4 B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

To help you get your desired results for your email marketing campaigns, our Guest Author Lane Harbin Senior Content Marketing Manager at Campaign Monitor, has put together a few tips to help you plan your campaigns for 2019.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool for B2B marketers and organisations for a variety of reasons. For one, email marketing has an ROI of £34 for every £1 spent. In addition, a vast majority of professionals prefer to use email when communicating with businesses online. Here are a few tips and best practice recommendations to help get you started.

#1Start with your subject lines

Subject lines appear on each and every one of your emails across all of your campaigns, so it will really pay off if you put extra time and effort into crafting them.

Your goal is to reach out to your subscribers and show them that you understand the pain points that they have within their organisations – they most likely subscribed to your list because they are looking for solutions. If you want them to open your emails, your subject lines should reflect that you are offering solutions to their problems.

It’s also useful to think about the tone of not just your subject lines, but your emails in general. In contrast to B2C email marketing that is focused on grabbing the audience’s attention to make a sale, B2B email marketing is more focussed on giving clients helpful information. Your subject lines don’t have to be formal, but they do have to be professional and clearly state the incentive for opening the mail so keep this in mind when crafting your subject lines.

#2Leverage your content

A recent Demand Gen survey revealed that 51% of B2B customers want content that aids them in their decision-making and benchmarking. They want to be educated, not sold to, so rather than making your email content seem promotional, it should help your subscribers to do their jobs more effectively and to see you as a useful resource.

Create content that provides information and actual insight into your subscribers’ pain points. This could be in the form of data, statistics, or case studies that showcase exactly how you can solve your subscribers’ problems.

In the Demand Gen survey report, the 51% of B2B customers who said they wanted informative content also said they wanted shorter content. So it will help your subscribers if your email messages are straightforward and concise – break out the text with images and make it easy to read.

#3Get rid of email clutter

Similar to the tone of your email content, the design of your emails should also be appealing and not text-heavy. Here are some tips on how you can clear your emails of unnecessary clutter.

  • Avoid putting in too many bright colours.
  • Take advantage of whitespace.
  • Minimise your use of images.
  • Use templates that are mobile-responsive.

When it comes to B2B email marketing, the cleaner and simpler your emails are, the better they look.

#4Segmentation is key

The success of your B2B email marketing strategy will depend on providing the information your subscribers need at the time that they need it. To support this you need to carefully segment your lists.

If you’re using the data from your CRM system, make sure that it’s updated, accurate, and free of duplicates. Apart from considering the usual data like your subscribers’ age, gender, and geography, take note of the following too:

  • Position and seniority level – the content you send an executive will of course be different from the content you send a mid-level marketer.
  • Organisation type – Is the subscriber the owner of a small business or the CEO of a large company?
  • Industry – Knowing which industry a subscriber belongs to helps you with targeting your content. For example, you wouldn’t offer an eBook about manufacturing trends to the Director of a nonprofit organisation.
  • Stage in the buyer’s journey – How you communicate with clients will differ depending on whether they’re still in the awareness stage, information stage, or already a paying client.

Segmentation enables you to send the right messages to the right groups of people. This in turn will help you to increase your open rates and click-through rates, which will naturally lead to increased conversions.

Final word

Keep in mind that how you carry out your email marketing strategies will still depend on factors such as the types of businesses that you work with and what industries they belong to. We hope that these tips serve as a useful guide for you in preparing for future campaigns.

About the Guest Author

Lane Harbin is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Campaign Monitor, an easy-to-use email marketing platform that empowers marketers to send targeted campaigns that grow their business.

Let's connect