist Robert temple, and he likes to try different Tomato Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup.

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I don't know. It's like a logical Margarita Kennedy.

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To cinema for six years, I still think tickling your pickup or other people or you

Unknown 1:21

just don't know anything about what I do today. But for some reason, I used to go by law, but then obviously, a few years ago we had this pandemic. So that was basically for about a year preceding the pandemic, maybe if I know there's gonna be three or three times a bit of makeup. So I hadn't been for like a year before the pandemic, pandemic we were expected. They lasted longer than I thought. And then I've never been I've never got back into the rhythm of CFL. So I'm gonna send us resolution in early New Year's resolution to go and see a film that's nice. I'd like to start with them as people from around the world. So I film a film, a film, the pictures, is the plural of Ketchup, ketchup or ketchup.

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I think it is because I'm trying different types of catch ups.

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It's different types of tomato ketchup. Well, it's

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the brands of ketchup something I'm tasting, isn't it?

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I try different brands. lieu of tomato ketchup.

Unknown 2:04

Maybe ketchup he she shall catch up? They shall. Yeah, so I've always been like a heightens person like I think will be like, I'll have Heinz and then one day I was like, Let's go wild. Let's spice up a little bit how fries and chips taste so I bought a daddy's one daddy's ketchup. So I bought that that was nice. And then there was this other fancy one of the fancy of all the other weeks I bought that and then I go to America so I was like some really nice fancy ketchup. So yeah, I'm just trying to catch up. So I mean, I'm not I don't have like a shelf of cats. I've got one catch up. I'm not crazy. I've got one catch up at a time but each time I'm trying to find a different ketchup.

Unknown 2:32

I have a daddy's brown sauce in the cupboard Karla brown sauce pasta masala over daddy's brown sauce and not because of the one I buy but because I ordered from the local chip shop and I had to get the order amount over a certain threshold in order to get delivery and I was gonna buy your brandsource 129 done. You're the person who bought the source or the

Unknown 2:52

hero of your business.

Unknown 2:55

Hilarious. Even. You've even defaced your little words. No, we can't because we only

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Unknown 5:02

and some people who join our programmes and buy from us are so so so small d they're so new to business that currently their business isn't making any money right now and they're putting their money in, which means they are quite literally spending their money. It's not like they're spending money they can't take out the business. They're literally spending money by putting it into the business. So you've got to remember again, that's that's the situation. So really, first of all, assess your business and go Am I actually b2b in the very traditional sense of I sell to Jaffe works in accounts for big business, or am I actually selling to, you know, Sandra, who started a business because she cares about this thing massively. And actually, she's spending her child her kids inheritance right now. Trying to make a future that's better by investing her money now. Because that makes it fun in this

Unknown 5:40

Yeah, it makes sense. And you gotta you gotta make a decision. You got Okay, okay, now I've got a definition. And yes, in this episode we're gonna be talking about mostly be too big B. But if you're thinking oh, well, I'm being I'm being a small b, because they behave like consumers. They are spending their money. Great news. Every episode of the Mr. Martin show, everything that we do fits you perfectly because we're going to treat these people as the individual as if they're consumers. Right, as if you are b2c. That's how you're thinking. And by the way, it is a VAT thinking this idea of come up with betta small b, that changed the way we thought about the way we communicate and made us better at communicating with our audience. It was a huge change for us when we figured that out. So hopefully a whole bunch of people listening have gone Bloody hell, that's the thing I've been doing wrong. I've been speaking beat a big B. Well, actually, my audience has beat a little b. All right, but in this episode, we are going to focus on those folks who are beat a big B. And I think we'll all learn something anyway, even if a beat a small beat. So here's a really important thing about when we think about dealing with businesses, they uppercase B, the proper businesses, whether they've got team and the reporting to people in budgets and stuff is every single person in that business is a really busy human being. They're a busy, busy person, and that busy person has a busy day. What's ahead, MER busy, be busy, busy beaver Bay. That's right. Children sit down. Probably. But yeah, they're busy and they've got short attention spans cuz they've got so many things to be doing. They have to have short attention spans. But here's a really important thing is they've still got emotions. They've still got stuff they care about and the things that they care about doing a really good job so that they get good results in their boss pat them on the back and they hit their KPIs and their numbers and they care about doing it in a way that as easy as possible for them, because it will impact the other stuff they're doing and it means they can perhaps relieve some stress and alleviate some pressure right. So that that's, that's really, really important that you think about the person you're sending emails to as a human being who has all those things, and they want those things.

Unknown 7:39

So let's talk about five of the sort of problems that people will have with this b2b thing, assuming that they've decided okay, that's definitely who my audience are. That's definitely who I sell to. Let's try and sort of go through these things. So the first one is, nobody is joining your business to business or b2b email lists. So you're building a list of people who are b2b, and you're trying to figure out, you know, what, why is nobody joining this thing? And part of the problem is, of course, that actually, there's like a new level of distraction in that world. So what they've got right now that person so let's imagine you've got Sandra who works in the marketing department of company, and she's your ideal prospect to be on your list. She's got all of her personal life going on, and all the things she's trying to deal with that.

Unknown 8:34

She's got a puppy and she's trying to learn dog train and she's you're trying to figure out our accounts and she's in debt, just trying to get out of debt and she's got all of the personal life going on, and all the things that you already think you're busy just trying to nail all of your hobbies, right? So she's like trying to deal with all of our personal life stuff. But then also she's got our boss and our team leader and her subordinates, everyone within the business sending us stuff and problems and that doesn't work and why didn't this Why didn't this like this campaign go out and why isn't that happened? I can't remember I said Sandra work in a council marketing now. There you go. She might do both. So like she's got loads of stuff flying at her from above and below her in the business. And so actually, you're a new level, like, trying to get her to come and join your email list is like a new level of distraction. That she sort of isn't hasn't quite got the bandwidth to take on right now. Even if your thing sounds like it might be helpful. And so I think if you've got anything other than it and exceptionally interesting, exciting reason for her to come and give you her her work email address, which again is already bombarded with stuff. Then then you're going to be fighting a losing battle. So the first thing really is to go what is that? What is the really good and when we say this, this can't be taken for granted, and it applies to all marketing but particularly here, having the most compelling interesting unique positioning and messaging to get somebody to join your email list and pay attention in the first place. is probably more important here than anywhere else because again, sure that these people are busy from all directions. So just saying join my newsletter about thing is not going to cut it you can that can be the lead magnet. I'm not saying that will work but the reason to do it the positioning of that newsletter, the positioning of that lead magnet, the positioning of that quiz has to just be more compelling than you probably think it needs to be in order to get the same level of attention that you want it to get. So just having a thing that's got a compelling headline is not necessarily enough, unless the messaging the idea behind the headline that the big idea behind the headline is compelling and interesting in the first

place. Yeah, I mean, how many people's b2b websites that we've been around when we were sort of researching this episode, and you go to their homepage, and they've got just this dull, bland, sign up to our company newsletter. We'll keep you up to date with the goings on who gives a toss honestly, like, I don't care, like Yeah, like you've got a new marketing manager and they're, they're from Idaho, and they've got three gaggle give a shit like I don't care. It's so easy to do in the b2b space where you go, Well, you know, we should we shouldn't really be the sort of more direct response. If you think about it randomly thought up until this moment, I make my first avenues that it was b2b because I was a corporate entertainer only sign to corporations where I buy target audience was companies with more than 200 staff usually work with multiple locations, right jet usually global, but generally multiple locations. So I'm selling b2b, which

means likely the person joining your list is going to be what I mean, is it different from business to business, but it could be the assistant to the CEO who's going to organise the awards do or

it could be the marketing manager who's doing the marketing conference, it could be the sales managers organising the sales conference, or, or whatever. Yeah, so you've got some kind of a human being who's got wants and desires. So again, it's just about going okay, what does the human really want? Like, in my case, it's, it was something like, of course, my lead magnet I'm trying to think now put myself on the spot, which was ridiculous. But it was something to do with like six ways to get the most out of the most value or impact from the next entertainer you hire for your conference. Like it was something around getting the most value out of our event, the team or the people who were at your conference or whatever. And so people would opt into on their own for that because you think about what is what's the thing like this, this this VA this pa this email the Secretary was trying to solve. And all the other lead magnet I had that worked really, really well it was about it was something to do with it was some kind of framework or something to help them organise events much more smoothly, because I understood that most people who were hiring me were not professional event organisers at the time. They were people who've been gone. Oh, you know, what is jerry can you sort out the event this year? And they're like, Yeah, okay. And they've got not a Scooby Doo what they're doing, they start searching the internet for entertainers, and then they stumble across my lead magnet and that says, here's my 23 step framework that makes sure you've got everything sorted for your event without getting ripped off or forgetting anything. And they're like, Oh, my God, that's my two biggest fears. So I'm speaking to the individual who's looking to solve their problem within the business. That's an important definition here. The lead magnet The reason or opt in has to not solve the business's problem. It has to solve the individual within the businesses problem.

Yeah, because there's an interesting thing that where those lead magnets are actually wider than hiring you on there. They're not like join my newsletter were told about me they're actually this sounds counterintuitive, but they're actually they would help them regardless of what entertainer they hire right?

And I can do the marketing to them.

Exactly. So what that means is that they can if they stumble across your list in your, your, your lead magnet is generically but it's very specifically about hiring you in some regard, like join my newsletter or do this. Once they opt in for that if they decide to take a different route or do something else, they've got no reason to hang around on your list. Whereas actually, if you were a helpful person who turned up and said, I've got wider advice for you than just hiring me and it's gonna help because again, remember what you said there about solving their problem, not the businesses problem, their problem right now is I've never organised an event before because I don't

want to like a deck in front of my boss. Yeah, exactly. Or if you're the manager, I don't look like I'm incompetent in front of my subordinates, like nobody wants to look look incompetent. And this all goes down. We did an episode about the the stage of awareness right the height of it the stage of awareness. What we want to generally do is yes, you want to have both legs, you want to have a lead, which is solving the problem aware, which is what we're talking about these kind of humans the problem where lead management is, is how to organise a conference that missing something out or how to get the most value out of meditators. You also do probably want to have a product or solution aware lead magnet as well to get people on which is one of my best performing ones was get my rate card. People want to know that your website is entertainer. They want to know how much you charge like that. But what I did find is a whole bunch of people opted in for that were my competitors because they wanted to know how much I was charging. So it is interesting, but I want to just drive home before we move on. We ate our way of building our email list. The thing we're offering people in exchange that email address to get onto the email list is solving the problem of the individual who's within the company, not just the problem of the company. Really important thing we've got to do within b2b list building. So the next issue that can kind of come across is that you are getting loads of people unsubscribing Yeah, that joining your email list, but damn the other door seems wide open as a huge Oh, in my bucket. dear Liza, dear Liza, and they're all They're all leaving.

One of the ways of fixing that is to do I talked about a second ago just as a total aside before we get into the proper content for this bit, which I guess is again, have a lead magnet is wider than just hiring you. So if they're looking for in your case, looking for an entertainer for their event, and they subscribe to if they come along, and they subscribe to Jeff the magician, Kennedy that Margarita guy, John the the juggler and you know, Stephanie, the Acrobat? And then the end of all these examples in a second is he noticed I'm fine, I'm happy I'm done with that now, and the only the only hire you they can immediately unsubscribe from one else's list instantly. Whereas actually if you're helpful in your email marketing is now again the way that we teach it is it's not just about you and your stuff, but it's about solving the emotional problems in their life. You're now able to turn up and be helpful above and beyond that thing, right? So sure you want to drive them ultimately to hire you. But the truth is, they might not hire you this time, but they might be I'll tell you next time, but again, if you can tell them in the interim with useful stuff, or maybe they're not if it's not like you know, Kennedys event thing is an obscure example, if it's more about they're just not ready to actually solve that problem. Right now they want to do it further down the line. They're more likely to remain subscribed if your newsletter is generally helpful stuff rather than being all about you.

Actually, I'll just go back to the get me on your email listing as well. One of the things I would definitely recommend you do is let's say we've got ABC recruitment at our business and West selling to honestly other businesses, right. b2b often happen is Stephanie at ABC recruitment will join your email list, but in many businesses, people move people move businesses, so if you can, I would try and put a system in place where you get Stephanie in this case, you get her on your email list and with her personal why email or Gmail account, because now wherever she goes, whichever company she is what she's doing for x y Zed recruitment next week, you want to go with her. So that's the little extra tip you could get it that means you do inflate your email that email list a little bit but it means you've got more longevity in that relationship. Sorry to take us back around there Robert Charles. I mean, that's right.

So that's the first thing is you can sort of help to curb this unsubscribe thing by being more helpful than just hire me hire me and I'll keep talking about you until you do or you unsubscribe. Having said all of that. You do want to push people to work with you and that kind of thing. So I guess the real reasons behind this are that people don't continue to know who you are or why they should read your emails. You haven't bridged the fact that somebody should join your newsletter and hang around in order to continue to get really great advice. A lot of the time again, this is making it not about you but about them. So for example, if a lot of b2b email marketing is is a weekly newsletter, so again, Stephanie and accounts joins your email list because you've got an accountancy software and you had a good lead magnet. And now what you do is you email them every every week, just letting them know what's going on. Nobody cares. It's not helping them solve their problem, what you really want to do is you want to help them you want to sort of help them and nudge them in the right direction with your emails, regardless of whether they end up hiring or buying from you. Because that's what keeps people around for a long time. That's not to say you just give them the farm and give them everything for free and let them crack on. But you want to give them our sort of thing about our typical approach to emails if you've heard any of our episodes before, if you're on our on our list is hints, tips, stories, ideas, it's stuff that connects with the human in the business. That's what's going to keep somebody subscribed to your email list is knowing that actually I enjoy coming to the office every day switch on like, my home office if they work from home, coming into the office, switching on the computer, and then and then finding out what Robert Kennedy has to say this week.

Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the one of the quick ways you can you can get over this idea that they sort of don't remember who you are, first of all is to make sure that that your from name is actually a human being right and also includes the brand name, because I can tell you now I've subscribed to so many b2b lists because honestly, we buy things like software and coaching and stuff like that to continue our learning. And I'll join ABC coaching as list and then I suddenly getting these emails from Mike Smith and I'm like who this shit is Mike Smith. Really simple solution for them. The reason you're gonna get opens because I don't know who Mike Smith is in this example. So simple solution and what you'll see in all of our emails that you'll see for us, it has the person's name, so it might be Aiden, right? It might say Aiden, like Who the hell's Aiden? But it says Aiden slash or dash or brackets or whatever you want that email marketing heroes so now you know it's a human being from that brand new Oh, that's right. I signed up to email marketing heroes email list. Got it. So we're creating a personal connection by having the name and or reminding you why you want to list Oh, I remember email Martin here. I don't remember the name because people's names just blur and a one big thing. You can't put a first name you don't know that person intimately. It's very quick to lose that. The second reason people don't know who the hell you are, is honestly because you're not emailing very often. You're not emailing, emailing often enough to be remembered. Like how many of you that's probably somebody you bumped into a metal at an event or something a year ago, who you can't even remember, you met? And you'll meet them. How many times have you met somebody and you've gone I think, Oh, I bet you at that event you got I just remember I feel terrible. But then you may be thinking oh, yes, it was great. How is everyone you know, get around that awkward moment. If you're not showing up regularly, they are going to forget who you are. And when you receive an email from somebody, you don't recognise their name or you can't remember being involved with them. You assume it's spam. It's unsolicited. It's not something you want. So you don't have any emails. That's what's happening with them. They're forgetting who you are. So increasing your frequency to at least a few times a week means they can not forget who you are, which means they're going to continue opening your emails, especially if it's really good stuff. That all said, there are kind of two to two kind of models on this.

Yeah. So one of our approaches is actually to think that generally speaking a bit of a caveat to this, but generally speaking unsubscribes is not a problem if it's part of your business model. And that's not an excuse to just go Oh, my email marketing sucks. So people are gonna unsubscribe and therefore it's okay because that's my model I've chosen. But what we mean is basically you can either have high retention or you can have high churn, and it's gonna depend on how sort of aggressively you push and clean your list. So we take the approach of high churn with our with our list what we do is we want to keep the leanest list of hyper fans that we possibly can. So what happens with our businesses, somebody joins our email list. And we will very, very quickly work through our get to know your sequence and our initial emails to make them either somebody who's going to be a subscriber for a long time or unsubscribe super fast, and we're happy to know that most people will unsubscribe not the most lots of people unsubscribe super fast, in order that we are bringing enough people in that some of those people become the lifers, and they're gonna hang around forever. Why? Well, because having a small but super profitable list, a small, small list of very active people who buy a lot is actually just much more profitable. It's easier to manage the deliverability is easier. The hygiene of that list is better and so actually just remember that getting getting a lot of unsubscribes. What you want to avoid, however, is a sudden surge of unsubscribes. If you're doing something and suddenly you get a big surge of unsubscribes that you've never seen before, then probably you've done something wrong and you want to wind that back and figure out what you did there and not do that again. But if you've got a consistently high unsubscribe rate, it's not a huge problem if that is by design, and if your marketing and your sales is making up for that. So that's not an excuse to just go Oh, my unsubscribe rate is high. And Robert Kennedy said that's fine. But if it's a case of I want to keep my list clean and I want to keep it to the point and I want to make sure that people are either going to buy from me quickly and they're going to remain lifers or they're sort of just going to come in they're going to briefly get my lead magnet we're going to decide to part ways and then they're going to go that's fine too. And again, we're not suddenly talking about a 70% unsubscribe rate, it's only a few percent. But again, you don't have to look at every subscriber and think how do I cling on to that person. We don't pay $6 to acquire a subscriber and then go right, I've got to nurture that person. Otherwise, if they unsubscribe, I've lost my $6 Instead, we look at it as we might spend $6,000 to acquire 1000 subscribers and some of them are going to unsubscribe, but we're going to turn the rest of them into hyper fans who will buy so much stuff that that will more than cover the cost of the ones who do unsubscribe. So just remember that the unsubscribe thing is a bit of a myth in terms of it always being a bad thing. It can actually be part of your model to just go I'm not I'm not looking to build like legacy brands that's gonna go on for generations and even if you are you can still do the high unsubscribe thing. Again, you can just go I want I don't want a list of a billion people who I'm frightened to email. I want a list of 2000 people but all of them responded bison from stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So just you got to pick your pick your path and

both are great. Both are valid. Both are hugely successful either. You gotta go for high churn with a high retention, more nurture, just pick your thing. And then because we're gonna get back to the way it is, as long as we're getting the result we're looking for which is this level of income, this level of sales and profit, all that sort of stuff. The next thing to talk about is what happens in b2b If you're not making sales for your business from this email marketing stuff and the likely diagnosis of this is that you're not making enough sales in the first 60 days of someone's relationship with you on your email list, in our research in our business, and in a few others. We found that if someone does not buy from us in the first 60 days of their relationship, the first couple of months and that relationship was on my email list, their chance of ever buying from us plummets down to less than 5%. And that makes sense. We think about it really like someone joins your email list because they've got a problem or they want to grow in some area. They want to solve a thing. They if they haven't solved it within 60 days with you they've probably gone and found the solution from somewhere else. People don't join email list willy nilly generally right they looking for a problem or a solution to a problem now. So that's what that's why we'll do that. So the way you fix that is just by making sure that when someone joins your email list, you've got a whole bunch of email campaigns and automations and systems in place to make sure that you give them the best chance of buying from you within those first 60 days by using a combination of sale

have the job of getting your emails open. They do, they but they do have the job of getting your emails up. They don't just have that job, they have other things to do as well like driving clicks, engagement and sales, but they do also have the job of helping you to get your emails open. So I think a lot of the time again, people look at b2b Marketing as this weird animal where they have to be very professional, very subject, very benefit driven in the subject lines, and they can't inject the same personality into subject lines that they would into into a b2c email, but actually, it's just so not true because again, you are talking to a human within a business. And therefore, whilst you have to be professional in the confines of that, so if you're emailing a group of lawyers or funeral directors, you probably don't want to be wacky and zany the way that we are. But you can still have personality and you can still use personality driven curiosity driven subject lines, you can still write emails about the fact that you haven't been to the cinema in six years and make the subject line about that rather than about how this amazing things going to impact their lives. Because again, their inbox is full, especially a b2b inbox is full of random outreach emails from people who are just trying to get them to pay attention to stuff it's full of benefit driven subject lines that have no personality at all. So a strong subject line is not the one that is not like writing a headline for a sales page, where it's got to be you know how to do X without y or something, and it's gonna be

very benefit and outcome driven. The subject lines that are going to win are the ones that make them open the email, the subject lines that going to win are the ones that are going to go, I've got to see what's inside this email. Because I'm, I'm confused. I'm bewildered, I'm interested, I'm intrigued. Any of those emotions are more useful to you in terms of getting open rates than I'm going to write the most compelling benefit I possibly can in the subject line. So again, remember you're talking to the human within the business, not You're not talking to the business entity, and therefore you want to write subject lines that like the end of the day, even if somebody sat on your subscriber on your email list thinking. So somebody sat on your email list, and they're thinking I'm so professional and the most professional lawyer that's ever professionally Lloyd. And even if that's what they're thinking, the at the core of their human nature, they cannot help but open an email where the subject line is, you know, the curiosity driven like the sort of subject line we'll give you at the end when we get I was gonna do so during the week, but we'll do that the end the subject line that is purely curiosity driven, basically, they can't because at the core of the human nature, there are human they listen to gossip from their next door neighbours about the other next door neighbours in the same way that everyone else does. They watch the soap operas to find out what's going on in the lives of these fictional people because that gives us that gives our fixer a craving we have they are at the at their core human beings who will get respond because we're opening an email is often a good response to just sort of flicking down and just see when you tap it before you've even thought about it. So they are humans at the end of the day, and that's what you're looking to. That's what you're looking to patch up here. So again, humans to humans, it gets that a lot, but it's specifically very applicable here. You want to talk about stuff that's going to be of intrigue to them, not necessarily of benefit to them. And I think one thing to do well in this is to do split testing, like honestly, we don't split test that many email subject lines at the moment. We're just going through a phase of work on some other stuff. We're trying to stay focused and just doing longer term testing, we sort of found a groove for it but if you really want to get nerdy with like getting more emails opened, and you're seeing a lot of people opening those emails, split test the email subject line, so the way that we've always done it is pretty much is we'll set up the same email, but we'll have two very different subject lines. And I'm not talking about making one word capitals and a different word capitals and the other one or changing the animal that you're referencing the most I'm talking about have one of them be really absurd and have the other one be quite benefit driven. With a couple of benefits of it. And then do a test, take 10% of your list and send them those two subject lines. Whichever one wins after say four hours, send the rest of your list that one or 20% of us, depending on the size will get at least like 100 100 clicks. Let's get some kind of statistical significance there. So at least 100 clicks or, or opens and then and then pick the winner. And then send that out start doing some split testing and start noticing the pattern start going okay, here's all my winners, start making a note of all the winners and then sit delegate what's common about these? Are they all humorous on the all to the point are they all very short? Are they all so what did they do with literally what's in them? The physical episode we've all got a full stop for a period at the end of them all. They all have a lowercase first letter or they all all they're all very absurd, or they're all very benefit driven. Because while we have always found in lots of testing in our business, and many of our customers that we've asked about this, we find that this compound curiosity approach to separate lines, way outperforms benefit driven ones when not saying don't test it. Please test it because if in your business, but if it looks late and subject lines work, flip it do that. Just do that. So go find out what works for you. Finally, before we get to the subject of the week, we're going to talk about what happens if you are not clicking the links in your emails. And if you are not obviously opening your emails they can't be clicking leads to the copywriting of the emails and if they're not clicking the links they can't be seeing your sales page or your appointment booking page or, or your cart or whatever. So if they're not click on the links a bunch of things you can do. A really likely scenario is that the call to action is not clear enough or there's not a call to action at all. You won't believe especially in the world of b2b How many times there's not even a thing to go and do. You're not commanding people to go and do a thing. Hey, go book an appointment, go book a demo, go do this thing. It just doesn't happen. A lot of the times in b2b It's almost like we're just giving information out. We want to make sure there's a clear call to action. Go watch the demo, book a demo, get the free trial, book an appointment, get a call in whatever that thing's gonna be download the information pack. Make sure you do all of these things, a really good way of making sure that there are these call to actions really stand out because if it's buried in the middle of paragraphs or at the very end your email, you might find people just becoming link blind to it or not seeing it and we actually create a resource we'll get heads up on it's totally free. So you can go check this out. Just got an email marketing heroes.com/tricks Email Marketing hero.com Email Marketing heroes.com/tricks And it's a free PDF I put together called click tricks, and it's a bunch of 12 different ways that we dress up and present links in emails to make sure they stand out to make sure that compelling and exciting. We're gonna click on to go to the next action. So what you have here is.com/tricks To go and check out your email address in and just download that and start implementing them. Of course you're able to get way more clicks in your emails. Awesome. Hope that really helps you let us know and we gotta get into this week's Thanks