Why you should keep personal emails when marketing to small fleets
We often think personal emails are bad for B2B marketing. We set forms to force only business emails. We ask list providers to suppress hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol and internet service provider “.net” emails from B2B lists.
But sometimes personal emails are useful. Even critical! Here are two cases:
- Small business fleets
- LinkedIn ad campaigns
First let’s get something out of the way. I know you might be thinking this, because I’ve done it, and you might do it too … yes, personal email can be throwaway email that you use only for form fills and conference badge scans, and you never look at that account.
But sometimes, personal email is used daily for business. Keep reading to see why.
Small business and SMB fleets
Many business owners with small fleets and “company cars” use personal email. Even if they have a website. Have you ever set up a website with domain email? You know you might need techie know-how! SMTP, IMAP, errors, how to fix them?! It gets overwhelming fast. I can understand small businesses saying, forget that, let’s keep using our gmail. It’s easy and it works.
With small business, you’ll often see gmail and yahoo emails on their websites and Facebook pages.
Especially if the personal email is on their website, you don’t want to throw out that email. They are checking that email for customer communication.
And, many small businesses don’t even have websites. So they don’t have a custom domain for business email.
This is common for small business fleets or “SMB” in the trades, towing & recovery, facilities services, owner-operators of trucking businesses.
LinkedIn ads
On LinkedIn, many people use personal emails for their profile. Because people change jobs. Their personal email won’t change when jobs change, so they can still get into their profiles. You can use several emails for your LinkedIn account. For most people, a personal email is among those emails.
If you want to run ad campaigns on LinkedIn, you can reach your audience in a few ways:
- You can target people with LinkedIn’s filters. For example, choose people in the construction industry who are director level and above, at companies with 51+ employees, in California.
- You can also upload a list of specific people to match with LinkedIn profiles, like your prospects and leads. This is where you can use the personal as well as business email addresses.
When we match emails to LinkedIn profiles, and we include personal emails on the list, we get significantly higher match rates. So, if you advertise through LinkedIn, you might want to keep those personal emails.
Finally, be sure to look at your data. Know the difference between spam and a good email, and keep your email data clean.
Director of Marketing & Customer Success at Valgen
Grew up by the Motor City. A spelling nerd, I wrote Chevrolet in chalk on our driveway. Thought I was a big kid writing a big word. Didn’t stray far from cars: worked in transportation and fleet safety, preventing distracted driving. Now working with marketers and sales teams to connect with their next fleet customers.
