If you own a B2B company, then you should not ignore email marketing! According to the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of B2B marketers state that email is their preferred solution for organic channel distribution.
B2B email marketing is all about building and maintaining trust. It’s an easy way to do so, but only if you do it the right way. This blog post discusses the ways in which B2B email marketing differs from B2C email marketing and contains some important tips, tricks, and best practices that will help you succeed!
What Is B2B Email Marketing?
B2B email marketing is a digital marketing tactic that involves sending emails and newsletters to professionals and businesses instead of individual customers. Brands that sell to or service other businesses often rely on B2B marketing strategies for boosting awareness and lead generation. B2B email marketing is highly effective when approached correctly.
3 Ways B2B Email Marketing Differs from B2C Email Marketing
There’s a common misconception that all email marketing strategies are the same. They aren’t. The strategies you use to reach consumers using email marketing will be different from those you’d use to reach other businesses. Some of the ways B2B marketing differs include the following.
1. Email Targeting
When B2C brands send out marketing emails, they target one consumer at a time, but B2B brands often have to target multiple people within a company. In other words, you might need to convince multiple decision-makers to give your brand a chance.
2. Cycle Length
When an individual makes a purchase decision, it might only take a few minutes for them to decide what they want and who they’ll buy it from. Businesses often purchase high-dollar items, so their sales cycle is much longer. This means multiple emails may be necessary to move B2B prospects to the next step.
3. Email Content and Tone
Promotional and flashy tends to work well in B2C email campaigns, but it may not be as successful with your B2B prospects. You may need to create more professional copy that appeals to your target audience. We’re not saying that the former can’t work; it just doesn’t work as often.
6 Reasons Why B2B Email Marketing is Important
Email is one of the most effective strategies for B2B marketing. How effective? Studies show that email has an ROI of $36 for every one dollar spent! Email allows your business to target its messages to the decision-makers who can have the most impact. You can also segment your email lists by using categories like industry, job title, and interests.
Because email allows for back-and-forth communication, it’s a great way to build rapport with potential leads and nurture long-term relationships. Here are some of the other ways B2B email marketing is important to your business.
1. It Simplifies Lead Generation
B2B email marketing makes attracting and nurturing new leads simple. When you create a well-crafted sign-up form that delivers value in exchange for a visitor’s email address, you can begin building a subscriber list. With your list, you can segment leads by their position in the sales funnel and their particular interests to create laser-targeted email campaigns that produce qualified leads.
2. It Builds Brand Authority
One of the primary goals of digital marketing is to build brand authority, and email marketing can help you tackle this goal. Whether you want to share your latest research, discuss the state of the industry, or talk about various aspects of your business, email is an excellent way to do so.
Every email you send is an opportunity to deliver engaging and results-producing content. When you do this enough, the people on your email list will begin to view you as an authority in your industry. Even if they aren’t ready to purchase today, your brand name will be top of mind when they are ready.
3. It Curates Relationships
B2B email marketing allows you to reach out to existing customers and sales leads at any time. Once you’ve built your list of potential and existing clients, you can send out email messages that build long-term relationships.
Many businesses build rapport with other organizations and professionals by sharing educational content, helpful resources, regulatory updates, and announcements about products and services.
4. It Increases Customer Retention
It can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. This is a major incentive to make customer retention one of your priorities. Fortunately, you can achieve this goal with a solid B2B email marketing strategy. You can craft personalized email marketing campaigns to…
- …thank clients for purchases.
- …encourage sales of related products and upsells.
- …improve the onboarding process.
- …answer questions.
- …demonstrate product installation, use, and maintenance.
- …send product and renewal offerings.
These types of emails help you keep your customers engaged and coming back for more.
5. It Encourages Customer Advocacy
Consumers want to read about others’ experiences before they decide to trust a new brand. Many business clients are the same. After all, there might be a lot at stake, so testimonials would provide valuable peace of mind.
B2B email marketing makes it simple to transform current customers into brand advocates. Use email to deliver helpful links to review websites, such as your Google Business Page. You can also provide shareable information in case your audience wishes to pass it along.
6. It Increases Sales
Last but not least, email marketing can take some of the pressure off of your sales team. With a well-thought-out B2B email marketing campaign, you can guide prospects through the sales funnel and allow your sales professionals to focus on closing the deal and servicing clients after the sale.
9 B2B Email Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices
There are currently 4.2 billion email users worldwide, so your potential audience is substantial. In business, just about everyone is reachable via email—but just because someone opts into your email campaigns, that doesn’t mean you’ll get the results you want. Here are some B2B email marketing tips, tricks, and best practices that will help you get the best possible results.
1. Personalize Your Messages
Personalization in B2B marketing can dramatically improve your open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. When you address your recipients by name and title and include other relevant information, your messages feel more conversational.
2. Focus on Email Design
Your email messages should be easy on the eyes so that your readers don’t find them challenging to scan. There’s nothing wrong with putting together a library of templates to help you work faster and smarter. At the same time, simple and minimalist emails can work great as well.
3. Create Engaging Subject Lines
Your target audience is likely to be very busy, so they aren’t going to open every email that lands in their inboxes. Research shows that two-thirds of people open emails based on subject lines alone. You only have about 40 to 50 characters (or five to seven words) to work with, so your subject lines should be relevant, engaging, and non-spammy.
4. Segment Your List Carefully
You don’t want to send the same content to everyone on your list. Customer segmentation is vital to B2B email marketing success. You can segment your list according to various interest levels and job roles (i.e. CEOs, directors, buyers, etc.) within a company.
5. Include a Winning Call to Action
Every email you send should include a call to action, which tells the recipient what they should do next. This might consist of visiting a landing page to learn more about your business, scheduling a free demo, or contacting you directly.
6. Keep Your Messaging Focused
When people hand over their contact information, they assume they’ll get some value in return. That’s why it’s essential that you keep your messages relevant to your audience’s interests. If you venture too far off the mark, people are going to unsubscribe from your email lists.
7. Include Images
People respond well to visuals. In fact, 32% of marketers say images are the most important form of content for their business. How many images should you use? Constant Contact performed a study revealing that 1 to 3 images in an email will produce the highest CTRs.
8. Automate Your Processes
The good news is much of B2B email marketing can be automated. You can speed up repetitive and mundane tasks by automating personalization, drip campaigns, list segmentation, and much more. This saves your business time and allows you to focus on other areas.
9. Track Your Results
As a B2B marketer, it’s never enough to set up a marketing strategy and forget about it. It’s vital that you track the performance of your email marketing campaigns so that you can determine what is working and what can use some improvement.
8 Types of B2B Email Marketing Campaigns
A study conducted by Strongview revealed that the priority for most businesses was to “increase subscriber engagement.” If you’re sending the same types of emails to your subscriber list, they’re going to lose interest fast.
You can boost engagement and get better results by mixing up the types of email marketing campaigns you run. You can group your different types of email campaigns into three categories based on your goals.
- Relationship — Emails that educate and inform can build trust and foster relationships with recipients.
- Sales — Emails that promote specific products or services can lead to sales.
- Loyalty — Email campaigns sent to existing customers can produce additional sales and referral business.
Now that you understand the different categories, here are some of the most common types of B2B email marketing campaigns that produce results.
1. Welcome Emails
Once a lead hands over their contact information, you need to nurture them. They may not know much about your brand or products. Your welcome email should be your first step in building a relationship. Introduce your company and your mission.
2. Drip Campaigns
The goal of a drip campaign is to nurture customers through the sales funnel. This is an automated sequence of emails that is triggered when a prospect or customer takes a specific action, such as requesting a demo or signing up for an email newsletter.
3. Educational Emails
These types of email campaigns are used to educate new and existing customers on how to best use your products. You can also let them know how to contact you for post-sales service.
4. Product Updates
These email campaigns focus on telling the people on your list about new product features. You can also discuss any maintenance recommendations or upcoming improvements.
5. Case Studies
Case studies are excellent sales tools. Business professionals appreciate receiving these relatable stories about how your business was able to help another company succeed.
6. Promotional Emails
There’s nothing wrong with the occasional promotional email. For prospects and existing customers, a free trial or limited-time discount via email could be the tipping point.
7. Customer Reactivation
Customers might move away from your products for any number of reasons. If they’re still subscribed to your list, you can reach out occasionally to let them know how your business can still serve their needs.
8. Feedback Requests
Finally, you can use email to ask clients for feedback. Let them know that you value their opinion about your business, and ask them to complete internal surveys or leave reviews on external websites.
B2B Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
According to the Content Marketing Institute, of all available ways to distribute content, 93% of B2B marketers choose email, which is higher than any other strategy. However, simply sending out random email messages to your list won’t produce the desired results. Here are some common B2B email marketing mistakes to avoid.
- Sending too many emails — Businesspeople get a ton of emails every day. If they see your name in their inbox too often, you might be remembered for the wrong reasons. Be strategic in your timing.
- Not optimizing for mobile — Nearly half of all searches happen on mobile devices. If your email messages aren’t optimized for mobile, you will likely lose some subscribers.
- Not providing value — Your emails should provide value to your recipients. Otherwise, they will be quickly disregarded. When designing your email marketing campaigns, pinpoint exactly what value you are delivering. If you can’t, then you need to head back to the drawing board.
- Failing to proofread — Business customers hate sloppiness. Make sure you have multiple reviews of your copy to check for misspellings and errors before you hit “send.”
RSM Marketing Can Help You Create Email Campaigns That Convert!
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for converting prospects into customers and retaining your existing customers. Once you take the time to segment your audience and create various B2B email campaigns, the process becomes almost seamless.
While email marketing isn’t as time-consuming as some other digital marketing tactics, like blogging, search engine optimization, or paid advertising, it still requires some significant time, effort, and dedication. Not to mention that you need to familiarize yourself with email service providers, like Mailchimp, or hire somebody who already knows how to use them.
It might make more sense for you to outsource your business’s email marketing efforts to a company that is familiar with and experienced in all types of B2B email marketing campaigns. RSM Marketing is an outsourced marketing department that offers a full suite of digital marketing tactics, including email marketing. Our in-house experts can craft visually appealing, attention-grabbing, lead-generating email campaigns for your business and take the stress off your plate!
Fill out the form below if you would like to learn about the power of the outsourced marketing department!
