If you're transitioning from being consumer-oriented to B2B (business-to-business) email marketing, either because you've decided to sell exclusively to businesses or have added new products/services for businesses, it's essential to adapt your email strategies for effective and profitable B2B campaigns.
Successful B2B campaigns thrive on personalized email marketing tactics that cater to businesses, each with unique needs. Unlike B2C campaigns that can require a broader approach to include everyone, B2B strategies demand a more tailored approach.
Not to worry, though. Here are five B2B email marketing tips you can follow to enhance your marketing efforts and generate more leads or convert businesses into paying customers:
1. Identify and Profile Your Target Clients
B2B campaigns may target multiple individuals with different roles and responsibilities in a company. For this reason, the first email marketing best practice is to create a customer persona, profiling your target clients. Consider their values and what they do in the company.Unlike B2C campaigns, B2B email marketing appeals to a business frame of mind by targeting the needs and interests of business executives purchasing products to impact their company’s bottom line. To identify and profile the right clients, first, create your target market and include the following data in your buyer persona:
- Firmographics: These are descriptive attributes of your buyers’ organizations, including company size, years of operation, annual revenue, etc.
- Geographic location: The value prospects place on different aspects of products or services varies by geography, resources, and industry focus.
- Needs and behaviors of ideal buyers: In a typical B2B buying process, you’ll need to profile the people involved and their roles to influence buying decisions. Are they the influencers, decision-makers, or technical buyers? What key talking points or touch points need to be addressed?
Remember, business clients are clear on what they need from the start and will make rational buying decisions based on the quality versus price ratio. Therefore, consider the different B2B buyer profiles involved in the buying process and expand your ideal customer profile to include the roles each target client plays.With this in mind and the help of email newsletter platforms, which we’ll discuss in a moment, you can create a more tailored email marketing plan.
2. Write a Compelling Subject Line
According to Invesp, 69% of email recipients report emails as spam based on the subject line. That’s why it’s so important to get your subject line right. Business people skim through emails daily. The only way to get them to notice yours is to make your email subject line catchy, compelling, and straight to the point.Keep your titles short and state the purpose of the email upfront. Depending on the target profile you’re messaging, you can write a non-clickbait, teaser subject line like this example below.
Personalization is a great way to increase your subject line's relevance. Strong subject lines tap into the prospect’s intent to build curiosity and help improve email open rates and the overall success of your campaign.Generative AI tools are great for writing compelling subject lines. AI can give you a great starting point with tons of subject line ideas based on simple prompts related to your email campaign.
3. Include a Clear CTA and other vital elements
A strong call-to-action (CTA) helps to eliminate confusion in your emails. CTAs serve as a beacon of clarity within your emails, providing direction to your B2B audience on the next steps to take after engaging with your message.For a CTA to be effective, we recommend keeping it concise and straightforward. Something as simple as “click here,” “sign up,” or even “watch the video,” can be enough to entice action. However, avoid using multiple CTAs within your email. Ideally, one or two should be fine. This ensures that your audience can fully concentrate on your email's content and, most importantly, the specific action aligned with your campaign's objectives.See how Zendesk does it.
In the Zendesk example above, the email copy has two CTAs that call the recipient to action — “click here to verify your email address” and “sign in to your Zendesk.” These CTAs are friendly and accurately reflect what the marketer wants the client to do.
Another vital email marketing tip is to avoid using a sense of urgency in your B2B outreach campaigns. This sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense. Unlike B2C email marketing, B2B emails should be professional and respectful of your recipient’s time. Use skimmable email content. Go straight to the point. This is so much better than trying to trick your audience with urgency triggers.
Remember, B2B customers tend to be more logical and less emotional.
4. Segment Your Audience
Segmentation is another B2B email marketing tip you shouldn’t overlook. Segmentation allows you to group B2B subscribers, business prospects, and customers into smaller groups based on specific criteria or where they are in the buyer journey.
Most email service providers have built-in segmentation tools that let you create segmented lists and target each group with tailored content. This ensures you only send out highly customized or personalized emails based on user activity or interest, not generic email content. Here are some ways to segment your audience based on their engagement with your business: Start by gauging your audience's interest level. For example, if they respond well to a particular email campaign, then there’s reason to believe they’re interested in that offering.
- Prospects with fewer engagements could receive free e-books and white papers with zero marketing language.
- The most engaged group could receive full-on marketing emails that address their unique needs.
Of course, you can also use other criteria to segment your audience. The bottom line is you must put your audience into subgroups based on each individual’s interest or activity and tailor email content to suit them.
5. Tap Into Automation
Email automation takes your B2B email marketing campaign to the next level. For starters, it guarantees that your emails are dispatched at the optimal moments. For instance, you can choose the specific triggers that deploy particular email campaigns. This can be configured based on factors such as firmographics, buyer behaviors, or specific actions taken by your audience.This is an example of how Hubspot uses automated bulk emails to welcome new businesses using their CRM:
Marketing automation platforms allow you to get even more nuanced with email automation. With platforms like GetResponse, for example, you could set up an automatic email campaign to be deployed when customers hit a particular milestone. This not only fosters stronger customer relationships but also enhances conversion rates, ultimately amplifying the return on investment (ROI) of your email marketing efforts.
Time to put our B2B email marketing tips to the test
The B2B email marketing tips in this article are only as effective as you make them. It might take some time and effort to get the engines rolling, but it’s worth it. First, understand and segment your target market. That will ensure your ideal customer profile is well aligned with industry standards and satisfies the pain points of big players in the market. Improve your chances of conversion by tailoring each email to suit a specific target profile in an organization. Pair this with a clear CTA and a compelling subject line and use automation tools to optimize your ROI.
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