B2B Email Marketing: A How To Guide
B2B email marketing is one of the most popular methods for marketing to other businesses. With high engagement rates and an ability to easily be automated, it’s no wonder why this is the preferred method for most companies. When developing an approach to email marketing, it’s important to consider your audience, the types of emails you want to create, and your goals.
Understanding Your Audience
As with most marketing tactics, the first step to email marketing is understanding your audience. This is a critical step because you will experience the most success with emails that are tailored to your audience’s specific pain points. In fact, 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement. By developing a deeper understanding of your audience, you will be able to create personalized emails that speak directly to their challenges and begin establishing trust.
Key Questions to Answer:
Why are they interested in my company?
At what stage are they in the Buyer’s Journey?
What specific business challenges do they have that my company solves?
What do they want to know now that would inspire them to read emails?
How can I help get them set up to be ready to purchase my product/service?
Segmenting Your Audience
When you begin creating your email list (and even if you already have one), it’s important to develop a segmentation approach. By segmenting your audience in different ways, you can create emails tailored to their unique conditions as opposed to trying to speak to everyone at once. Most email service providers have the ability to add tags based on subscriber activity and refine your audience's interests. Once your list is segmented, you will be able to craft emails for each segmented group and increase engagement.
Ways to segment your audience:
Solution interest (i.e. product or service they want to know more about)
Industry
Company size
Buying role (i.e. individual contributor, leader, CEO)
Marketing engagement (i.e. frequently open emails, downloaded guide, clicked link)
Client vs non-client
Stage in sales process (i.e. no contact, consultation call, demo, contract negotiation)
Defining Your Goals
Before you begin creating emails, you should first determine the goals of those emails and what you consider email success. For example, do you want to establish trust with your email subscribers or encourage them to book a sales call? The goal may vary for each email you send out, and you should establish a higher-level strategy for your emails, such as creating emails for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey or sending out emails to persuade subscribers to attend an upcoming webinar or event. Some emails might simply help you to understand how interested the subscriber is in solving their problem
Example email goals:
Download guide/whitepaper
Schedule consultation
Sign up for free trial
Attend webinar/event
Purchase product/upgrade subscription
Re-engagement
Types of Emails to Create
Once you have your goals, you can begin creating emails to achieve those goals. The content and design of the email should be adjusted to the targeted audience and the goal of the email. For example, if you know a group is currently evaluating different companies based on past interactions, you might send an email with an overview of client success stories and a link to schedule a sales call. There should be only one main goal of each email or you limit the likelihood of anyone taking action.
The types of emails you create are very similar to the above list with email goals. The main difference is that the emails include content to guide customers to the goal instead of just focusing on the goal.
Sales vs Marketing Emails
Some email providers (i.e. Salesforce) will allow you to send out sales emails in addition to marketing emails. The benefit of sending sales emails through the platform instead of through your regular email, such as Microsoft Office or Gmail, is that you can closely track how the subscriber engages with the email. Within one view, you can see if a prospect opened a marketing email after engaging with sales, for example. This gives your sales team a clearer understanding of how interested that prospect is in purchasing, and they can refine their sales tactics based on this information. Providing sales insights into marketing engagement helps to align sales and marketing and will allow your sales team to better understand and connect with prospective clients.
Getting Started: What You Need
If you don’t already have email marketing implemented in your business, it’s time to start!
Step 1: Sign up for Email Service Provider
The first step in B2B email marketing is to select your email service provider. Thankfully, there are many to choose from with all levels of support and pricing.
A few examples include:
Step 2: Create landing page(s) & Opt-Ins
To build your email list, you will need to have a compelling offer for why they should join your email list. Most buyers today are already swimming in too many emails. It’s your job to show that you have content and information that will truly help them--and that you won’t bombard them with too many emails.
One way to do this is to create a landing page with a unique offer that you promote. You can also include offers throughout your website that speak to your audience. An offer might be a How To Guide, a whitepaper, case study, industry report, template, or really anything that might speak to your audience. You can create these as free resources, or depending on their value and your business, you might sell these for a small amount. Either way, the goal is for the person to download the resource and join your email list.
Step 3: Create Automations
Once you establish your landing pages and downloadable resources, you should create a few email automations off that action. For example, if you have a how-to guide, once they download the guide, you might send out a series of emails that walks the subscriber through the next steps that pick up where the how-to guide left off. The goal with the automations is to introduce potential clients to your company, establish trust, and show that your emails are valuable. This means it is especially important to create truly valuable content for them or they will quickly unsubscribe.
Step 4: Create Emails
After you start growing your list, it’s time to start sending out regular emails or campaigns to those subscribers. This will connect with your larger marketing goals and how you want to engage with your subscribers.
Step 5: Review and Revise
Now that your B2B email marketing approach is up-and-running, you need to monitor your performance and adjust as needed. You’ll quickly learn what types of content are most effective and how to engage with your audience.