Did you know that more than 90% of B2B marketers distribute content through email? And that’s not the only impressive statistic related to the role of email in promoting B2B growth!  

As you can see, B2B email marketing has not lost any of its power and relevance in the age of social media and fast information exchange. 80% of marketers say they would instead give up social media than email marketing to promote their business. 

Email marketing is constantly improvising according to business landscape. Marketers keep coming up with new ways to use email to increase brand awareness, reach new audiences, address customers’ pain points, and boost sales. 

This detailed guide will show you how to develop a killer B2B marketing strategy to grow your business. 

What is B2B email marketing? 

The key difference between B2C and B2B email marketing is that the latter targets businesses rather than individual consumers. 

• You generate interest in your product or service in potential B2B buyers via their professional email as a primary communication channel. 
• Your goal is to turn this interest into an engagement that will convert into leads.
• Your email marketing methods in B2B email marketing differ from those implemented in B2C email marketing. Businesses are usually much more pragmatic than individual buyers, which means you need to create long B2B cycles in your email marketing campaigns. In other words, your B2B email recipients require a longer customer journey to decide to choose your brand. 

Why B2B email marketing is important

B2B email marketing is essential to boosting sales for several reasons: 

• Email is a time-tested, universally used communication and outreach channel;
• Email is a non-invasive way of information delivery and product promotion;
• Email marketing is a perfect tool for reaching out to new businesses and audiences;
• B2B email marketing effectively generates leads; 
• It keeps your B2B email subscribers up to date: you can advertise new products and services, share valuable materials, news, offers, etc. 
• B2B email marketing is effective for customer retention since it allows your business to keep providing value for your customers and sustain a strong relationship with them. 

B2B email marketing industry metrics 

To track and assess the progress of your B2B email marketing strategy and choose the best marketing tools, pay attention to the key B2B email marketing metrics. They include:  

• Open rate: This metric shows the percentage of emails that recipients open. Open rate is a great indicator of the quality of your email subject line since people often decide to read an email based on what they see in the subject lines. The average email open rate ranges within 15%-30% in most industries, while B2B's average open email rate is 15.1%. 
• Click-through rate: This metric is the percentage of people who clicked on the link inside your email. Your links could lead to a landing page, a blog post, a product page, educational content, etc. CTR is good to track if you want to assess the quality of your copy and calls to action. 
• Bounce rate: This metric is the reflection of email deliverability. It demonstrates how often your emails get sent (or bounce) back to the sender. If for some reason, the email cannot reach the recipient, it is returned to you. High bounce rates harm the sender's business’s reputation and credibility. 
• Unsubscribe rate. This metric shows the percentage of subscribers who have decided to leave your mailing list and stop receiving further emails from you. It is normal to have some recipients opt-out occasionally, but you need to make sure your unsubscribe rate is not too high. A good unsubscribe rate is about 0.1%.    

Why businesses should create a viable B2B email marketing strategy 

Even if you know your metrics well, an elaborate B2B email marketing strategy is a must if you want to launch a successful B2B email marketing campaign. 

B2B email marketing strategy is essentially a combination of various types of emails that will ensure that your business: 

• Create substantial interest in your product or service.
• Effectively nurture leads.
• Stay cost-effective (B2B email marketing ROI can reach more than $36 for every dollar invested in the strategy).
• Initiate a sales process with potential B2B buyers.
• Stay connected with your clients through the entirety of the buyer’s journey.
• Target both the existing customers and the new prospective clients. 

10 Top-notch B2B email marketing strategy tips 

Now that you know what B2B email marketing is and why it matters, it’s time to get into specifics. 

Here are 10 simple and practical tips on boosting your B2B email marketing strategy and launching a top-notch campaign for your business. 

1. Use a filtered email list

Let’s start with the basics. 

Filtering your email lists is an absolute must – it will help you route and direct your emails much more effectively. 

Email list filtering allows you to choose specific categories to group your email subscribers into various types. This way, you can ensure that each group will receive emails relevant to them, boosting the open rate and CTR. 

Pro-tip: to leverage filtered email lists, establish the grouping criteria necessary to optimize your B2B email marketing efforts. They can be content-based, niche-based, etc. You can use email automation tools to simplify filtering your email lists. 

2. Create an ideal customer profile

To apply B2B email marketing principles to your business goals, you need to have a clear vision of who your customers are. 

Creating a detailed customer profile will help you target your marketing effort more effectively because you will have a better understanding of: 

• Your target demographic;
• What do your target customers want and respond to;
• The best channels to reach them;
• What product or service will appeal to them the most; 
• What kinds of emails you should use in your B2B email marketing strategy. 

Here’s a great example of several customer profiles: 

Pro-tip: leverage behavioral segmentation to improve customer profile. When you do customer profiling for B2B, some factors are more important than others. For instance, job title and company role, professional skills, and location are more relevant than gender and age. 

You will want to create different email content to target, say, salespeople and quality managers or IT professionals. 

3. Time to segment your email list 

Now that you have a detailed customer profile that takes advantage of behavioral segmentation and determines preferred engaging content for each group, you can segment your email list. 

Use the categories you’ve established in the process of customer profiling to create a well-targeted, segmented B2B email marketing campaign. Doing this guarantees a significant increase in email revenue. 

4. Start personalized email marketing campaigns 

Another excellent way to generate more targeted B2B email content is to use subscribers’ personal information in your emails – this way, you customize people’s experiences with your brand and effectively engage them. After all, the inbox is a private space. The more personal an email is, the more likely a person is to interact with it (even if they do it on behalf of a business).   

78% of marketers use personalized communication in email, so it’s time you do it as well. 

Here’s what you can do to ace B2B email personalization:

• Use company names as well as individual recipients’ names in the subject lines and the body of an email.
• Adjust your actual content to the target receiving groups: here’s where the behavioral segmentation we discussed in point 3 will come in handy.
• Use diverse, dynamic email layouts for different types of emails, such as welcome emails, transactional emails, abandoned cart emails, etc.
• Include personalized recommendations and shareable (reports, white papers, images, a new feature, etc.) in your emails.

5. Introduce videos for B2B email marketing 

Elements of video marketing can become an important contribution to your B2B email marketing strategy. Partnering with a video marketing agency can help you produce visually appealing content that captures recipients' attention and effectively conveys your key messages.

Video is a powerful visual medium that can enhance the quality of your email content and draw the recipients’ attention to what you think is important – people are drawn to visual content and see it as more appealing than plain text. 

Besides, including videos in your emails will help you boost your click-through rate and grow recipient engagement. 

You can use videos in your B2B email marketing campaign to announce events, special offers, and launches – whatever fits your business purposes. 

6. Improvise email marketing strategy 

While planning out your business-to-business email marketing campaign is necessary to ensure it runs smoothly and hits the target audience, remembers that there’s always room for creativity and improvisation. 

You can experiment with several aspects of your B2B email marketing strategy, such as: 

• Your tone of voice. You can be friendlier and more conversational in some of your emails while using a more official tone in others, depending on who your email subscribers are and what goals you are pursuing;
• Your subject lines. You can include different calls to action or descriptive words in your subject lines, experiment with their length, etc. 
• Your email message layouts and design. As your brand identity develops and changes, your email design will also change. Try new color schemes, fonts, content organization layouts, etc. 
• The use of UGC. B2B email marketing (as well as many other areas of digital marketing) is now leveraging user-generated content to boost brand credibility and audience engagement. If your improvised inclusion of UGC into your B2B email marketing campaign works well, you can go on to develop a full-on UGC strategy to use it consistently.  

Pro-tip: use A/B testing to see which experiments and changes work best with your customers and website visitors. 

7. Send emails at the right time

When you send your emails is another factor that affects your open rate and can help you generate more leads. So don’t be random about it – you need to know when your intended audience is more likely to spot and read your B2B email. 

According to a study, the best time of day to send B2B emails to target recipients is between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m – this is when people usually check their inbox upon coming to work.  

8. Validate your emails 

Did you know that email marketing databases decay by more than 20% annually? And B2B email marketing is no exception to this tendency. 

To decrease the decay rate and boost your email deliverability for the existing clients, you need email validation. The email validation process checks if an email address is valid and, thus, deliverable.

Ensure your email server providers include the email validation function, and if a sender mistypes your email address, the system will still catch the message and redirect it to you. 

The same goes for the receiving end of the email as a communication channel. You don’t want to keep sending your email messages to invalid users and “dead” subscribers. By consistently validating your email lists and eliminating irrelevant units, you’ll increase your ROI and optimize your B2B email marketing expenses. 

9. Improve CTAs  

Calls to action are a definitive B2B email marketing tool. It is also probably the most important part of an email because it tells your readers exactly what you want them to do. CTAs state your intent and instruct subscribers as to what actions they can take to do business with you. 

Improving calls to action in your B2B emails is key to ensuring the completion of the buyer’s journey and keeping your customers engaged with your brand. 

To boost the quality of your B2B email CTAs, consider the following suggestions: 

• Don’t include more than one CTA in your email. It’s very important not to overdo it with calls to action – otherwise, your email will seem pushy and intrusive. Keep it down to one CTA per email message. 
• Keep it short and sweet. Ideally, your CTA is 2-6 words long. This way, you’ll manage to grab the recipients’ attention and preserve the clarity of your intent. 
• Create a sense of immediacy. Motivate your buyers to click on your links “now”, use your discount “today”, and “not miss out on” what you have in store for them. 
• Manage your tone. You don’t want to sound as if you were giving out orders. Instead, be suggestive, encouraging, and friendly in your CTAs. 

For reference, let's look at a few examples of effective CTAs: 

10. Stick to the Point 

Finally, remember to be straightforward and stick to the point in your B2B emails. 

Since you’re dealing with businesses, not individual customers, you know that it is essential to respect their time and make sure your email falls right into the recipient’s attention span. 

So be concise and practical with your B2B email content and always aim to bring value to your email subscribers: actual content, new information, relevant offers, etc. Cut down on unnecessary descriptions, fancy introductions, and a complex syntax. If you’re dying to give your recipients more, you can always include extra information in email attachments.

Pro-tip: don’t forget that the structural organization of your B2B email also affects its clarity. Use bullet points, short paragraphs, and simple sentences to make the reading experience easy and comfortable for your target audience. 

Conclusion 

A solid B2B email marketing strategy is a combination of both big-picture stuff and subtler details. Depending on your business goals and key B2B email marketing metrics, adjust the use of the email marketing tools of your choice and keep the balance between planning and creativity. 

And of course, strive to stay on top of marketing trends to keep customer satisfaction levels high. For example, consider how mobile-friendly your B2B emails are – more and more people spend the majority of their time on their phones, including work email browsing.  

With Mailmunch email marketing tool your email campaign can hit off with ease!