Boost your business bottom line with actionable B2B email marketing tips

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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

B2B email marketing is a lot beyond those promotional emails that you come across from ecommerce brands. While such emails are only about enticing the user to make the purchase with offers and discounts, B2B email marketing is about persuading a business owner that your product or service will add more value to their business. You must convince the readers that by availing of your services, they will be able to streamline their business and acquire more customers.

Take a look at these statistics that clearly demonstrate the efficiency of B2B email marketing.

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Source

Through this article, we shall delve deeper into how you can employ email marketing to make the best of your business.

1. Segment your target audience by learning more about them.

To create an effective email marketing campaign, you must understand your target audience. Determine the B2B customer personas that will be an ideal business customer for you. In order to do so, you must ask the right questions to the prospective customers while they are filling up the opt-in form.

For instance: You must ask them about the challenges that they are facing and the goals that they wish to achieve. Also, try to get information about how your product or service will be of maximum use to them.

You must even have details about their business type and industry along with the designation.

Based on these answers, you must segment your email list. Doing so will ensure that your subscribers are receiving the most relevant emails that will be valuable for them.

2. Personalize your emails to make the subscribers feel special.

After segmentation, you will be able to send out tailormade emails according to the answers the subscribers have provided.

Addressing the user with their first name is the foundation of email personalization. However, to make your message more engaging for the B2B customer, you must go a step ahead and personalize your email with what the subscribers want to know about.

For example: If someone has inquired about SEO services from your digital marketing agency, you must send out emails that share more information about how you would help them boost their rank on search engines.

3. Add attractive visuals to make your message more impactful.

Without imagery, your message will look boring and fail to impress the reader. Therefore, you must add relevant visuals that support the email copy. Using visuals will also help you to keep the email copy concise and still convey the message.

You can use illustrative images, animations, and explainer videos to let the subscribers know more about the services you offer. Instead of having a long paragraph explaining the usage of your products, you can simply add rich media to your emails for better communication.

4. Let your emails tell a story.

Storytelling is the key to powerful communication. Through your B2B emails, you must try to win the subscriber’s heart with a story.

For example: You can share your brand story with the new subscribers through the welcome email. Let them know how you started and evolved through time.

Alternatively, you can use visuals to do so.

Here’s how Moo has used the power of an interactive visual to tell a story to their subscribers.

Moo - email

The landing page continues the story by popping the balloon and revealing the discount offer. Now, that’s a cool idea, right?

Moo - landing page

5. Automate the email marketing process.

Sending emails manually to each and every subscriber is not possible, and that’s why automation comes into the picture.

Whenever a new subscriber signs up on your list, you must send him or her an automated welcome email that will introduce your brand and express gratitude for joining your list.

Here’s how Wistia celebrates the onboarding of the new user with the help of a welcome email.

Wistia 1

Once you have onboarded the user, you must send out lead nurturing campaigns that will sequentially persuade them to try out your product. It is recommended to have a series of nurture emails so that the users do not forget about you.

Wistia sends out such nurture emails that would inspire the user to take action. 

Wistia 2

See how Wistia has sent out an announcement about extending support to podcasts. Sharing such updates will pique the subscriber’s curiosity and get them to check out your services.

Wistia 3

Additionally, you can incentivize the user and offer them a free trial. That’s a low commitment activity for the subscribers and they will be more receptive towards such emails.

See how Wistia has offered 50% discount on their Pro plan to the users to encourage them to make the purchase.

Wistia 4

In case a customer stops opening your emails or engaging with them for more than six months, it is time to employ the email sunsetting strategy. This means that you must send out a series of re-engagement emails to the dormant users and entice them to take action.

Here’s an example of a re-engagement email by Return Path that allows the user to update their preferences and tempts them to stay subscribed with cute Koala GIFs. 

In case they still do not engage with your emails, you must send a last email informing them that you are unsubscribing and removing them from your list. This will help you to maintain a healthy email list and improve your email deliverability rate too. 

See how Sidekick has sent out a Holiday email subtly informing the subscriber that they are removing him or her from the list.

6. Analyze the metrics and keep optimizing the emails.

Having all your email campaigns in place will not be enough if you do not monitor the performance of your emails. You must keep track of basic metrics like the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and unsubscribe rate. In addition, you must also determine the conversion rate by analyzing the click-to-conversion ratio.

These figures will help you understand whether your subscribers are finding your emails interesting enough. If you are not getting the desired results, you must revamp your email marketing strategy.

You can A/B test different elements of your email like the subject line, personalization, placement of the CTA, and visuals. See what resonates the most with your target audience and then send the version that has got better metrics. 

Wrapping Up

B2B email marketing is challenging because it is not based simply on impulsion but on thoughtful decision making. The tips and examples shared here will surely help you plan your next B2B email campaign better and garner higher conversions.


Disha Bhatt

Disha Bhatt (Dave) is Content Specialist at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing email design and coding companies. She is a dentist, who has found her calling in words & technical subjects. She loves to pen down travelogues and romantic short stories in her free time.

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