The world sends about 196 billion emails daily, according to the Radicati Group’s Email Statistics Report. Of those 196 billion emails, the majority (109 billion) are business-related. With the rapid and ongoing migration of business activities from traditional to digital platforms moving forward, the number of worldwide business email accounts are expected to continue growing at an even faster rate.
This fast-paced digital world means our inboxes are constantly receiving new emails from the brands and people who know us–and lots of spam from senders who do not. In response, we are quickly skimming through lots of emails to decide which ones we actually want to read and which ones we should just mark as ‘read’ or simply delete. This frustration might dissuade B2B marketers from considering email an important part of their marketing strategy.
Underestimating the potential rewards of a great B2B email strategy would be a mistake. Why? Because email remains a powerful marketing tool that continues to be the main driver of customer retention and acquisition for small-to-midsize or larger B2B businesses.
So, if email marketing has the potential to deliver significant value and ROI for your business, how can you develop and craft your email campaigns, so they are received, opened, viewed, and acted upon by your recipients?
Why is Email Marketing Effective for B2B Companies?
A new study says 59% of B2B companies do not use email marketing effectively. However, on average, B2B companies send out one email marketing campaign every 25 days. Creating a strong email marketing strategy helps B2B companies reach and connect with target audiences in a personalized way to increase sales and lead generation at an affordable cost.
Just as other platforms and media have changed, the latest email marketing tools give your business the ability to reach customers easier and with more precision than ever. Email has repeatedly demonstrated that it is the most effective digital channel at driving ROI for B2B organizations. Therefore, it’s shocking that over half of all B2B organizations are missing out on the benefits of email as a revenue-generating channel.
There are numerous reasons email delivers results for B2B businesses:
1. Every business and individual uses email.
Email presents an incredible opportunity to reach any kind of customer because it has become so ubiquitous across the daily lives of both people and businesses. A recent Hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email–and businesses themselves are full of consumers, after all. That statistic alone should be enough to convince B2B marketers to explore the potential value of email as a marketing tool for prospecting and customer engagement.
2. Email reaches customers in real-time.
According to a recent survey by Litmus, 54% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. This is significant and explains why the nuances of your email’s mobile experience should come into play when planning any email marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails, but all other types of media and information. That’s why well-designed emails that are optimized for mobile screens and email clients produce higher conversion rates on mobile than any other medium.
3. Emails can be timelier and more relevant.
Email marketing strategies for B2B companies can incorporate seasonal offers, allowing you to promote a holiday special or an annual sale, or to reward customers who reach important milestones in your business relationship. This is particularly effective if your emails create a sense of urgency–customers are much more likely to reply or initiate a new purchase when a deal is ending soon.
4. Email is more affordable.
As with any form of marketing, email requires an upfront investment in strategy–but unlike channels such as PPC or social media that require budget and continuous spending to produce results, B2B marketers can send targeted and customized emails that reach a vast number of prospects and customers for less than pennies per message. This makes the possible cost-per-conversion so low with email marketing that B2B companies can’t afford not to at least consider sending email campaigns more often.
5. Emails nurture warm prospects to become leads.
Your pool of potential customers is all at different stages of the buying cycle. Some may be in the consideration stage, not fully sure whether they need or want your solution; others may be at the research and comparison stage, knowing they have a problem to solve but not quite sure which is the best solution for them; and others will be fully informed and mostly ready-to-purchase. Creating email content for each of your buyer personas can help you determine the best email to send for each stage of the funnel.
6. Email helps brands stay top-of-mind.
Social media isn’t the only platform that helps a company’s brand awareness. Possessing a customer or prospect’s email address means one thing: they showed a level of interest in your business. Email marketing gives you the ability to increase that interest level, that brand awareness, by staying top of mind.
7. Emails are measurable, trackable, and easy to produce.
Email marketing is easy to measure. Most email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, and open rates
8. Email supports existing customers and partners.
Business emails have the ability to keep your customers informed. Consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient for them. It can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them. Those that have signed up to your email list have already made a commitment to receive updates. So, they will likely enjoy these emails and it will boost engagement with your customers as long as you follow best practices and give them something worth reading.
Best Practices for B2B Email Marketing
Business emails are incredibly powerful. Estimates say that a third of customers use a website or purchase something from seeing an email in their inbox (after due considerations). That’s the power of email to establish contacts. B2B marketers can achieve the same success by following the best practices for email marketing and evolving their email strategy over time.
1. Perform Thorough Audience Research
B2B is all about buying/selling products/services or exchanging information between multiple business entities. This should reflect how well you understand your target audience. Therefore, knowing your target audience becomes more critical in B2B email marketing. The key strategy to have an effective lead nurturing process is to take your potential prospects through a unique journey of all the three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision making.
2. Target Specific Buyer Personas
During the B2B process, one person does not make a purchase decision. A group of individuals that form the so-called Decision-Making Unit (DMU) are involved. You should be able to evaluate your target audience and understand the DMU (Decision Making Unit) to distinguish the decision-makers from the “gatekeepers” for any group of contacts within each company you are targeting.
Directing the email exclusively to the profile of the person you believe is responsible for making the final decision regarding the specific activities related to your product, or to the person at the top of the company, is a rather widespread mistake. Remember: In B2B marketing, it is almost never a single individual making a decision about purchases from end to end.
Realize that each member of the DMU will examine your email campaigns from their point of view. So, it is essential to adapt the message of each email accordingly. All marketers say they would like to segment more Every professional profile has different pain points. In fact, a financial director will have different needs and concerns than a technical director or marketing director. The fact that 58% of marketers don’t use buyer personas is surprising, as this approach to segmentation has proved successful. Potential buyer personas to personalize the company’s email campaigns can help conversions to increase multi-fold with specific target marketing and strategic planning.
Emails that best suit the different pain points will produce the best performance at the level of clicks, involvement, and conversions.
3. Perform Regular List Maintenance
Segmentation and the removal of inactive or unengaged contacts are a part of maintaining an active email list with subscribers that have value for your B2B organization.
The Value of List Segmentation
As your business grows, your need for multiple conditions and parameters for segmentation will also grow. It’s likely you’ll want to segment your recipients in various ways across their lifecycle, as they have different needs at different points of their customer journeys or for different products and personas.
Segmentation can be based on using attributes like company size, industry, and revenue to define your email lists. Segmenting your subscribed audience by known interests and communication preferences, can deliver an email experience that’s more personally resonant as well as relevant – something that will increase the likelihood that the recipient will do something with that content, such as sharing it or responding to it.
Removing Inactive or Unengaged Subscribers
Regularly maintaining your contact list is a best practice and highly recommended. Over time, opt-in contact lists can become stale or ineffective if contacts abandon their email addresses or grow disinterested in your content. The purpose of “cleaning” your contact list is to identify and remove contacts that are inactive or not engaged by your recent emails. This helps in the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) of your email campaign
4. Use Reporting That Makes Sense of the Data
Email marketing is one of the most measurable marketing tactics. You can track everything from who opened and clicked your campaigns to where the subscriber lives and which links, they clicked on. But this can be overwhelming if you don’t narrow the focus of your reporting on just the information that has value for your specific B2B email marketing strategy.
Typical KPIs (Open rates, click rates, etc.)
When you send campaigns only to active, engaged contacts your engagement metrics such as open and click rates improve. This signals to inbox providers (like Gmail, Microsoft, etc.) that your emails are welcomed by recipients. In turn, your deliverability improves, and your campaigns will be even more successful. Just as you analyze your campaigns after they’ve been sent, you need to examine your automations and email journeys regularly to see what’s working and what needs improvement.
Viewing Email Traffic in Website Analytics
Detailed analytics allow you to uncover where your most active subscribers are coming from and how their engagement with your content varies, helping you create a plan for developing a highly effective and profitable email marketing strategy. It also helps evaluate how landing pages support conversion.
It should be no surprise that, if your list growth is stagnant, your wider audience is probably not interested in your messaging. Monitor how your list grows over time to ensure a captive audience. A growing list is a good sign of a healthy list. Understanding the portion of your subscriber base that is active, disengaged, or unsubscribing is incredibly important to develop a strategy that supports a healthy balance of growth and engagement. The processes of collecting and reporting data insights may seem like tedium in some cases, but it offers great potential. The insights you gather are the foundation of your marketing strategy and your guide for tracking your progress.
Strategies to Grow Email Subscriber Lists
Building your list of email subscribers is an ongoing process, and there are a few strategies that will help you effectively grow your list with engaged readers:
1. Effective Website CTAs
This is not to replace or take precedence over your lead generation CTAs. At the end of each blog post, however, include a secondary CTA inviting the reader who has just finished reading the post to sign up for regular updates via email.
2. Organic Social Media Posts
Most B2B brands are solely focused on generating emails through their own site using newsletter sign-ups and calls to action on blog posts and ebooks. For example, LinkedIn can be used as a channel to build and nurture professional relationships. It can also be used as a marketing channel for B2B brands looking to connect with their target audience through what is still considered the preferred social network for business.
3. Leveraging Facebook Groups
With over 2.6 billion active monthly users, Facebook is the undisputed champion when it comes to social networks. Did you know that it’s also the channel where B2B decision makers spend the majority of their time online each month? Knowing which Facebook Groups your prospects spend their time in will both present an opportunity to both promote your newsletter (assuming it’s within the admin’s rules for the Group) and to gather insights on what topics are resonating with that audience and getting them to engage, helping you plan content for your emails and CTAs.
4. Social Media Ads
Since B2B purchases are less influenced by impulses or discounts, there’s more room for relationships to grow into an eventual transaction, and the first touchpoint from online advertising can be crucial in securing a new solid lead and increasing the database of prospects. That’s why advertising for B2B businesses is not just focused on lead generation, but also building brand awareness. To that end, LinkedIn and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter offer a handful of paid media products that brands can use to place their email newsletter promotion in front of their target audience.
5. Signups at Virtual or In-Person Events
Events such as webinars and virtual trade shows along with product launches etc are yet another tool for B2B lead generation. These business activities are conducted on a regular ongoing basis (even under the present circumstances in the pandemic) through virtual trade shows and online webinars. Taking established trade show best practices and adapting them for an online audience with virtual events is the changing trend. This lead generation activity helps increase your email list much easier as a replacement to in-person events, as they offer lead generation, branding and networking opportunities – much more conveniently, and without travel, hotel and other operational costs.
6. Gated Content Downloads
Gated content is a strategy used by many B2B companies to give away good and meaningful content to get some good leads in exchange. Gated content for any inbound practice is free; it is only made available against an exchange of information. The very reason for hiding content is to generate leads. When a user comes over to a website and is about to download an asset; it will ask the visitor to fill up a form. This form is crucial information for the marketer to capture the lead. A lead that is eager enough to download an asset could probably be a good lead. Gated content cannot be directly accessed, and one can get it only after exchanging some important information like email contacts and other relevant information. Downloads of product information, white papers and other lead generation activities thus increases your subscription list.
Conclusion
Email is constantly evolving, and it continues to become more and more sophisticated with time, thanks to market intelligence, automation, artificial intelligence, the need for compliance with new data privacy regulations, and more innovations sure to come moving forward. While it may sound hopeless with the majority of companies failing at email marketing, their lack of results actually presents you with an opportunity to get it right and beat your competitors with smart email campaigns.
Armed with the knowledge presented and the best practice tips we’ve included above, you now have everything you need to stand out from the competition and leverage email marketing as part of your overall B2B marketing efforts the right way.
