B2B is an entirely different realm of email marketing. Tweaking strategies from B2C or other email marketing campaigns won’t get you a home run.
An effective email marketing strategy for B2B has to be holistic. All the boxes for personalization, audience segmentation, warm-ups, and more have to be checked.
So, if you want to level up your email campaigns, stick around! In this article, we’ll be exploring:
- B2B email marketing best practices
- Strategy
- Email Delivery Optimization.
What is B2B Email Marketing?
B2B marketing demands an entirely new perspective from traditional email marketing campaigns. You’re not just selling to a customer—you’re selling to a business.
This means sending an email to another company’s work email instead of an individual, hoping that the right person reads it and strikes up a conversation.
Remember, your audience is self-aware that they’re the customers. The content in the email has to bring value enough to get your products up to the decision-makers.
But you can’t just grab email templates from Google and call it a day (unless maybe they are our b2b templates). This requires specific strategies tailored for each business you want to converse with.
Why Does B2B Require A Specific Strategy For Email?
You need to consider several factors to make an effective B2B email campaign. Email marketing statistics even say leads generated from B2B can have the highest ROI amongst other leads.
Although B2B marketing can differ depending on the target business, the foundations of each strategy can be more effective when considering the following:
- Target Audience: In B2B, you’re not just targeting one specific person. Within each company are key players responsible for facets of the company that keep it running. So, consider sending emails to these key players of a company.
- Cycle Length: Unlike B2C, the purchasing journey for a B2B transaction can take considerable time. As mentioned earlier, there are several key players within a company. The decision to purchase needs to run through a gauntlet of departments, budget approvals, and strategy meetings between decision-makers.
- Tone and Content: People that run a business are some of the highest functioning individuals out there. This is especially true for the people in charge of making critical business decisions. To get their attention, your content should provide them with immediate value. Provide content that solves key pain points, including how-to guides and webinars, and then show how business processes can be streamlined with your product.
9 Tips To Develop Your Email Marketing Strategy For B2B
No matter what niche or business you’re in, these tips can serve as fundamentals that can get you started on your B2B email campaigns.
Set Yourself Goals
Always keep track of key email marketing metrics your business requires. This ensures that your business is using the most effective strategies that fit your needs.
Before any campaign, outline what “success” means for you. To do this, you need to define benchmarks to help you see what went right and how to improve, and what went wrong.
For B2B email campaigns, the common metrics to look out for are:
- Open Rates: Defines the quality of your subject lines and measures how many emails got opened.
- Click-through Rates: Defines how many clicked on a hyperlink or CTA within your emails.
- Conversions: This can be a newsletter sign-up, scheduled call, product purchase, and more.
Select The Right Audience
Email segmentation is important for any marketing campaign, and it’s even more so with B2B. Earlier, we discussed how you could send emails to different key people within a company.
For example, how-to guides can be more effective when sent to “users”—people who’d be using your product on a day-to-day basis.
Meanwhile, emails with statistical data can be more effective when sent to “buyers” or “decision-makers”—people that handle logistics, budgeting, and other administrative aspects of a business.
Always Add Value
Even before a prospect becomes a subscriber, your business should always add immediate value to your target audience. People are likely to be busy, especially those running a business.
From sign-up forms to your emails, the content you provide needs to help out in some way. This is where SEO content marketing can come into play.
People that find your business’s landing page through search engines can easily become leads if you provide quality content right off the bat.
Then, you can ask them to subscribe to your newsletters through more in-depth gated content like guides, webinars, consults, and case studies.
And once you’ve got their contacts, make sure to nurture them to nudge them further into the sales funnel.
Get Into The Recipient’s Mindset
In B2B, you’re trying to get more informed people to make a purchase. These people are likely to do their own research.
Right off the bat, your target audience knows what they need to scale their business. So, try and think from their perspective. Think about what you would need if you wanted to scale. Will certain products help with your goals? What are the price comparisons between similar products?
Send To The Right Person
Sending an email to the right people can be streamlined with the use of audience segmentation. These are tools that help group people according to characteristics instead of which company they’re from.
From here, you can create contact tailored for these specific people to get the highest chance possible for a reply or an email open.
Nail The Subject Line
According to statistics, 69% of emails are sent to spam just after reading the subject line—and that’s just for emails seen by actual people.
Some email service providers automatically filter emails that include specific keywords in the subject line. Meanwhile, 47% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone.
This means the subject line is one of the most important factors of an email campaign to consider. In the case of B2B campaigns, your subject line should:
- Clear and concise
- Relevant and targeted
- Creative!
Include Personalization
Personalization is the bread and butter of every email marketing campaign. But, trying to personalize each email can become a nightmare, especially when you’re scaling up.
This is where email automation comes into play. With automation tools, you can send out personalized emails for every step of a customer’s purchasing journey.
Statistics show that 80% of email automation users saw a 77% sales boost when using effective personalization strategies. For B2B campaigns, personalization can come in the form of:
- Using a specific decision-makers name in the subject line.
- Sending content relevant to use cases of different departments in a company.
- Sending emails based on company size and culture.
Clear and Concise
Your message should be clear and concise from the subject line all the way to your CTAs. Having clear and concise content cuts all the fluff and buzzwords your target audience doesn’t want to read.
Clearly define what you’re trying to provide, the pain points your content is trying to solve, and the CTAs you want your recipients to click to move forward.
Include A Clear CTA
You’ve provided quality content to your target audience. What now? For every email that you send, there should be a clear purpose. This could be anything from trying to schedule a consult, signup for a service, or even a newsletter.
Let your purpose be clear so your audience knows how to move forward. You can improve your CTAs by using colors or buttons that stand out, using stylized text, and much more.
Optimizing B2B Email Delivery
Now that we know some of the important fundamentals that make up a great B2B email campaign, we need to optimize our email delivery rates. Here’s how you can do so:
Make Sure Your Account Is Warmed Up
A warmed-up email account means that the account already has a history of email exchanges to prove it's not a bot made for sending spam. You can do this manually or with the help of email marketing software that can automate this task for you.
Use Automation To Scale
Automation is a great way to help your business grow. It helps streamline repetitive tasks allowing decision-makers to focus on more dollar-productive activities.
In email marketing, automation can help you segment your target audience, create personalized content at scale, and schedule sending so you don’t get flagged as spam.
Track Your Campaigns
Tracking key performance metrics such as open rates, delivery rates, CTRs, and more allows your business to identify what works and what doesn’t through analytics.
Validate Your Recipients’ Addresses
Validating your recipients’ addresses ensures that you’re sending out your emails to the right people. This ensures that the quality emails you’ve created have the highest chance of engagement. Getting the address wrong leads to poor analytics that can affect reports and statistics.
Key Takeaways
Email marketing for B2B requires a couple of considerations. Strategies for other marketing campaigns won’t be as effective. So, if you want to make the most of every email, consider the following:
- Personalization in B2B requires you to create different sets of content for different people within a company.
- Your content has to provide value for multiple departments.
- Email best practices, such as making content clear and concise, should be followed.
- Subject lines can mean the difference between an opened email and one sent to spam.
- To ensure high deliverability rates, use warmed-up email accounts and automation to streamline campaigns.
You can get all of these and more with Instantly, an AI-powered email marketing tool perfect for B2B campaigns. Start for free today!