Best B2B Email Marketing Practices
Reading Time: 5 minutesIn the ever-changing world of marketing, there are always new ways to connect with your B2B customers.
Social media channels are becoming more and more advanced every day, helping companies to engage with their B2B customers. In this ever-changing world, one thing remains true: Email marketing still remains the most powerful marketing strategy.
If you’re wondering just how effective email marketing is, you might be surprised to find out that nearly 60 percent of B2B marketers believe that email is the most effective channel when it comes to generating revenue.
As a B2B marketer, you have the chance to use email as a way to cultivate relationships with prospects, and convert them into customers. In just a short amount of time, consistent emails will help convert new customers into long-term, loyal customers who recommend your business to others.
Before you send out emails, you must have an email marketing strategy in place. Here are some of the best B2B email marketing practices out there that will help to enhance your email campaigns:
Keep Your Email List Relevant
When diving into your email strategy, it is important to have the contact information of those who will benefit from your emails. Building your email list is the first step but, it doesn’t end there. Once you have built an email list, it’s important to maintain that list.
Maintaining your email list is more important than you think. Email lists naturally get smaller each year because of staff turnover, and uninterested or disengaged recipients. It’s important to identify those recipients so that you can make up for lost contacts. By doing so, you will keep your email marketing strategy healthy and successful.
Put Yourself In Buyers Shoes (Buyer personas)
More than likely, you’ve heard of buyer personas. You might even use buyer personas in other areas of your marketing plan.
If the term is new to you, buyer personas are a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research and data. Buyer persona’s help you to understand and relate to an audience that you want to market your products and services to.
B2B buyer personas include information that is relevant to the industry you are targeting. This includes the size of the organization, industry location, job roles, budget, and challenges you can solve.
So why do you need buyer persona’s for your email campaigns? With Buyer Persona’s, you can create the right content in order to connect with your audience. When it comes to creating buyer persona’s in the B2B world, you will want to connect with people in the industry to find out exactly who would be interested in your product and the different challenges they face. You will also want to survey existing customers to gather information about their situation and how you can potentially help them.
Be Purposeful With Email Design
When it comes to crafting emails, email design might be the most enjoyable part. You get to choose the color, as well as the overall look and feel of the email. Who wouldn’t enjoy it?
However, when it comes to B2B email design, the design depends on the type of industry you are in. For instance, the fashion industry will require a completely different design than the medical industry. But considering these emails are going to other businesses, the design will also be a bit different because it is more professional. If you’re unsure about the design, you might want to consider working with an email design service that can create the template you’re looking for.
Be Considerate of Cold Emails
If you choose to send cold emails, it can deliver the results you are looking for if it is done correctly. Before sending cold emails, do a bit of research to ensure that the people you are emailing fit in with the buyer persona you have developed.
Also, even though this is a “cold email” and most likely your first time connecting with the individual, you still want to personalize the content. At the very least, you should address the email to their first name.
Segment Your Customers
Whether you’re doing B2B marketing or B2C marketing, you won’t want to send the same email, or the same content, to everyone on your email list. You wouldn’t want to send the CEO of a company the same email that you would send to a salesperson, right?
When segmenting your audience, consider your buyer personas such as job title and location. You can also use existing data that might show you some sort of pattern.
Measure Your Success
Once your emails are sent, your work is not done. You must track several measures. This includes clickthrough rate, bounce rate, list growth rate, open rate, and the unsubscribe rate. By analyzing your data, you will be able to see how email marketing is working for your business and what you can do to improve.
Blog Updates
If your business has a blog, you might want to consider sharing that blog with some of your email contacts. Blogs are a great way to share information and show others in the industry that you are a leader that is willing to share insight.
Welcome Emails
When someone subscribes to your emails, you should have an automated welcome email. In this email, it should be explained what your recipient can expect in your future emails. The goal is to set expectations, which means you should meet those expectations. Only send your readers the content that they opted in for. By doing so, you will have better engagement and reduce unsubscribe rates.
MailBakery: It All Starts With Design
At MailBakery, we’re here to ensure your B2B email marketing campaigns are a success. If you’re looking for a way to get started with effective email marketing campaigns, it’s time to direct your attention to email design.
Not a graphic designer? Don’t know where to start? At MailBakery we’ve got you covered! Choose from dozens of templates or if you have a design in mind, your first coding is free!
Let’s get to baking!