Email marketing is a powerful vehicle for taking your business to the next level. It promises to produce the highest return on investment (ROI) of all marketing channels – $36-$42 back for every dollar spent.
And suppose the ROI isn’t enough to convince you to use email marketing to promote your business or communicate with customers or leads. In that case, it is the marketing channel that most consumers want companies or brands to use to communicate with them.
Effective B2B email marketing strategies are targeted, personal, and crafted with consumers’ objections and objectives.
So, are you excited to learn more about B2B email marketing? We hope so! But before we focus on B2B email marketing best practices, let’s first define the B2B concept and how it is used in email marketing:
What is B2B Email Marketing?
B2B (business-to-business) email marketing refers to email marketing strategies in sending email campaigns to professionals or businesses rather than consumers or customers.
Firms that sell products or services to other firms or organizations (vs. consumers) use B2B email marketing strategies.
The goal with B2B email marketing is often to reach out to prospective audiences (B2B buyers) through their work email and give them educational content about your product or services and convert them into qualified leads.
B2B vs. B2C Email Marketing: Key Differences
B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) email marketing differ in their respective applications, strategies, and audiences.
B2B email marketing targets the interests, needs, and challenges of those making purchases. They usually target for, or on behalf of, their organization rather than themselves.
B2C email marketing, on the other hand, targets the interests, needs, and challenges of individual consumers making purchases for themselves.
| B2B Email Marketing | B2C Email Marketing | |
| Goal | Customers are focused on efficiency, expertise, and ROI. | Customers seek entertainment and deals (meaning the marketing approach needs to be fun). |
| Purchase Motivation | Customers are driven by financial incentives and logic B2B emails need to educate the audience and pre-sell the product or service that meets their needs and pain points. | Customers are driven by emotion. B2C emails should trigger emotion-based purchases. |
| Purchase Behavior | B2B customers carefully consider the benefits of a product or service offered. | B2C costume purchasing behavior is based less on logic and more on emotion. |
| Purchase Purpose | Purchases are made for long-term solutions. This results in more extended contracts, longer business relationships, and a longer sales cycle. | Purchases that are usually made for short-term solutions. Consumers are not necessarily looking for long-term relationships or solutions with their buying company. |
| Length of Buying Cycles | Business clients often take more extended purchases. Decisions as they do vendor evaluation and in-depth research; Email marketing campaigns require multiple workflows to nurture clients and build trust. | Individual customers to make Faster decisions. Email marketing campaigns should focus on engagement, loyalty, and brand awareness and highlight customers’ preferences. |
B2B Emails Require a Bit More Discipline
When running an email campaign for other businesses or organizations, it is essential to note that your emails need to be more disciplined to build trust between you and your business customers carefully.
So, your email marketing efforts should live up to your subscribers’ expectations. If you promised them weekly discounts or tips in the pop-up window, do so because that is why someone subscribed.
The Benefits of Email Marketing for B2B Businesses
Email marketing may appear outdated with the advent of modern digital marketing methods. Still, the truth is that email marketing remains relevant to businesses.
The following are some of the many benefits that email marketing brings to B2B businesses:
Lead Generation
B2B email marketing provides a way for small or big business to reach their potential clients and customers that are a perfect fit for their product or services.
With email marketing, they can build a highly engaged audience with what they offer by exchanging valuable content for people’s email addresses and opt-in.
When a business starts the customer relationship by providing service and value, they start on the right foot.
Content Distribution
Businesses can also use B2B email marketing to ensure that the right audience sees their content. They can use the platform to inform their audience by linking and announcing new industry articles from their content marketing efforts.
As a result, it builds your reader’s perception of your expertise and authority.
When readers receive valuable and relevant emails, they become more engaged, which allows businesses to position their brand as the most trustworthy or knowledgeable on the block.
Brand Building
Email marketing has few restrictions on formatting and content. How companies can use it is not bound by the readers’ expectations. In the same manner, they are on social networks.
For instance, users are expected to be more professional on LinkedIn and more informal on Instagram.
On email, a brand can be whatever it wants to be. Thus, businesses can use email marketing to link up the other facets of their marketing strategy for a unified experience.
Customer Retention
B2B email marketing is a great platform to move prospects through the buyers’ journey. Thanking their audience is a good start. Client onboarding is another critical point in the buyers’ journey that can be improved using email marketing.
On the other hand, drip email sequences can nurture new customers. What’s essential throughout the process is to provide value at every step.
Relationship Building
It’s easy to build a business relationship with email marketing when a contact joins a mailing list. Welcome emails, which are opened at a much higher rate (82%) than other marketing messages, give businesses the perfect opportunity to make a great first impression.
From there, they can use different options to market to their audience.
Just remember, though, that email affords businesses a reasonably intimate level of access, so marketers are responsible for treating their contact’s attention and inbox with respect.
Sales Effectiveness
B2B email marketing can move leads from a lukewarm opt-in into hot leads. This is possible by scheduling or automating significant portions of the buyers’ journey and nurturing leads until the prospects’ lead score indicates that they are okay with personal outreach.
Featured Resource: This Is Why Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media
8 Effective B2B Email Marketing Practices For 2022 (Email Marketing Ideas That Drive Sales)
If you lack direction or focus with your email campaigns or are seeing lackluster results, here are some of the best B2B email marketing practices you can use:
1. Bring in the right leads
B2B marketing is similar to direct marketing, but they are not the same. That is because the clients make different choices and behave differently.
In B2B email marketing, you are addressing a more rational audience. Suppose in B2C email marketing, regular customers are sometimes less informed about what they buy. In that case, that’s not the case in B2B marketing – the audience is less susceptible to recklessness and whims.
Right from the start, business clients already know what they need. So, they base their decisions on making rational decisions based on a good quality vs. price ratio or on what they need.
This is why when you address business clients in B2B email marketing, you need to consider that they act differently compared to regular customers.
Have a clear idea of your ideal customer profile (ICP).
We suggest you have a clear picture of who your ICP is. That way, you can more effectively segment your contact database for a more effective call-to-action, personalize your email marketing campaigns, and write emails that tap into key challenges and pain points or are highly relevant to them.
2. Choose the right email service provider
The next step is to select the right email service provider for your B2B needs. Most email service providers offer the same functionality, but not all scale the way you want to run a successful digital marketing campaign.
Do some research first. Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo Mail, Sendinblue, HubSpot, and Constant Contact are some of your best choices. Each has fair pricing and makes for an excellent business-to-business email marketing platform.
What if you don’t want an ESP?
Some businesses simply want to use WordPress email delivery. If your business is among these, you may want to install the WP Mail SMTP plugin to ensure you get the best email deliverability rates.
Remember that several email platforms, such as Yahoo or Google, have cracked down on preventing spam on their platforms. However, this downside is that legitimate emails like yours sometimes can be mislabeled as spam and will never reach the intended inbox.
The WP Mail SMTP installed ensures the ensures are sent by trusted third parties and authenticated. Plus, the WP Mail SMTP team configures it for you.
3. Run a competitive analysis.
Review the market and see what other businesses in your industry are marketing to your target audience. By doing competitive research, you’ll be able to deliver an expertly crafted marketing email that can initiate a sales conversation.
When running a competitive analysis, things to look out for are
- Competitor product offerings
- Competitor marketing content and social media presence
- Competitor results
- Sales tactics
Getting an overview of these items can help you learn your competitors’ SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
4. Use a comprehensive email marketing tool.
According to the global customer relationship management (CRM) company, Salesforce.com, a well-executed B2B email marketing campaign can generate an average return of $44.25 on email marketing investment, according to global customer relationship management (CRM) company Salesforce.com.
Also, if you want to ensure email deliverability on your campaign, you can use the email marketing tools available. These email marketing tools are not meant to optimize your B2B emails at each possible touchpoint or are meant for sending mass emails to a larger audience.
They are also designed to provide value to your target audience, segment and maintain your list, run promotions, track metrics, email automation, and send successful permission-based marketing communications.
InboxAlly, for instance, is an easy-to-use email marketing software that works. It provides an essential email marketing service for anyone who cares about deliverability.
It helped clients get out of their spam folder, get a reputation boost, warm up a domain or IP address, move to a new email service provider, send to a seldom-used list, send an important email campaign, and repair a damaged sender domain.
Email marketing tools provide options to customize your marketing emails and ensure mobile-responsive content.
5. Use a vital or enticing subject line.
A good B2B email marketing campaign is a craft; its success depends on your email subject line. That is because different kinds of communication are beamed into our brains.
There may be a lot of information, but only so much can stick.
So, ensure your emails get noticed as they land in the inbox. Email experts suggest that if you write a newsletter email subject line, adding value to your audience should be your core goal.
This means avoiding a blanket approach and focusing on how your company updates can benefit the reader or remedy their pain points.
As much as possible, personalize your B2B email. This email marketing strategy is vital because it helps you make the best impression possible. We suggest including companies, names, or locations in your subject line.
Lastly, try to serve up tailored content so your sales content strikes a chord.
Featured Resource:3 Key Elements of Irresistible Email Subject Lines
6. Focus on facts, information, and profit in your email.
Email newsletters are considered the most critical aspect to content marketing success by about 40% of marketers. Moreover, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute their content.
Sadly, email campaigns fail, and one of the most prominent mistakes marketers make is treating B2B and B2C email marketing the same. But the fact that people purchase things for different reasons – some buy for pleasure, others for business – means that you need to approach your email marketing differently.
B2B communication should focus more on facts, information, and profit than emotions. When B2B customers purchase, they do so with one goal: to make more money for their business.
Your email content for B2B campaigns needs to have an information-based, practical communication style in mind. The email copy should be more straightforward and focus more on results and the process of getting that results.
7. Build your B2B email list.
Your business email program is only as good as your email list. No matter how great you crafted your emails, they don’t matter if they don’t hit the right audience.
Keep in mind that eventually, your contacts change jobs or their companies merge with other organizations or go out of business.
Does list size matter?
Yes, but don’t let it discourage you if you have a small email list for now. Growing your list is your goal because the more significant the list, the more conversions you can achieve.
But having a list of about 500 subscribers can already make a difference. You can gradually build your B2B email list by cleansing your database regularly. This makes it easy for visitors to subscribe to your emails.
It can also include an opt-in option in your web forms, offer a discount for subscribing to your emails, or work with a data provider. This will help you match the characteristics of your best buyers.
8. Measure the success of your email marketing campaign.
You should regularly measure essential email marketing metrics if you want to maintain an effective marketing strategy and improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns.
These crucial key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics will help you create an effective marketing strategy:
- Emails delivered
- Emails opened
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Click-to-open rate (CTO)
- Unsubscribe rate
- Bounce rate (soft and hard bounces)
- Social shares
- Spam complaints
- Conversions and forwards
Focusing on the right metrics will help you analyze and improve your marketing campaigns.
After knowing the metrics to look for, benchmark your email marketing effectiveness by returning to your past broadcast from the last three to 12 months and chart the above mentioned metrics.
Next, calculate the average of every metric you charted. You can do this by adding up each value for each metric and dividing the number by the total number of B2B email marketing campaigns sent in a period.
Identify the outliers and patterns for the next step. Are there any campaigns that had high or low open rates? Did you notice any patterns?
For example, are there specific topics that do well or send at a particular day or time better or worse? Make use of these benchmarks to improve your email marketing campaigns.
Deliver Efficient Email Marketing Campaigns Today!
Congratulations! You made it this far.
You may already know how to jump-start your business and take it to the next level using B2B email marketing. You’ll need an email deliverability tool that helps you land in the inbox to get this show on the road.
InboxAlly can help you increase your open rate to more than double within 1-2 weeks. Request a demo today to find out how.