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B2B email marketing isn’t going anywhere.
Just think about it: Do you know any businessman who doesn’t use email? Exactly.
Email marketing campaigns are highly relevant today and one of the best ways to promote growth in a business-to-business landscape. You can reach out to people who aren't aware of your brand and products, along with moving prospects down the sales funnel.
In this article, we’ll discuss B2B marketing, along with its best practices and how you can automate the process to boost efficiency and save time.
We’ll cover:
Want to learn more? Let’s dive in.
What Is B2B Email Marketing?
As a B2B marketer, you have to come up with marketing strategies and create content that caters to the needs of a business or an organization – now, just add email to this mix. That’s B2B email marketing.
There is another thing that we’d like to point out.
While it’s true that B2B email marketing strategies are similar to B2C email marketing strategies where personalization, data-based decision-making, and optimizing emails for mobiles are concerned, they have some differences. If there’s one thing that differentiates experienced B2B email marketers from amateur email marketers, it’s who knows this difference.
From different purchasing behavior (B2B prioritizes return on investment) to different business cycle lengths (B2B is longer) to varying emailing frequency (B2B is more frequent) – there are several notable differences. But out of the two, B2B email campaigns require more discipline and dedication, along with an efficient metric system to measure results since B2B emails are harder to track for the customer journey.
Why Do B2B Emails Require Strategy?
It’s no secret that effective B2B email marketing campaigns don’t follow general email marketing tactics. The reason why is that they are too different.
We’ll discuss a few ways in which general email marketing tactics don’t work for B2B campaigns.
Email Targeting
The main difference between general email campaigns and B2B is that email marketing campaigns target individuals, while B2B campaigns target companies. In a B2C customer experience, individual customers are responsible for every stage of their customer journey.
On the other hand, when you find a B2B company you want to target, you need an effective marketing strategy that accounts for the differences between different individuals within a company. This means you must personalize emails sent to different emails within your target company.
Email Cycle Length
Buying something as an individual customer doesn’t usually take very long. You see something you want and either decide to buy it or not.
But for a company, the purchasing process can be more complicated. Sometimes, bigger purchases require getting multiple departments involved. There may need to be a coordinated effort in coming to a decision or getting budget approval, which takes time.
For this reason, you can expect B2B marketing campaigns to take significantly longer in making a decision.
Email Tone and Valuable Content
With B2C emails, you can be direct in the fact that you want to try to make a sale. You can send promotions, discounts, and sales announcements as part of your marketing campaign.
B2B emails are vastly different and tend to perform better when they provide educational content and resources. This type of content may include trend reports, webinar recordings, podcasts, and how-to guides that can help your B2B subscribers.
To provide your B2B audience with engaging content, you’ll need to source new content types and formats to include in your B2B campaigns.
5 Top B2B Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing is great for lead generation and maintaining long-term relationships with clients – provided you remember guidelines that help you test, track, and optimize your marketing efforts.
Let’s take a look at some of these best practices:
1. Choose Your Email Marketing Tools Wisely
Email marketing tools or email service providers help optimize your emails at every stage of your campaign despite the large volume.
These tools send thousands of emails without any blunders and can also segment your audience base, maintain email lists, run promotions, send bulk email blasts, and improve email deliverability. Moreover, you can also automate the whole campaign and track metrics to measure success.
2. Work on Creating the Perfect Email Subject Lines
A good subject line will ensure your business emails get read, and a bad subject line will take your email straight to the trash bin – or even spam.
Yes, subject lines should be attention-grabbing and impactful. But this doesn't mean that they make or break your campaign – they should just not be spammy to avoid the junk folder. And since more engagement is what we want, this can be very useful for you.
The best way to do this? Make sure that the subject line taps into B2B buyers’ intent.
Your email title is equally important, too. In fact, while a subject line will help increase open rates, the title will ensure the recipient reads the rest of your content.
We also recommend adding emojis, using actionable words, and avoiding spam triggers.
3. Nurture Your Leads To Move Down the Sales Cycle
If you think getting people to subscribe to your mailing list is the most difficult part of B2B email marketing, you're wrong. It's retaining them that's hard. Quality leads should be your top priority. You need to nurture them to move the leads down the sales cycle. Although long, the process is fruitful.
Your first impression has to be solid, which is why you should send a welcome email. Here, you tell the recipient how excited you are they chose to be a part of your business family and maybe offer a freebie like exclusive discounts or white papers to get on their good books.
Welcome emails are among the most important emails you send, so make sure they're good.
Follow that with a series of emails – sent over some time – to raise interest and encourage engagement within yourtarget audience. The good news is that you can send as many emails as you want, but you have to be careful not to overdo it.
Tip: Spacing out your emails is vital.
4. Aim To Educate Instead of Sell
If you’ve ever wondered what your B2B email marketing mantra should be, it’s creating email content that educates.
You want B2B customers to buy your product. Ironically, though, B2B companies are more likely to buy if you tell them how your product can solve their problems instead of directly pitching your features. For instance, experts found that adding a “Learn more here“ call-to-action (CTA) performed better than “Buy now.”
In short, you need a more customized approach. Tell your recipient about their pain points and how your product is the best solution for them, especially when compared to your competitors. Generally, try to be subtle.
5. Segment Emails the B2B Way
One primary difference between the B2B and B2C sectors is the number of persons who have authority when it comes to making purchase decisions. While B2C usually has one decision-maker, it's a whole group that calls the shots in B2B.
Enter email list segmentation.
Email list segmentation means crafting your email copy in a way that matches every or the majority of the decision-makers perspective. You see, every individual will view your email from their own angle after considering their respective roles and their priorities. The Chief Operating Officer, for instance, will have a different set of challenges when compared to the Chief Technical Officer. Hence, both will have different priorities and concerns.
So what do you do?
You address the pain points or pressure points of both executives as much as possible. Not only will this lead to better long-term results, but it will cause more engagement too. It's also precisely why strategizing is so crucial in B2B marketing. You'll get better results when you segment and target your customers with care and precision.
Tips To Automate Your B2B Email Marketing
Automating emails should take first place when targeting new customers. The process is incredibly cost-effective and time-saving, making it perfect for organizations and marketing agencies.
The following are a few email marketing tips to send automated emails:
Set up an Email Drip Campaign
An email drip campaign refers to a triggered sequence of automated email messages that are sent according to a predefined schedule to achieve a specific digital marketing goal. This is an excellent way to nurture your leads, especially considering the longer sales cycle of B2B customers.
EmailMonday published a stat that highlighted marketing automation can cause a 451% increase in qualified leads. Such campaigns allow you to personalize your emails to boost their appeal to email subscribers on the scale.
Here are a few additional ways that you can use automated B2B campaigns:
Setting appointments
Visiting social media profiles like LinkedIn
Nurturing new leads
Building a sales pitch
Increasing free to paid conversion
Basically, there are several ways in which you can take advantage of automated B2B drip campaigns.
Sending Behavior-Triggered Emails
You should personalize your B2B email marketing efforts, and automating the whole process will let you do that without the extra time.
You can set up campaigns that get triggered according to the recipient’s activity, such as clicking on a link in the email copy, visiting a webpage, getting added to a list, and so on. Triggers are also useful for following up with recipients, helping you achieve your dream campaign goals.
Implementing Email Autoresponders
You have to become the Usain Bolt of this cold emailing race if you want to stay ahead in the competition, which is why you need to acknowledge anyone who tries to contact you fast.
Autoresponders are best for this purpose. Let people know you received their email and that someone from your team will contact them shortly. Firstly, this is great customer service, and secondly, it makes you look good in front of your current and potential customers.
Opting for Conditional Automation
This is whatever we described email automation to be, albeit with conditions. You can send bulk email blasts to a lot of people at one time, depending on who the new user is and the action they perform.
Let’s explain this with an example.
Imagine you want to send out a webinar invite to all recipients. For this, you’ll want to send the first email informing new subscribers about the webinar, a follow-up email, and finally, an email with the live cast link. You can also send another email for those who didn’t attend that contains a link to the recorded webinar.
While this may seem like a lot of work, with email automation, you won’t have to break a sweat. Continuing with our webinar, your email automation can include conditions like the following:
The recipient opened an email.
The recipient clicked on a link within the email.
The recipient has a tag.
The recipient is on a specific email list.
With this in place, you can then send behavioral-based emails.
Resending Emails To Non-Openers
There is no guarantee that all your recipients will open your emails, which makes resending your email campaign to non-openers – with a different subject line – an integral part of your B2B email marketing campaign.
Keep in mind that this should only be directed to those who didn’t open your first email. You can also choose the number of resends you want – once or twice is good enough.
5 B2B Email Marketing Examples
Here are five great examples of B2B email marketing. Many of the templates below can act as a B2B email template for your marketing initiatives.
1. Welcome Email Template
Regardless of B2B or B2C marketing, a welcome email can always make a strong first impression with new subscribers. This email strategy tends to have high open and engagement rates because they are typically sent as soon as a subscriber has signed up to engage with your business.
Welcome emails can be a valuable opportunity to connect, as you can use them to tell your customers all about your brand and highlight any steps they can take to learn more. Include resources and any other types of content you believe could be helpful to them.
Here’s an example template to help you get started:
Hi {{customer.name}},
Welcome to [company name]! We’re so happy to have you join the ranks of our weekly readers.
Our researchers and reporters put together this content to help you learn more about our products:
[Bullet list of content with links]
If you want to explore more of what we offer, you can find out more here.
Thank you,
[Signature]
2. Survey Emails
One of the easiest and best ways to engage with your B2B audience is by sending a survey. It lets you learn more about your customers and what they think of your business. You can then use this information to improve your products and marketing.
Consider sending the survey email after a certain point in the customer journey. You can use it when a free trial ends or your B2B prospect decides against a purchase. The survey can help you discover why the customer didn’t sign up for a product and improve any pain points for future customers.
Here’s a template to use:
Hi {{customer.name}},
We noticed you recently finished [a free trial or using our product]. At [ company], we believe in improving our products and setting our users up for success. We want to know what you think!
This four-question survey will only take a few minutes to complete, and your answers will help us make [product] better for users. Click below to get started.
Thank you,
[Signature]
3. Making an Announcement
Do you have breaking news about your company? If you’ve launched a new feature or a limited edition product, share it with your audience in an announcement email.
Product update emails can build excitement for your audience as they highlight new features and benefits. You can also incorporate a button so B2B customers can download your software or learn more about your product update right away.
Here’s a template you can use for inspiration:
Hi {{customer.name}},
We saw that you previously installed [product] on your browser before our [product] was updated! The good news is that you can come back and learn more about all the awesome new things our [product] can do.
[Insert button]
Thank you,
[Signature]
4. Exclusive Content
Your B2B audience likely loves gaining new knowledge and the latest industry knowledge.
If you have survey data, high-quality information, or exclusive insights about your customers, use it! You can generate reports or unique content and use a B2B email marketing campaign to distribute the insights.
Here’s an example of an exclusive content template:
Hi {{customer.name}},
Our latest report on [topic] is in! We’ve worked with researchers to find out about [topic] and how it impacts our customers.
This data report shows that [discuss an insight]
Here’s what we learned:
[Insert bullet points of insights]
Get the full report by clicking the button below to learn how our study can help you improve your business and benefit your bottom line.
[Get the Full Report Button]
Thank you,
[Signature]
5. Cross-Promotion Emails
The great thing about B2B email marketing campaigns is that you can use them to drive traffic to other parts of your website. Consider linking to your blog posts, social media posts, podcast episodes, or YouTube channels.
Engaging with B2B clients across multiple platforms allows you to deepen connections with your clients and help them learn more about their industry or jobs.
Here’s a template you can use for this situation:
Hi {{customer.name}},
Are you looking for new content on trends in the [industry]? Consider checking out these articles below!
[Include links and images to a few different articles]
Best,
[Signature]
Wrapping Up
Whether it's lead generation, improving open rates, or boosting conversions – email marketing will help you land more B2B sales. However, you have to do it right.
You need carefully thought-out email templates, email newsletters, and lead magnets like white papers and PDFs that keep you connected with your B2B audience. Email automation, on the other hand, will allow you to get better results without extra effort.
So make sure to sign up for a 14-day free trial from QuickMail.
