Events are popular marketing strategies B2B marketers use to drive business results. This has changed a little bit with the pandemic. Virtual calls take over and in-person meetings and face-to-face conversations have been limited. Businesses strive for efforts towards digital marketing and email marketing. It’s not a secret that good quality, organic subscribers are essential in B2B email marketing, and this time, we want to discuss how you can make your B2B email marketing even more successful. We’ve dived into how you can use various B2B emails to help drive results.
Tips for Creating Robust B2B Email Marketing Strategies
To get the most out of your email strategy, here are proven tips that will help you build trust and drive results.
Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is the first major step. Grasping their needs, preferences, and challenges can guide your email strategies and content creation toward success. It’s like having an insightful conversation with a friend. You listen, understand, and offer advice accordingly.
There are plenty of tools you can use to do so. Customer surveys, analytics, and feedback can provide valuable insights into your target audience’s habits. Once you understand your audience, you can tailor your emails to resonate directly with them, offering solutions to their unique challenges. Try to provide value that keeps them coming back.
Create High-Quality Content
Creating high-quality content is another necessity to keep your B2B audience engaged. A well-written piece of content wrapped in an email can play a big role in nurturing leads and improving overall customer relationships.
Whether it’s unique blog posts, instructional videos, or insightful industry reports, provide your audience with something that helps solve their problems. Remember, you’re speaking to fellow industry professionals. Maintain an authoritative and professional tone while keeping things engaging. Your email content can be an excellent platform to share your unique perspectives and expertise in the field.
Optimize Your Email Design
Effective email marketing isn’t just about compelling content, though. Your email design is key in capturing your audience’s attention. And that’s the only to ensure your message gets across. Here are some key elements to consider when optimizing your email design:
- Attractive Header: Your header is the first thing your subscribers see. Make it visually appealing and in line with your brand’s aesthetics.
- Clear Layout: A cluttered layout can be offputting. Your content should be organized and easy to navigate. Use subheadings, bullet points, and white spaces wisely.
- Eye-catching CTA: Your call to action (CTA) should stand out and be clearly visible. Use bold colors and concise, action-oriented language.
- Mobile-Friendly: A significant number of people check their emails on mobile devices. Ensure your email design and layout are responsive and mobile-friendly.
Your email design should complement your content, creating a seamless visual and reading experience for your subscribers. It’s all about creating an email your audience will want to open, read, and engage with.
Leverage Marketing Automation
Embracing marketing automation is like hiring a diligent assistant who never sleeps. Email marketing automation can save valuable time and keep your communication with prospects consistent, personalized, and timely.
For instance, you can use automation software to set up a welcome email series for new subscribers. Take this opportunity to introduce your company and establish a rapport immediately. Automated follow-up emails could gently prompt action from interested clients or re-engage dormant leads.
However, automation is not about replacing relationships but enhancing them. You’re still focusing on creating genuine connections. You’ve just got some tech-savvy help in the process! With strategic planning and careful execution, automated B2B emails can be powerful tools to increase the ROI of your email campaigns.
Build Relationships with Your Subscribers
Speaking of connections, a robot cannot establish the emotional connection that can be created through personalized interaction. B2B Email marketing is so much more than a one-off interaction. The goal is to foster strong and lasting relationships with your subscribers.
Always keep your lines of communication open. This strategy encourages your subscribers to share their thoughts, queries, and feedback which in turn helps you gain useful insights into their expectations. Appreciate their engagement with personalized acknowledgments or rewards.
Finally, respect comes with honesty. Be authentic in your communication. Uphold any promises you make and provide only factual information about your services or products.
Monitor Your Metrics
This might not be the most exciting aspect of B2B email marketing, but it’s certainly one of the most critical. According to Litmus Research, for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of about $38. However, achieving such a high ROI is only possible if you track and take action based on your metrics.
Key performance indicators such as open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribes can offer valuable insights into your emails’ performance. But don’t stop there. Dig deeper into what these numbers signify. Lower open rates could indicate poorly crafted subject lines or less-than-ideal send times.
Monitoring helps you make informed decisions and plot successful future campaigns. For instance, if analytic data reflects high engagement with video content in emails, that’s a clear indication to incorporate more in the future.
Nurture Your Leads
Too many marketers see their leads are just potential sales. The truth is that they are individuals seeking a solution, guidance, or gain from their interaction with you. Just as a gardener carefully nurtures saplings until they blossom into mature plants, you must consistently nourish your B2B leads.
Start by delivering an engaging welcome email series, introducing your brand, and setting expectations for future interactions. Provide continuous value through educational posts or tips to help them overcome industry challenges. Use personalized messages to strengthen the relationship and accentuate that you understand their needs. Eventually, the client will see you as a trusted partner and will be more likely to convert.
Build Social Proof
With the increase of imposters in the B2B sector, potential customers often seek proof of claims. Building social proof can help validate your business’s reputation and influence decision-making in your favor.
Customer testimonials are a tried-and-true method. Hearing how other businesses benefited from your services can instill confidence in prospects. Case studies also add weight to your credentials, giving a detailed account of how you’ve solved industry-specific problems. Lastly, don’t be afraid to show off industry certifications or awards if applicable.
B2B Emails Marketing Strategy: Find The Best Fit For Your Business
Developing a B2B email marketing strategy that fits your business is largely dependent on the business type and industry. For some businesses, email marketing is a monthly newsletter or one email marketing sales funnel. However, there are many email types that can be included in marketing, acquisition, and customer retention strategies. Let’s take a look at some examples of various emails businesses can use for their B2B email marketing.
Welcome Emails
Firstly, if your business is getting new subscribers, it is vital to send them a welcome email (or series of emails). Welcome emails aren’t just for B2C marketing. They are necessary for B2B email marketing too. Use the opportunity to welcome your subscribers and help them learn more about your business. It’s the first step to nurturing your new leads! Here is an example of a good welcome email.
Webinar and Event Emails
If you’re organizing a B2B webinar or event (virtual or present), create targeted emails with automated workflows for them. Your subscribers’ actions will trigger the deployment of these emails – for example registration confirmations, agenda confirmations, speaker information emails, reminders, and many more. Here’s a webinar email example from Teachable to take your B2B webinar emails to a new level:
New Content Announcement Emails
B2B customers value really good content. So you could be sharing your B2B-made content in various digital channels, depending on where your audience is. Good content will generate web traffic and will help you find new business leads. When choosing a medium to post your content to, don’t forget to promote it to your email subscribers too.
Blog posts are starting to become a standard method of distributing new B2B content. New blog post email notifications or blog round-up emails would be very useful to an engaged audience.
Many B2B companies have also started to incorporate new and various types of content such as videos, educational whitepapers, and reports, or informative, visual, or interactive infographics. B2B content in different ways can be promoted through your email channel too.
Product Emails
Your email templates should include one for promoting your products or services. You can drive sales in many ways with your product emails, for example advertising a new product or service and highlighting specific benefits of an existing product. Templates that are product-related can feature different promotions or coupons to help boost sales. Remember, that product emails can be personalized and targeted as well.
Referral Emails
B2B businesses can benefit from word-of-mouth recommendations and referrals for B2B businesses. According to Harvard Business Review, 84% of B2B decision-makers begin their buying processes with a referral. You can create excellent leads with higher conversion rates, faster sales cycles, and better customer lifetime value with referral emails. So as a B2B marketer, consider for example a referral program or a good option to send a referral email to your already existing customers.
Surveys and Feedback Requests
For improving your marketing effort you will need to receive feedback from your customers on your products or services. Any feedback will help you optimize your marketing and sales strategies and even upgrade your products or services. We highly advise you to use your email marketing channel and ask your customers for feedback in a review form or a survey. Here is an example of feedback request email.
Newsletters
Newsletters are one of the most popular types of emails. You can view them as a type of content round-up email. It is possible to promote different things – highlight a news article or a blog post, share a discount/promo voucher, or feature a specific product.
Bonus Trick: Cold Calling Customers Followed by an Email Sequence
It is very effective to use cold-calling services as a way to introduce products and services to new customers. You can add a customer who is interested in your services and products to your email newsletter and onboard them on a beautifully crafted email sequence. In this way, your customers have already made a meaningful connection with your sales team and are more likely to open your emails.
Plan Your Email Designs: Can Minimalist Design Suit You?
Many B2B companies are still used to implementing minimalist designs and even mimicking plain-text emails. Consider if such email templates are bringing you the best results then it may be useful to continue these actions. Of course, there are industries and types of businesses that should be following such email design approaches due to various regulations. Minimalist emails are usually attractive, clean, and spacious – but it isn’t necessary to create them to be all white or plain-text imitations. Use your brand colors and your brand voice in these email templates.
Colors and Contrasts
Some B2B companies can be more innovative with their email designs. Thinking of colors and contrasts in your marketing emails can attract attention and generate engagement – go through a few A/B tests and evaluate your results. Emails are getting more sophisticated, and you can see more integrated animation in B2B emails as well. Here’s another interesting animated email from Adobe:
B2B Email Marketing: Going Beyond Just a Newsletter
There are many emails and sequences that you can use for your B2B marketing. They have different functions like boosting sales, generating or nurturing leads, and even increasing brand recognition. Expand your email marketing to include these different kinds of emails to engage with your B2B email subscribers.
