Unlock the Power of B2B Email Marketing: 6 Tips to Get Started
February 23, 2023. Written by Keli Dantin.
Are you looking to supercharge your B2B sales efforts? Email marketing is one of the top three most effective marketing channels. In 2020, email marketing software was worth $7.5 billion globally. And by 2027 it’s estimated to reach $17.9 billion. So, if you aren’t utilizing email marketing to grow your business by now, this expected growth is the push you need to get started in 2024.
Email marketing is an effective way for B2B businesses to reach potential customers and build relationships with existing ones. It can be used to nurture leads, build brand awareness, and drive sales.
But getting started can be a challenge.
To help, here are six tips to unlock the power of B2B email marketing and make sure your campaigns are effective.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
The first step in any successful B2B email marketing campaign is to understand your target audience. You need to know who your ideal customer is, and you need to understand their interest, pain points, and needs. This information will help you create content that resonates with your audience.
How do you learn more about your target audience? From your current customers! When working with new clients, my first question is — who are your top three clients and what can you tell me about them?
Demographics - job title, size / location / industry of the company
How did they find you?
What problem did they come to you with?
Why did they say yes to working with you?
Using what you learned about your current clients, you can go out and find more prospects who “look” similar to your current clients. They will likely have the same needs, problems, etc. Then you can tailor your emails to identify precisely how your product / services will address your target audience’s pain points. In other words… wash, rinse, repeat.
Here’s an example from one of my past new client discovery meetings:
My client offers training services. The year before they won a new contract from a CMO that had recently left one of the leading CPG companies in the world and thus left behind a plethora of new hire training resources. The CMO felt my client’s training programs were very similar to what he was used to from his old employer, which is how my client won the contract. Using Apollo.io I found new clients for my client who’s previous employer was that same CPG company. I crafted content telling a similar story. Within one month, my client booked 5 sales meetings with new leads and converted one into a new contract shortly after.
The morale - learn more about your target audience through analyzing customer data (i.e. developing buying personas) and by interviewing client facing members of your organization. Use this data to segment your audiences and create personalized B2B email marketing campaigns for each segment. This will ensure that your emails are more relevant to each user and improve your overall engagement rates.
2. Craft Engaging B2B Email Marketing Subject Lines
The subject line is the first thing your recipients will see when they look at their inbox. It should be attention-grabbing, but also relevant to your content. Regarding length, brevity is key. Aim for a subject line length between 30 and 60 characters or 4-7 words.
The secret ingredient is in crafting a subject line that doesn’t immediately scream, “sales pitch”. Spoiler alert - no one is rushing to open and read a sales email.
Consider your own inbox. Which subject lines draw your attention first and why? Alternatively, which subject lines prompted you to immediately hit delete? Subject lines that look and sound like spam will be immediately discarded. Those emails may not even make it to the inbox to begin with if they are caught by spam filters.
You can also use subject line A/B testing to help you find the most effective subject lines. This involves sending two different versions of the same email to two different groups of recipients and then comparing the results. This will help you identify which subject lines are more successful. Most email marketing software solutions will automatically divide your campaign audience into two different groups. Once each has reached 100 recipients, review the performance metrics and turn off the group that was under performing.
3. Write Effective B2B Email Copy
Once you’ve crafted the perfect subject line, it’s time to move on to the body of the email. Your email copy should be concise, informative, and engaging. It should also be written in a conversational tone and avoid using too much technical jargon.
Avoid the shotgun approach of firing everything you have and hoping one point sticks. That won’t work. Instead pick one focus point (pain point, solution, etc.) per email and stick to just that one. Use subsequent messages to discuss the other points that you feel are important to your pitch. As you learn more about your target audience, you’ll begin to identify what resonates with the different buying personas that make up your target audience.
Look through your own inbox at the cold emails you’ve received and pick out the one that you felt spoke to you the best. This is a great way to learn how to better craft content that resonates. Another suggestion is to look at what made your current clients say yes to that first meeting with you. Target other leads who fit the similar profile of your client with that same messaging.
Always ensure that the email body is easy to read and scan. Break up long blocks of text into smaller paragraphs to make the content more digestible. To get someone to read your email, you have to first catch their attention when they scan it. If they can’t scan it, they won’t be reading it!
Most importantly, keep it short! The overall email should be short, as well as your sentences and paragraphs. A good practice is to go back through your copy and edit out a third of what you’ve written. Short, easy to read emails will generate the best results. The ideal length for cold email content is between 50 and 200 words.
Finally, make sure to include a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your emails. This will encourage the reader to take the desired action, such as signing up for a webinar or agreeing to an introductory call. Your CTA should be clear and specific in order to generate results for your B2B email marketing efforts.
4. Set Up Automated Email Campaigns
Setting up automated email campaigns is an effective way to reach your audience without having to manually send emails, i.e. saving you tons of time.
Most CRM platforms, like Salesforce and HubSpot, include a feature for automating email campaigns. There are also many other subscription-based standalone tools that are budget friendly for B2B email marketing efforts. A few examples are MailChimp, Constant Contact, Smartreach, Apollo, Hunter (this list could go on and on).
I have personally worked with all of these email marketing software solutions and feel Apollo.io is the best value! It serves as a lead gen tool and a CRM tool in addition to email marketing. Think ZoomInfo + Salesforce + MailChimp all in one, but for a MAJOR fraction of the cost of all three. Apollo.io also offers a free trial, check it out.
Using an automated tool ensures you engage with your target audience in a consistent manner to ensure your brand remains relevant. You can also track the results of your automated campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t. This will help you refine your campaigns and improve your overall B2B email marketing strategy.
5. Analyze Email Performance Metrics
Once you’ve launched your B2B email marketing campaign, it’s time to start analyzing your results. This will help you determine what’s working, what needs to be improved, and how you can further optimize your campaigns.
One of the most important metrics to track is your open rate. This will tell you how many people are opening your emails. You can also track your click-through rate, which will tell you how many people are clicking on links in your emails. This will help you determine which emails are the most successful and which leads are most interested in your product/service. One thing to note, many email service providers now have privacy settings in place that keep their opens private. Thus, keep in mind the open rate will likely only be about 80% accurate.
You can also track your unsubscribe rate, which will tell you how many people are opting-out of your emails. This can be an indication that your emails are not relevant to the recipient or that they are receiving too many emails. If this is the case, you should look into refining your content or reducing the frequency of your emails.
One of my favorite metrics to follow is repeat opens (and clicks, when applicable), specifically greater than 5 opens from one single user. Multiple opens indicates a lead that may be almost ready to convert. I’ll typically run this report and reach out to these leads with a very personalized message.
Here’s an article from Hubspot that defines the top email marketing metrics to track.
6. Improve Email Deliverability
For your emails to reach their intended recipients, you need to ensure that they are being delivered to the inbox.
First, you should make sure that your contact list is up-to-date and that their email addresses are valid. You can use a validation tool, like Zero Bounce, to remove any invalid email addresses from your list.
For the body and subject line, avoid using spammy words and phrases. These words can trigger spam filters, which can result in your emails being blocked or sent to the spam folder. You should also avoid using too many exclamation marks, overusing bold, italics and underline tools, words with all capital letters, and too many hyperlinks.
Finally, you should set up email authentication for your domain. This will help prove to email providers that your emails are legitimate and not spam. This will help ensure that your emails are being delivered and not being blocked.
In March of 2024 Gmail launched an update to its bulk sender guidelines meant to crack down on senders who aren’t following the rules. Right now it only applies to email sent to personal gmail accounts, so it doesn’t impact B2B yet. But it’s likely coming.
Lavish Sales & Marketing
Lavish has helped dozens of clients get started with B2B email marketing. Our team is experienced in many of the common SaaS based solutions for generating new leads and executing email campaigns. From finding the right leads in your target market, to writing content personalized for those leads, and then selecting, executing, and managing your B2B email marketing campaigns, we will help you get results. Contact us today if you need some helping getting your email marketing efforts off the ground.
