When it comes to marketing, there are many different strategies you can choose from for brand lead generation or driving sales conversion driving. Hopefully, you already know what your goals are, who you are targeting, who is your ideal customer, follower, business partner. What you don’t know up front is which communication channels to choose to get the most out of your campaign.
There’s one thing every marketer needs to know: While not all of your potential customers are on social media or are avid blog readers, virtually all of them use their email regularly. Also, when it comes to B2B, email is still the fastest and most effective communication channel for receiving and transmitting data. Therefore, email marketing can still be profitable and effective, in case you know what you are doing and how to tailor your strategy to your audience.
Here you can find some email marketing tips that I hope will help my colleagues when doing B2B marketing. But first, let’s talk about the concept.
What is B2B Marketing?
Business-to-business marketing or B2B marketing, as it is commonly known, involves selling the products of one business to other businesses by meeting their needs. To better understand this concept, let’s say you have a textile company. To reach your customers, you need to reach out to them and at the same time promote your valuable and professional business.
Who are your clients? Well, you can sell the raw materials directly, in your store or other stores and I am sure there are enough enthusiasts who prefer to buy raw materials and tailor their own clothes. However, you will sell more if you market your business to other businesses that depend on the types of products you are producing. For example, you can market your products to specialized companies that produce finished products from your raw materials.
This is called a B2B marketing campaign.
Why Should All Businesses Create a Viable B2B Email Marketing Strategy?
I’m sure most of you are pondering the question above. Why should you create a dedicated B2B email marketing strategy ? What are the benefits and how can that strategy help my company, or the company I work for? Well, let’s take a look at some numbers shared by Vital Design .
1. According to your report, no less than 72% of B2B buyers are willing to share helpful content via email . This means that your emails are not static and do not end up in a spam folder. If people in your target audience receive them, there is a good chance that they will also share some of your content via email with other people in your “social group.” In other words, your emails will be forwarded, it is something similar to what you share on a social network.
2. For every dollar spent on an email marketing campaign, you get a return on investment of $ 44. This is a huge number, considering that other traditional marketing platforms cannot offer such numbers. For example, influencer marketers pay no more than $ 6.5 for every dollar spent, a rate almost 7 times less than what we can achieve with a successful email marketing campaign. However, this does not mean that you should forget about all other types of marketing and branding. It means that email marketing should not be neglected. It is effective and as we will see in this article, it is easy to implement.
Tips for a Successful B2B Email Marketing Strategy
Now that we know that email marketing is effective when it comes to B2B sales and B2B lead generation, let’s dive a little deeper and talk about some more important things to know before embarking on a journey like this:
1. Think About Your Customers and Understand the Differences
B2B marketing, although somewhat similar to direct marketing, is not the same. Customers behave differently and make different decisions. B2B marketing is targeting a more rational audience. How? Regular customers are sometimes less informed about what they are buying, they are susceptible to whims and recklessness.
On the other hand, business customers know what they need up front. They don’t base their purchasing decisions on whims or indulgences. Instead, they are making rational decisions based on what they need and value for money. As a consequence, when targeting business customers, you need to take into account the fact that they are different and act differently from regular customers.
What types of customers should be addressed with B2B marketing?
- First, there are companies that use their products to produce other goods. For example, a company that uses textile materials to produce T-shirts and other products.
- Second, there are companies that use their products for office automation or other secondary tasks. For example, a company that buys computers, paper, or pens from you.
- Third, there are government agencies and institutions (hospitals and schools) that can be chosen as potential consumers if their products meet their needs. To them for example, you can sell anything computers, soap and toilet paper.
- Finally, we have reseller companies that buy their products only to redistribute them to other customers. Here, we include local stores, but also brokers and wholesalers.
Now that you know what B2B sales is and who your offering is targeting, you can go ahead and create your first email newsletter. Here are some important things to keep in mind.
2. Pay Attention to the Email Header
This is the most important visual aspect of your email campaign. If you want B2B sales, you need content that’s right for your audience, but first, you need to grab their attention in some way. This is what your banner should do.
Considering that the average office worker receives 121 emails daily , they have only seconds to grab their attention. This means that you need to convey a clear message, right in the header section , the first thing your audience notices when they open your email.
What do you need? A clear vision of what your banner should look like, you need your logo to be visible so that your audience can recognize you and you will also need a tool to generate and design that banner. It should save time while still looking professional. To achieve that, I recommend that you use an online tool like Bannersnack, which has a great variety for creating great looking email banners .
3. Content Marketing Starts with the Title and the Subject Line
Think especially of the subject line, as if it were the only line of text in your email. Why? When the email you sent lands in your customer’s inbox, the first thing they’ll notice is your subject line. You don’t get more than a few seconds for them to be curious about your offering, and that’s why you need to tell them everything they need to know from there.
On the other hand, the title is also important, you have to get the customer to open the email. The subject line will make your audience click and open the email and as a consequence, the title should convince them to read the rest of your content. And don’t forget about little CTR tricks, like adding an emoji. Which of the following 5 emails stands out? 😉
4. Don’t Direct Your Email to a CEO
Considering that your goal is to generate B2B sales and leads, you should know that not all decision makers for your target audience have the same roles in their companies. I know that initially you want to contact the CEO of the companies you have targeted in your campaign directly, but this is not always the best option. Why?
Let’s say you want to sell office automation products. There are institutions that need these products, but there are also large companies, local stores, sole proprietorships, etc. There are different types of people who are in charge of supplying such goods to their companies.
They all have different educational backgrounds, different social statuses. You will be addressing the CEO, business owners, and perhaps even your employees, and this is why you need to create a message that is easy for anyone to understand.
5. Create Your Content
You have a header template, a theme, and maybe a title for your newsletter. Now is the time to give your audience something of value to read. It’s time to create content that will generate B2B sales and leads.
Things to consider at this point:
- Content is important even if you are only promoting products. In this case, the most valuable content will be the description of the content that you will write for your newsletter.
- Pick evergreen themes . If you want to add more to your email than just product descriptions, consider creating evergreen valuable content relevant to your audience. The best pieces of text, in this case, are those that manage to answer questions, tips and tricks, articles and advice that your audience can apply in their own lives or businesses. It’s important to aim not only to win new customers but also to keep existing stakeholders, considering that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.
- Make sure the content is unique . People listen to different types of music because music makes them feel a certain way. They buy specific brands of footwear for the same reasons. They choose things based on their ability to trigger some emotions or rational thinking that they need to buy them – nothing differs when it comes to content. You need something unique, something to tell your audience that you not only made an effort for this but also have something valuable to give them.
- Choose quality over quantity . You don’t need a novel to send a message. The length of your newsletter should not be a concern, always constantly remember that what you deliver should be of high quality and not too informative. You can create very short email newsletters and get a better RSI if your message is effective. Efficiency, in this case, means that you must express yourself in as few words as possible, that your texts and images are professionally composed and processed, that your style is properly adjusted for the type of audience you are trying to convince to buy your product.
- Make the content easy to read . There are some people who like to read long articles or large blocks of text, especially people targeted here are people who receive a lot of other emails every day and don’t have time to pay attention to all of them. That is why you must ensure that your message is legible and understandable. Use headings and subtitles, periods and highlight the most important data. Use short sentences and paragraphs and make sure you have enough white space
6. Select Your Delivery Service
There are many Email Service Providers (ESP) available, and while many of them offer professional services, not all are good for you. You’ll have to do some research and evaluate the more notable ESPs. My advice is to find a list of the best services like this and study each of the ten most trusted ESPs before deciding on one or the other.
7. Authenticating your Domain
Finishing up in the spam folder can dramatically decrease the total number of emails opened, which in turn affects the number of clicks on your website. One way to improve your opens and delivery rate is by authenticating your domain.
How Much Can Email Authentication Impact? Kinsta had a customer who switched DNS providers and his newsletter immediately went to the spam folder for almost a month before anyone noticed. This was due to the lack of authentication records.
By going straight to spam, their open rate decreased by 4.79% from the previous month and their click-through rate decreased by 1.56% . This is why you don’t want to end up in the spam folder and why email authentication is important.
conclusion
Email marketing has proven over the years to be an effective marketing strategy, regardless of whether it targets individual customers or business customers.
You can rely on email marketing to drive B2B sales, and this article was designed to shed some light on the most important steps to check on your list before starting your campaign.
What do you think about B2B email marketing? Did you try such a strategy and how successful was it? How many of these email marketing tips did you check on your list?
