This is the second part in our two-part series covering email marketing campaigns for government buyers. In part one, we looked at best practices for email campaigns. Now, we’ll cover some email marketing approaches and how to measure a successful email marketing campaign.
Email Strategies for Public Sector Engagement
The type of email marketing strategy you use depends on your objective. Here are a few examples of commonly used marketing emails.
Cold outreach vs. Nurture email campaigns
Cold outreach emails are like cold calls. The idea is to make contact with your target audience and introduce yourself to key decision-makers. Tell them about your services, products, or works and how your company can address their pain points. Cold outreach marketing emails should also include the value your solution provides – overall value, not in monetary terms.
Lead nurturing emails are like re-engagement campaigns. Emails are sent to buyers who have shown interest in your products or services but haven’t committed to anything yet. The idea is to use personalised emails to build relationships with new email clients that have long-term potential. It’s not about putting pressure on buyers, but about providing value that establishes trust, and respect, and ultimately leads to conversions.
Event Invitations & Thought leadership email marketing campaigns
Event invitations should entice buyers to attend in-person or digital events. The type of event depends on your goals, but should, at some point, convey your expertise in the field. Marketing emails are intended to inform and engage your audience, creating enough interest for subscribers to at least click through to the registration landing page for more information.
You want to generate excitement – hopefully enough for your audience to share the event with their network because it’s going to be super useful.
Your marketing strategy should include automated emails to remind subscribers about the event and follow-up emails to get feedback but also provide guests with post-event value, like copies of a presentation or an e-book summary of speakers.
Thought leadership email marketing is intended to demonstrate your depth of knowledge in the field. Their value lies in the quality of information you provide. It can’t just sound good. It has to be authentic and it has to be your own. Whether that’s a brand new idea or way of thinking or a different take on commonly accepted ideas or systems. Email newsletters are a good way to establish your status as a thought leader, provided they aren’t all entirely about you.
Insight into the market, patterns, trends, and insights from other thought leaders keep your emails relevant and of interest to existing customers and new subscribers.
Measuring Success to Improve Performance
To stagnate is to fail. That’s why measuring the success of your email marketing strategy is so important. Initially, you measure email campaigns to set a benchmark that indicates the relative success of each email marketing strategy. It also identifies areas for improvement, so you can adjust your strategy for future campaigns.
How to Measure a Successful Email Marketing Strategy
Probably the best way to measure success is to set KPIs or email marketing metrics. Metrics to measure include:
- Open rates: The number of ‘opens’ divided by the number of emails delivered.
- Total clicks: All clicks for specific calls to action, including multiple clicks by the same user. This indicates the most popular email content.
- Click-through rate: Unique clicks divided by total emails delivered.
- Click-to-open rate: Unique clicks divided by emails opened. The metric looks at engagement after the email is opened. It’s about the effectiveness of email content and not subject lines or other factors which lead to email being opened.
- Conversion rate: The number of people who responded to your CTA and reached your objective divided by the total emails opened.
- Unsubscribe rate: A low rate of unsubscribes is normal, but a sudden increase could indicate that you no longer produce relevant content or fail to provide the same value to loyal customers as before. You could also have increased the frequency of emails and become an annoyance rather than a trusted source. It’s a good idea to ask unsubscribers their reason for leaving, so you know what to work on.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is great for measuring individual variables in your email marketing efforts. One of the most common uses is to test the effectiveness of subject lines. It’s dead simple. Release subject line A and subject line B in a set number of test emails and see which performs best for open and click-through rates, etc.
Use the winning subject line in the official email campaign.
Feedback Loops
Feedback loops aren’t as complicated as they sound. Essentially, you use engagement metrics and subscriber behaviour to adjust and improve the effectiveness of email campaigns. Your audience’s responses, behaviour, and preferences are combined with open and click-through rates, as well as conversions to provide insights into email strategy performance.
A/B testing really helps here, as do subscriber surveys, audience reviews, and direct engagement. The data enables you to create personalised messages that provide specific value and deepen customer relationships.
Monitoring feedback loops is an ongoing process. Modern digital tech enables you to adjust campaigns in real time, so you can refine and further personalise your email marketing strategy to meet evolving needs and trends on the spot.
The ability to respond so quickly to changing pain points and contexts makes your target audience feel heard. They feel like they matter, which builds trust and loyalty, and increases the chances of repeat transactions.
Email Marketing is Essential for Government Engagement
As should be evident from parts one and two, email marketing is very effective in public sector procurement. The processes easily align with procurement regulations, ensuring compliance for buyers and suppliers.
However, email marketing is an art and best left to professionals, like Cadence Marketing. Cadence specialises in B2G (Business to Government) marketing, with a special focus on email marketing strategies.
If you want to reap all the benefits, book a strategy call with our B2G marketing experts today!
