Email Marketing

The Ultimate Guide to B2B Email Marketing in 2023

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An effective B2B marketing strategy won’t be complete without email marketing. It’s one of the prominent channels that you must look into. Do you know that over 59% of B2B marketers find that email is an effective channel for revenue generation? Also, HubSpot agrees that it’s one of the best ways for B2B lead generation. As it has become a prominent way for businesses to generate a lead, businesses are hiring an email marketing agency for their brand. These agencies help businesses to establish B2B email marketing more effectively.

Are you still unsure whether you would implement a B2B email marketing channel for your business? Here are some examples and study that may change your view towards it:

  • Almost 87% of business-to-business marketers swear that their topmost organic distribution path is also free.
  • B2B emails get more clicks than B2C email marketing, and the rate is 47% higher.
  • For communicating business purposes, almost 93% of the B2B professionals choose email over other channels.
  • For every $1 spent, email marketing generates revenue of $44.
  • Customer retention rate increases with email marketing.

Now, you probably have realized how much impact B2B email marketing can bring in your business when you leverage it smartly. Here’s a complete guide on B2B email marketing:

What And Why Of B2B Email Marketing

B2B or business-to-business email marketing refers to sending marketing campaigns via email to professionals or businesses. This marketing strategy is not created for individual customers or consumers.

So, why are businesses focusing on B2B email marketing? It is the most powerful channel to reach out to other businesses, and you get to control your audience. When you are campaigning through other digital platforms, you lose the power of choosing your audience due to the platforms. We are talking about platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. It creates pressure on your brand as you may get banned from any social media site for no reason. If social media bans your page, you will lose all of your audience in a moment. But when you have a connection via email to various businesses, you have a backup for your brand. A dedicated online email marketing team can help you generate more revenue with an effective strategy.

What’s The Difference Between B2B Vs. B2C Email Marketing?

Even though the audience for both B2B and B2C email marketing are people, B2B marketing is directed towards the professionals. There are few differences that set apart the impact of B2B email marketing over B2C email marketing:

Logic Over Emotion

B2B professionals take their time before responding to any email, unlike the quick response from B2C customers. Therefore, the B2C emails must serve an emotional factor in them. The emails must trigger the right emotion among the recipients so that they make the purchase immediately. But in the B2B buying process, you won’t get instant actions from B2B recipients. After all, B2B decisions follow logical information over emotions. When you provide effective information about your services, products, and solution it will provide, the B2B recipients will evaluate it better.

Decision-Making Process

B2B buying decisions take a long time, as mentioned above, as no one individual would take the decision even if he/she has the power. Before making any decision, he/she must consult the immediate department for such purchases. After all, B2B purchases are not for individuals, unlike B2C purchases. When it is a B2B purchase, it can affect many departments inside an organization based on products and services. You have to prepare an email sequence with a long lifecycle. With a long-term email marketing strategy, you can keep your brand on their mind so that they make the decision of purchasing.

Tone of Voice

For B2C email marketing, the email style can be informal as you are trying to trigger an emotional response. So, you can use humor and emojis; it helps establish a friendly relationship with the prospects. But B2B emails are for decision-makers of target companies. Therefore, it is advisable to keep the tone of the email formal. If you can use humor without dismantling their focus from the main focal points, only then use it. You want to retain their attention for the offerings of your brand and not for fun and humor. A good email marketing agency establishes the right tone of B2B emails before it reaches the B2B recipients.

Timing

For email marketing success, timing plays the key factor in both B2C and B2B markets. It impacts the email open-rates as well as click-through-rates(CTR). So, what’s the difference between the B2B and B2C recipients? It’s the timing. A B2B recipient may check their work emails all throughout the day, but B2C consumers may check the personal mails when they are free from work. B2C consumers can be available to check their personal email when they are on a break, but they, as B2B recipients, might not check the emails during working hours. You have to find a balance to find the best time to approach your prospects with B2B email marketing.

B2B Email Marketing Strategy

Now you have a better understanding of B2B email marketing and know its difference from B2C email marketing. However, everyone is trying to reach their prospects via online email marketing. So, you must have a full-proof strategy on how you are going to retrieve success from it, or else it won’t be able to impact. Here are the steps that will lead your brand to success with B2B email marketing:

Define Brand’s Target Audience

You must define your brand’s target audience before starting email marketing campaigns. So, which industries you want to target? Are there specific companies that you want to connect to via B2B email marketing? When you have created a list of your ideal customers and identified various personas of your customers, you will have the upper hand. It will allow you to create personalized content for the target audience.

Define The Goals And KPIs

When it’s about setting the goals for the brand, you must ensure that each goal has relation to the big picture. In case you have already set goals for every other channel, it will be easy to set them for email marketing too. But goals should be SMART. If the goals don’t match the SMART strategy, you may want to re-evaluate the goals. You would want to add numbers to give yourself a clear picture of your target. It will allow you to compare with previous campaigns.

As you have already set the goals, it’s time to select goal-related metrics for tracking their performances via email marketing. We know these metrics as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Based on your goals, the KPIs vary.

Build Email List For The Brand

You can’t send emails if you don’t have a dedicated email list of potential leads or customers. Therefore, to create a list, you must make areas that will make the prospects sign up to your mailing list. You can use lead magnets, pop-up forms, and bars to reach customers. Don’t forget to identify the visitors who leave the sites without signing up. You can then later cold email campaigns and make them sign up to your email list.

Segmentation Of Email Contacts

When you have an email list, you must know that each contact falls under a different stage. So, you can’t send a common email to every contact. Your emails should be relevant and personalized based on their needs. It’s more about sending the right information at the right time than bombarding your prospects with irrelevant emails. When they feel that you provide relevant information at the moment of their need, they will take action.

Write Email Sequence For Different Contact Segments

As you have created various segments of the email contacts, you have to send relevant information about your products and/or services to your subscribers. It will be easy to create an email sequence for each segment so that contacts learn more about the services and products they want to know. Sequencing email will make your life easier as each mail will be meaningful to the new subscribers and not random.

Schedule Email Delivery Timing

So, you have mapped all respective segments and email sequences. But have you set up a specific date and time for the follow-up emails? When you schedule the email timing, your audience knows when your mail will hit their email box. You don’t want to send your emails during rush hours because your recipients may not have time to go through them. It can get deleted if it is caught between lots of emails. So, you have to leverage the best timing to get a better response. A dedicated email marketing agency can look after all the email marketing process, giving you time to focus on other essential parts of the business.

Analyze And Optimize

Your work is not complete unless you evaluate whether the online email marketing strategy is working as per your goals. You have to look into the data and keep optimizing the email marketing campaigns. What are the open rates and CTAs of your B2B emails? How many people have unsubscribed? It will help you create more relevant content with a better subject line, so people make decisions based on it.

Top B2B Email Marketing Tools

Finally, you have fixed your decision on starting B2B email marketing for your brand. But which is the best online email marketing tool that you can utilize and execute the above strategies?

Right now, the email marketing industry has 3 top email marketing tools that also come with automation features. These tools have some useful features that users can reap benefits from:

GetResponse

Do you want to present your contacts with tailor-made offers via email? GetResponse, an email marketing tool, is here at your service. With few easy steps, you can establish a successful email marketing strategy.

GetResponse comes with useful features that can benefit your B2B marketing strategy. Webinar hosting, paid Facebook ads, conversion funnel creation, etc., are a few useful features to build an email list and utilize the platform well.

ActiveCampaign

As the most advanced B2B email marketing and automation tool, ActiveCampaign is great. It allows you to automate the journey of leads from their first encounter on your website to the existence of your brand’s ecosystem.

You also get a Free Sales CRM. Therefore, you can manage contacts and assign special deals to team members while automating sales sequences. The tool offers a form builder and a drag-and-drop landing page that you can leverage to build an email list.

ConvertKit

Do you have a CRM for managing your contacts and want a dedicated tool for only email marketing? Then ConvertKit is the perfect alternative to GetResponse and ActiveCampaign. By using Zapier along with your CRM, you can integrate ConvertKit.

With ConvertKit, you can create email forms and landing pages for capturing leads. When individuals sign in to a website, ConvertKit nurtures them with email automation.

Be it B2B or B2C, the email marketing channel is extremely powerful to maintain a conversation with potential prospects and customers. Most importantly, the engagement stays throughout their lifecycle with your brand via email. You can hire one of the best email marketing agencies to look after all the aspects of email marketing for your brand.

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