B2B Email Marketing Strategies: Crafting High-Converting Campaigns
B2B email marketing is the most used form of content marketing, according to 81% of marketers. If you’re not using the right approach, you’re missing out on:
- Nurturing your list
- Engaging your list
- Converting your list
However, at our agency, we find that most companies don’t know how to leverage cutting-edge B2B email marketing strategies. We’re going to explain what this form of marketing entails and why it’s important for your business to add it to your content marketing strategy.
What is B2B Email Marketing and Why is It Important?
B2B email marketing is different from B2C marketing. Instead of trying to nurture a consumer, you’re trying to nurture a buyer or owner who needs your product or service to solve their pain points.
Someone from the business signs up for your email newsletter and you create a campaign that works to:
- Educate the recipient about your product or service
- Nurture the lead with informative and sales content
- Convert potential leads into sales
With SEO, PPC, social media and other forms of marketing, why would you spend time on email marketing strategies in 2023? These stats explain everything:
- 32 – 45: 1 ROI (Spend $1 and receive $32 – $45 in return, depending on the industry)
- 64% of marketers agree that B2B email marketing is an effective means of reaching their goals
- 81% of marketers find that this form of content marketing is the most effective
If someone has enough interest in your business to sign up for a newsletter, you can be confident that you can effectively market to them time and time again.
Do you need help with your B2B email marketing?
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B2B Email Marketing Strategies: How to Craft High-Converting Campaigns
Email marketing strategies in 2023 remain highly effective and profitable. However, you need to focus more on the email marketing strategies that work and avoid those that are less effective in your niche.
How do you achieve this goal?
Trial and error. You need to try out multiple strategies, learn from your campaign and audience, and refine your approach until your emails engage and convert readers. We recommend that every campaign begins with identifying your target customers.
Let’s see how you can begin identifying your customers.
Identify Your Target Customers
Who is your target customer? If you said, “other businesses,” you’re off to a bad start. You need to sit down and determine who in the business can use your product or service, and who the buyers may include.
Your buyers may include:
- Initiators, or those who signed up for your email list
- Users of your product who may purchase it for work purposes
- Buyers who are responsible for major purchases and work with accounting to maintain strict budgets
- Deciders, who approve a purchase that the buyer recommends
Of course, there are also gatekeepers, such as the owner or VP, who can void a potential sale. These are the individuals you need to reach with your email marketing and who you need to consider when writing every email.
Segment Your List
Campaigns should be segmented. You can segment your list by:
- Business size
- Industry
- Etc.
You can even segment lists by persona so that you can put yourself in the person’s shoes (more on that soon) and craft emails that they’ll love to read.
Put Yourself in the Buyer’s Shoes
You’ve segmented your list, but you’re nowhere near done yet. Now, you need to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and really begin understanding how the person thinks and feels and what pain points they have.
Why is this important?
If you write an email that focuses on the person’s pain points and needs, you’ll:
- Increase click-through rates
- Increase open rates
- Boost conversions
Imagine an email that explains the exact pain points that you have and how the person’s product or service can solve them. If the company writing the email truly understands your needs, they’ll have a much easier time selling you the solution.
Plan Campaigns Around the Customer Journey
To maximize the effectiveness of email marketing, plan your campaign around the customer journey. Taking this approach will ensure that your messages are not only targeting the right people, but also where they are in the buying cycle.
There are four main stages of the customer journey:
- Awareness: The recipient is just learning about your product/services and brand, but they’re not quite ready to make a buying decision yet. Offering eBooks and how-to guides is a great way to move the customer along to the next stage.
- Consideration: At this stage, the recipient is interested in your product/service, but they’re still gathering more information to make their decision. Customer testimonials, case studies and demos are great ways to get these targets to the next stage.
- Decision-making: In this stage, the recipient is considering their budget and the return on investment of your product/service. Offering discounts or free trials may sway them to make a purchase.
- Retention is crucial for any business and is one of the stages that you need to focus on heavily. In this stage, you focus on ways to get subscribers to renew their subscriptions or purchase more of your product. Emails that show new features or how to use your product in new, exciting ways work perfectly.
Once you have a plan for your campaign, it’s time to focus on efficiency.
Automate and Use Templates to Make Campaigns Efficient
Making use of automation and templates will save you time and allow you to focus on creating more engaging content for your campaigns.
You can use automation to:
- Set up drip campaigns that send emails out over a period of weeks
- Add and update contacts
- Segment your subscribers into different lists
Email templates are another valuable tool that will save you time and allow you to reach out to subscribers at opportune moments.
Consider creating templates for:
- Welcome messages
- Thank-you emails
- Surveys
- Gated content delivery
- Case studies and reports
- Newsletters and updates
- Event and webinar announcements
- Unsubscribe
Having templates for these occasions will allow you to send messages automatically when subscribers take certain actions or sign up using different forms on your website.
Focus on Creating Great Subject Lines
One of the most important aspects of creating a great email campaign is crafting great subject lines.
In the B2B sector, effective subject lines are:
- Short enough to be seen in the inbox
- To-the-point
- Reveal the value of your message in the first words
Your targets are busy people. Don’t beat around the bush. Tell them what you’re offering and why they should open your email right in the subject line. Click-bait-ey titles that don’t reveal the message’s value may very well wind up in the spam box.
Personalize and Be Conversational
Personalized email campaigns can increase sales revenue by up to 20%. Personalizing your messages and campaigns allows you to speak to the recipient directly and helps them feel valued.
To personalize email messages and subject lines, you can import fields. For example, you can add the recipient’s name to the message or the company name to the subject line.
The goal is to make the email appear less generalized and more personal in nature.
Along with adding personalization, it’s important to be conversational in your messages. Yes, it is the B2B sector, so some level of professionalism is required. However, you are still talking to a person. Be human in your email content, and you’ll find that your emails will be more engaging and convert higher as a result.
Validate Your Emails
An email marketing campaign can only drive results if your messages are reaching recipients. Bounces and invalid emails will skew the results of your campaign and put your business’s reputation at risk.
Email lists naturally decay by about 22.5% every year. People change jobs. Email accounts are abandoned. People may intentionally or unintentionally enter invalid email addresses in forms.
There are a number of reasons why the email address on your list may be or become invalid.
Validation ensures that the domain name and the rest of the email address are valid and spelled correctly.
Add a Call to Action
The goal of any B2B email marketing campaign is to get decision-makers to take the next step. Adding a call to action, or CTA, to your emails can help you achieve that goal.
A CTA asks the recipient to take an action. Here are some examples of CTAs:
- Learn more
- Schedule a call
- Start your free trial
- Book a demo
- Get access now
Email CTAs have an average click-through rate of 3-5%. If you personalize your CTAs, you’ll see even better results. In fact, personalized call-to-actions perform 202% better compared to standard CTAs.
Measure Your Results and Make Changes as Needed
As with any other marketing activity, it is crucial to measure the performance and results of your email marketing campaigns. Measuring campaign performance will help you identify areas to improve.
Marketing strategies should always be evolving, and that includes B2B email marketing strategies. Small changes to your campaign can have a dramatic effect on open rates and conversions. Always measure and improve your email strategies to maximize the results.
Final Thoughts
In the B2B sector, email remains a high-converting marketing strategy that provides a great return on investment. An estimated 86% of business professionals prefer to communicate via email for business purposes, which makes this strategy even more effective compared to cold calling or other similar strategies.
However, email marketing strategies in 2023 must be carefully planned and carried out strategically. Having the help of an email marketing agency can take your results to the next level.
Learn more about how Supersafe Marketing can help with your B2B email marketing campaign.