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Taking charge of your email marketing is essential if you want to succeed as a B2B company. Email interaction is a popular form of communication amongst B2B customers. Plus, it’s a super powerful way to drive leads as it allows you to consistently educate, inform, and support your audience.
As an experienced email marketing agency, we know a thing or two about B2B email marketing best practices and email marketing for small businesses in general. We’ll be sharing them with you right here, so consider this your B2B email marketing crash course. Oh, and be sure to take notes because once applied, the following info can really help grow your business.
Introduction to B2B Email Marketing
What is B2B Email Marketing?
As the name suggests, B2B email marketing is targeted at other businesses instead of individual customers. And as such, B2B marketing strategies are typically used by wholesale companies or suppliers whose customers are mainly business owners.
Why Do You Need a B2B Email Strategy?
What sets B2B email marketing apart is the fact that its email campaigns are more 1 on 1 and customer-focused. The customer in this case being the business owner. The aim of this is to nurture leads and customers alike. After all, once you have someone that’s interested in what you're offering, you need to keep them hooked and demonstrate how your products and services can help THEIR business. That’s where B2B email marketing comes in.
Benefits
Direct Client Communication
Email marketing is one of the few platforms that offers a direct channel to each client. Where TV, radio, print and social media broadcast to the public at large, an email is received and read by one lead so the possibilities for personalization are (almost) endless.
Building Strong Relationships
Because email marketing is such a personalized channel, you can foster deeper relationships with your clients individually. By utilizing segmentation and personalization, it’s easier than ever to craft messaging that feels tailor-made to each recipient and totally relevant to their business.
Cost Efficiency
Aside from social media, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to reach a broader audience. The only difference is that social media doesn’t offer the personalized experience afforded by email – so it should be a no-brainer.
Data and Analytics Insights
By utilizing your Email Service Provider (ESP) to its fullest potential, you can measure almost all KPIs and pivot quickly if you’re not reaching your goals. From open rates to click-through rates and beyond – email marketing is one of the most powerful channels for user data.
Best Practices
Without further ado, here are some important B2B email marketing best practices to follow when you’re building a strategy for your email marketing program:
Use Email Segmentation
First things first, determine who your audience is and segment them. This will make it easier to create targeted campaigns that speak directly to your intended customers.
The best way to splice your audience is through list segmentation. B2B segmentation requires that you divide your email list into smaller segments so you can create better-targeted campaigns.
Instead of wearing out your brand by presenting it to anyone and everyone, you can get the message out to those most likely to embrace it. And be sure to create different lead profiles, taking note of each buyer persona. This enables you to send subscribers either value-driven messaging (if they are not yet customers) or more product-focused content and discounts (once they have purchased from you).
The most important thing is to make your customers feel appreciated. They should get a sense that your products and services can really enhance their own businesses. But, give them time. It’s called nurturing for a reason and you don’t nurture something in a rush.
Most of your leads will need more engagement before turning into customers, and automation will play a major role in this regard.
Want proof? When DSLRPros partnered with us, they had no real strategy in place for segmenting their audience. After we built segments according to how engaged subscribers are and what industry they’re in, click rates increased by a whopping 115% and unique clicks skyrocketed by 445%.
Automate
Whenever you get a new customer, it’s important to observe social etiquette by giving them a warm welcome. And, with pretty much all ESPs, you can trigger a welcome email that’ll shed some light on your brand values while introducing them to your products and services. Now, say you want to hook in ‘the one that got away'. That’s what abandoned cart emails are for.
Email automation also offers auto-responders and chatbots that’ll provide customers with relevant answers to questions they may have, at any time of the day. Has somebody just converted, placed an order, received a transport or requested a change order? Transactional emails can handle a large part of the tasks that your team would otherwise have to manually cover.
Case in point: to help boost their standing with buyers and drive sales, we revamped B2B fashion brand Hayden LA’s existing automated workflows and built 5 new ones from scratch. Pretty soon their overall revenue from workflows went from 0% to 27% in just a few months. Plus, during that same period, AOV increased by 52%.
Want more? Check out these automated email marketing tips.
Picking Providers
You can’t just send out emails to other businesses and call that email marketing. You need an ESP platform that will help you to direct your campaigns and customize your email messages so that they’re eye-catching, yet functional.
Some providers will help you cater to more subscribers than others and some will offer more features and functions. You’ll have to compare each one according to your needs and determine the pros and cons for yourself.
Some well-known options include Klaviyo, Mailchimp, SalesForce, and HubSpot to name a few, and we’ve worked with them all – and then some. If you need help deciding on the best ESP provider for your business, check out our post on Klaviyo alternatives.
Optimize your Design
People are usually interested in things that are packaged well. Your layout must adapt to the device it appears on, as that’s how you keep subscribers from losing interest. Just like D2C email campaigns, you’ll need to consider how your B2B emails will appear on smartphones and other handheld devices.
It’s also advisable that while you explore your email design options, you try to keep it as simple as possible, so as not to overstimulate the audience. Professionalism is key when it comes to designing B2B emails.
Get your Content in Check
Write Compelling Subject Lines: When thinking about content, be mindful of your subject lines as they will play a huge role in improving open rates. It’s the first thing that meets the reader’s eye, so it needs to be an unforgettable statement that leaves them wanting more. Take the time to think of something unique but representative of your brand. Keep it down to just a few words and use verbs that’ll get your customers to spring into action.
Personalizing Content: When it comes to the body of the email, you want to show just how much value you can offer without using too much professional vocabulary. Providing solutions is what you need to be focusing on, anything else might elicit disinterest.
Your content must also align with what your data suggests. Basically, after segmenting your list, you’ll have to send messages appropriate to your subscribers’ behavior, their age, and so on. A good email marketing software or manager allows you to capture important information that you can use to create a personalized experience for subscribers.
Not quite sure what to include? Here at CodeCrew we employ A/B testing emails every single time one goes out. We collect all of that data in a huge repository of data that enables us to significantly improve our work.
A good rule of thumb is to avoid salesy clichés. Unlike ordinary customers, businesses are more concerned with long-term arrangements as opposed to buy-and-go situations. That’s why you need to create the right tone through the language you use.
Examples To Inspire You
Final Thoughts
Normal email marketing is tough enough, B2B email marketing can be downright daunting. Think about it; you’re dealing with serious business owners here whose main objective is to grow their own brands. Some of whom might be cold leads, creating even more of a challenge.
That’s why you need an email marketing team like CodeCrew to help you take the reins of your B2B email marketing strategy and successfully attract (and retain) your ideal customers. Book a 45-minute call with us and we’ll show you how.
We’ve worked with some of the most exciting wholesale businesses on the market, helping them grow and expand beyond their wildest dreams.
Try our full-service email marketing services for yourself and get in on that 1,300% average ROI that our customers have enjoyed.
