If you’re an email marketer, you know how important it is to consider your audience when designing a campaign. Strategies that are effective for a B2C campaign might not translate to B2B email marketing.
The following B2B email marketing best practices will help you better understand how to optimize your strategy. Keep them in mind as you plan your next campaign.
B2B Email Marketing Best Practices & Tips
1. Segment Your List.
Segmenting an email list into several smaller lists is an effective way to boost open rates by nearly 30%. It’s also particularly important for any B2B email marketing strategy.
List segmentation is an essential part of your B2B email marketing best practices. Segmentation is critical because it ensures the content followers receive is relevant. A B2C retail brand wouldn’t want to promote winter apparel to customers who live in warm regions.
The same principle may be even more significant in B2B email marketing. Each client of a B2B company will have their own distinct business that can differ substantially from others. Additionally, the specific audience for each client may be different.
Perhaps your business provides customers with accounting software. The person in charge of deciding whether to use it at a large company could work in the IT or accounting departments. For a small startup, however, you may be targeting the CEO directly. Knowing who you are speaking to and segmenting your list accordingly when email marketing for B2B audiences will help you make a better impression on contacts.
2. Don’t Expect Immediate Sales from a B2B Email Marketing Strategy.
Email marketers know a single promotional message might not be enough to make a sale. You have to convince a follower your product or service is valuable before they make a purchase.
This is key to effective email marketing for B2B. When you’re selling a product to a business client, there’s a good chance many people will be involved in making the purchasing decision. This means virtually no client will make an impulse buy.
You must design a B2B email marketing campaign which highlights the problem they face, the way your service helps, and evidence that it has already benefited others like them in the past.
3. Optimize Clean & Efficient Design in Your Email Marketing for B2B.
Most people now check email via mobile devices. Remember this when designing content. Avoid long paragraphs, use formatting tools such as headers to make content scannable, and condense points with infographics, videos, and other elements.
This is another B2B email marketing best practice to follow. Clients are typically busy: They don’t have time to try and make sense of poorly-organized content. A CEO checking email on his phone briefly between meetings will respond better to emails that are designed with efficiency and mobile-friendliness in mind.
4. Focus Your B2B Email Marketing Strategy, and Include Useful Content.
B2B marketers speak to a unique audience. Again, to use the example of a B2C, an apparel brand isn’t necessarily targeting customers with exclusively practical concerns. A follower might not need a new jacket, but if it’s stylish enough, they might want it anyway.
That’s not the case with email marketing for the B2B sector. Clients have very practical concerns in mind when investigating your services. They want to know how you can help them achieve clear, specific goals. Thus, it’s important for your email content to offer practical value.
Maybe your business aids in corporate recruiting with recruitment software for HR departments. As part of your B2B email marketing strategy, you might send emails which offer tips for reducing the cost of the recruitment process. Include relevant statistics to indicate why your product can help reduce expenses even more.
Surveys prove email marketing is still effective regardless of who you’re targeting. That said, you have to keep your audience in mind when designing a campaign. Don’t treat B2B clients the same way you would B2C customers. Apply these tips to design a B2B email marketing campaign that maximizes your success.
