According to 59% of B2B marketers, they consider email as the best medium for generating revenue.
In the B2B marketing scene, many platforms came and disappeared. However, B2B email marketing continued to bring better conversion rates.
For each pound spent on B2b email marketing, the return is £42.
It doesn’t pay back only in terms of revenue generation. B2b email marketing best practices drive brand awareness, build strong relationships, and position the business.
If your business has yet to wade into the B2B email marketing space, today is the day to start.
Read this article on b2b email marketing best practices to finally find out!
How to Approach B2B Email Marketing?
The sales cycle for business-to-business transactions is lengthy and involves a large number of decision-makers.
Thus, you’ll need to use focused messaging that emphasizes the immediate value of investing in you to approach and persuade these decision-makers.
For that, value is an integral element that will impact a customer’s choice.
Therefore, consider your audience’s needs when developing your marketing approach.
Email ROI is 4900%, so failing to develop a plan for your B2B email marketing is equivalent to finding a treasure full of valuables and leaving it unopened.
The strategies for B2B email marketing differ greatly from the B2C tactics as the buyer journey is different.
B2B marketing targets the company that facilitates its customers by focusing on people’s wants, needs, and difficulties.
Generally, there isn’t a single buyer involved. Instead, there is a decision maker that makes purchases on behalf of or for their organization.
Who Needs to Be Targeted with B2B Email Marketing?
Six to ten decision-makers make up the main B2B buying group, which must first agree before gaining support from other organizational executives.
There will be more opinions and viewpoints to consider when more stakeholders are involved in the process.
The decision-making process can be prolonged and made more difficult by an individual’s job title, level of influence, and department within the organization.
Additionally, there is more risk involved with B2B purchases because they sometimes entail larger quantities of commodities and higher prices than B2C sales.
People who review the purchase process include:
- Influencers: Giving opinions that impact the decision-maker.
- Recommenders: Perform evaluation and research to make the final call.
- Buyers: Identify the purchase budget.
- Decision Makers: Considers the given information and makes the last purchase decision.
- End users: They use the products the company provides and give feedback.
B2B Customer Journey Map
Before implementing the B2B email marketing strategies, you need to understand the buyer’s journey.
The three steps of the B2B buyer’s journey are as follows:
- Awareness: The prospect knows the problem and researches for the possible solution.
- Consideration: The potential customer looks for solutions.
- Decision: The prospect is prepared to formally start the buying process.
The chart below defines the actions to make a personalized experience in the buying process:
| B2B Buying Process | Audience For B2B Marketing | Actions Marketers Should Take |
| Aim | The audience looks for efficiency and expertise | Make them believe you have the best solution to their problem |
| Buying Motives | The audience wants financial incentives | Reward them with short-term rewards |
| Drivers | The audience wants information | Rather than a sales pitch, use educational content |
| Buying Process | Customers want vendors to justify the process | Empathize with them, deal with objections, answer questions at the right time |
| Buying Purpose | The audience wants long-term solutions and relationships with the vendors | Form a friendship with the customers and show the buyers that you are confident about your deliverables |
| Post Purchase |
Audience for B2B Marketing: Wants long-term solutions and relationships with the vendors |
Keep the customers coming back by proving value over time |
B2B Email Marketing: 11 Best Practices
Lead and sales generation are the goals of B2B email marketing.
To begin, you must first determine your target market and then develop a strong offer that addresses a challenge they are facing.
Then, create a message detailing the advantages of your company’s solution. Finally, use autoresponders to send targeted messages.
Wait, is this the first time you will run an email marketing campaign? Read these books on email marketing as a warm-up before starting the B2B email marketing marathon.
Statista estimated that by 2027, the worldwide email marketing market is estimated to reach a value of 17.9 billion dollars, up from its current estimate of 7.5 billion dollars.
Given that, B2B businesses cannot afford to ignore the advantages that email marketing offers.
Here is our handpicked collection of B2B email marketing best practices to break down market noise.
1. Build an Infrastructure: Select the Right Email Marketing Service
Small businesses can choose the best email marketing services, like Mailchimp, to fulfil their marketing needs.
If you don’t want to use a tool only because it is well-liked, you can launch your B2B strategy.
Here are some qualities a top-notch email service should have to give you an idea:
- Email newsletter creation
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- High deliverability of emails
- Audience management
- Campaign optimization
The services you choose for best practices B2B email marketing should be a definitive provider.
Marketing agencies can help create emails and grow mailing lists to skyrocket your business.
More specifically, marketing services curate custom campaigns for B2B email marketing to get your message through.
2. Acquiring New Subscribers: Email List Building
To master B2B email marketing, list building is important.
You can gather valuable leads and forward them through your marketing and sales funnels by gaining new subscribers.
You need an opt-in email marketing to build your list.
To do that, you need an opt-in form emphasizing the advantages of signing up for your newsletter.
In the above image, we have given you an example of the opt-in form by Neil Patel. In exchange for your website URL, he is promising to create a seven-week plan to help you gain higher traffic on your website.
Lead magnets, an alluring reward in exchange for a visitor’s email address, boost signup rates.
The main goal of lead magnets in B2B email marketing is to give stakeholders useful information.
These can assist a potential client in determining what their business requires and getting the solution right away.
3. Lead Magnets in B2B Email Marketing
In B2B email marketing, an e-book, whitepaper, presentation, checklist, or any other form of informational content serves as lead magnets.
Here is how lead magnets for B2B email marketing best practices work:
Case Studies
It is an effective lead generator for B2B firms.
It develops credibility and positions you as an authority in your field by demonstrating your accomplishments and the outcomes you’ve obtained for your clients.
Select the best clients or projects to use as a case study, and write up the process and outcomes in a thorough report.
White Papers
Whitepapers are a great source of leads for B2B companies since they offer in-depth knowledge and research on a subject.
You can entice potential clients interested in your specialty by providing free whitepapers in exchange for contact information.
36% of B2B decision makers check white papers in the initial stage of the purchase process.
Anyone can create a whitepaper lead magnet by selecting the product or the sector’s primary issue.
Next, use in-depth research, analysis, and insights.
Incorporating data, charts, and other visual components is also helpful in increasing the readability and shareability of the whitepaper.
Email Courses and Checklists
When using B2B email marketing best practices, checklists can draw potential clients looking for useful advice.
Such lead magnets offer a list of doable suggestions and procedures.
eBooks
eBooks are yet another powerful B2B email marketing lead magnet. Like the previously mentioned lead magnet, they build authority.
As you can see from the image, The Sales Evangelist is a company trying to get a higher audience by offering the download of a free eBook in exchange for the email. It is a great way to offer something useful and build an email list for nurturing.
4. Email List Segmentation: Sending Messages to the Right Audience
This is one of the B2B email marketing best practices that boost conversion rates and communication.
With email segmentation, you even get a step ahead of your rivals by gathering.
Basically, the personal information of your email subscribers can help you comprehend your clients far better.
The main benefits of B2B email marketing are:
- Maximum content distribution
- Better clickthrough rate
- Become a leading expert
- Generate website traffic
- Increased sales
B2B segmentation doesn’t work like B2C email segmentation. B2B email listings require you to come down further into the business-orientation approach.
To perform email list segmentation methodologically, here are some techniques:
Firmographic Data: sector, size, and number of clients/subscribers
Decision-makers: managers, executives, and other individuals participating in decision-making.
Business Requirements: challenges, objectives, and revenue targets
Possibility: Willingness to Purchase, lucrativeness
How to Use the Strategies for B2B Email Marketing Segmentation
You get a picture of the buyers’ personas once you break the email lists into small segments.
- Collect data
The relevant data for B2B segmentation include location, job responsibilities, and designation.
For example, if you know that the person getting the email has a role in the marketing department, you can send a welcome email with a brief review of marketing tactics.
- Experiment by sending different emails using the data
You should test several elements of your email’s content and appearance, including the call to action, headlines, photos, videos, and writing.
- Track engagement, make improvements, and use them in future
You must monitor performance if you want to optimize data-driven email campaigns.
Usually, clickthrough and open rates are the two proven monitoring methods marketers use to gauge success.
There are email marketing tools that help to measure these engagements.
5. Subject Line for Immediate Attention
When checking an email, most people skim the subject and sender line.
That’s why you see how companies emphasize inserting concise and relevant subject lines.
Subject lines help companies identify how important an email is and when to address it first.
Sadly, email marketing campaigns don’t get much attention as they are not considered high-priority emails.
The emails relevant to the required goods and services the purchasing decision-makers are searching for will catch eyeballs.
But for them to open your email, the subject line must persuade them.
For instance, you can use psychological triggers in email marketing to bring sales. Apart from that, you can add emojis too.
When compared to non-custom subject lines, personalized subject lines had 50% higher open rates.
Example:
Let’s say you are curating a subject line for sales; you can write “3 secrets for achieving your sales target.” or “Find out the tools that increase sales by 200%.”
Adding numbers, facts, emoticons and stats all have a positive impact on the open rates, making it one of the B2B email marketing best practices.
6. Strike a Lasting First Impression: Welcome Emails
A strong first impression is the foundation of any successful consumer or business relationship.
B2C encourages first-time buyers to purchase by offering discounts in welcome emails.
However, this technique would be useless for B2B email marketing.
So, a welcome email template highlighting what your subscribers can do with your products or services is the first thing you need to get right.
You can utilize discounts to persuade those who have signed up for a free trial to purchase a premium subscription.
Yet, you’ll have higher customer retention rates if you educate them first and convert them later.
In the welcome email, you can show your audience how grateful you are as they have followed you.
Be genuine and show them you are truly happy to make them a part of your family.
For example, “Welcome to the family, read on to know how we can solve (the issue) together.”
7. Onboarding Sequence for Community Building
The greatest way to nurture leads and acquire lifetime clients is to set up an efficient onboarding process.
With the emails you send after the welcome email, the audience should feel as if they have entered a tight-knit community.
For best success, be sure to include the following B2B email marketing messages in the onboarding series:
Email testimonials: Inform new users of what other businesses say about you.
Re-engagement campaigns: Don’t let the subscribers forget an ongoing promotion or encourage them to use your product/service.
Upgrade messaging: Encourage users to purchase the paid version of your product or service.
To avoid overloading your audience, remember to optimize your email frequency and deliver them at the appropriate time.
Nobody wants to get several emails from the same sender in one day.
8. A Shotgun Approach: Personalized Emails
Users recognize generic and automated emails at first glance. Therefore, the open rates of such emails are low.
It is one of the b2b email marketing best practices to increase conversion rates and brand loyalty.
Here are some strategies for utilizing that information as you create customized emails for B2B email marketing:
- Use subject lines that match the audience’s expectations for the email’s content.
- Ask suitable questions so that your audience gets relevant choices.
- Potential consumers should receive messages at the best time, so divide your list into time zones.
- Sort your list into categories depending on several personas.
- Set up lead behaviour-based trigger emails.
- Use prompt follow-ups.
9. Include Targeted Calls-To-Action (CTA)
Whether new clients take advantage of an email’s enticing activity depends on the CTA.
Depending on where the potential customer is in the purchasing cycle, calls to action can take the form of a question or a selection of options.
The CTA must be clear, simple to locate, and linked to the text.
Take note of the call to action’s specificity, which includes a button that directs them to a landing page.
Your B2B campaigns must have short, clear, and distinguishable buttons if you want them to be successful.
Additionally, B2B CTAs differ greatly from B2C buttons since they are typically logic-driven and place more emphasis on offering value than doing it emotionally.
So, make your calls to action simple and urgent, and steer clear of words like “buy now” or “click here.”
To ensure you tick all the boxes for creating a good email, you can use an email newsletter template.
10. Communicate Value with a Concise Copy
Avoid overselling, be straightforward, and make your B2B efforts problem-solvers whether you want to provide clever marketing advice or advertise a new product.
B2B customers won’t respond warmly to urges to “purchase anything immediately.”
Concentrate on writing content that helps you develop deep relationships with your leads and motivates them to open and interact with your emails more regularly.
B2B email marketing is not just about you and your business but also for the customers.
Therefore, focus entirely on your subscribers while writing the copy for your emails.
Lastly, for customizing the text, the business offers potential customers pain points remedies.
11. Testing the B2B Email Marketing Efforts
One success with one B2B client does not guarantee that it will be successful with more clients.
So, the last one from the B2B email marketing best practices is to test the components of your email.
Don’t be afraid to test different variations of your email copy, subject lines, and CTAs to see which performs better.
Utilize all of the A/B Testing features that your email marketing tool provides to streamline the process.
After you’ve finished your tests, remember to keep an eye on your results by tracking crucial email marketing metrics:
- % of read emails
- Conversions
- Bounce rate
- Rate of subscription and unsubscription
Every metric helps refine your B2B email marketing plan, find any potential flaws, and achieve a global reach.
FAQs
Why should I employ B2B email marketing?
B2B email marketing helps create direct, reliable communication channels with existing and new customers.
How does a B2B strategy work?
Business-to-business (B2B) strategy concerns how a company may successfully market and sell its offerings to other businesses.
What is the best way to begin a B2B email marketing campaign?
Identifying the target market is the best strategy to launch your B2B email marketing campaign.
Final Thoughts
These are the best B2B email marketing tips that help you put your best foot forward. However, performing the B2B email marketing best practices manually can be taxing.
Therefore, the best email marketing service from Canada is at your service. The Dreams Agency has the best practices and tools to take effective actions for email marketing.
Book an initial consultation with us to rule the market with B2B email marketing!