B2B Email Marketing: A crucial Approach for Marketers

B2B email marketing aims to reach out to potential consumers for business-to-business sales. Besides connecting with individual buyers, a business organization also connects with another business to develop an excellent business-to-business (B2B) relationship. Some businesses, such as email marketing software, target only B2B leads to generate. Because other (B2B or B2C) businesses tend to rely on B2B brands (like MailBluster) to reach or maintain their customers. Thus, each business must understand the strategies of business-to-business marketing, that goes without saying. 

What is B2B email marketing?

First, we can find the answer to the question – what is B2B marketing? B2B marketing is a marketing strategy by one business to connect and sell products or services to other organizations. But when the ’email’ term adds to the B2B marketing approach, the promotional process occurs digitally. In a B2B email marketing strategy, B2B brands run email campaigns to promote or sell their product or service to other organizations.

Current scenario of B2B email marketing

Nowadays, email marketing is the most powerful way of marketing a solution. Therefore, the B2B email marketing approach is widely prevalent among organizations. Not every business offers its products or services to individual consumers; some also sell to other organizations. For example, Slack is a messaging service for business purposes, and the company only targets the company or organization. 

However, according to CMI’s 13th annual B2B Content Marketing research, 69% of B2B marketers used email channels for distributing their content. On the other hand, 75% of B2B brands used email marketing software to assist their content marketing purposes.

All these data indicate that the use ratio of email as a communication channel is significantly increased among B2B marketers.

B2B vs B2C

First and foremost, you should know the key difference between B2B and B2C email marketing approaches, as it is crucial if your target market is both business organizations and individuals. The difference is as below –

Differences	B2B	B2C
Target audience	Business clients, organizations	Individual customers
Target market type	Focused and niche target markets	Large target markets
Focus on	Lead generation and relationship building	Brand awareness building
Buying process	Longer or even with multiple steps	Simple and in a single step, mostly
Risk level	Relatively high	Relatively low
Transaction cycle period	Long selling cycle	Short selling cycle
Promotional media uses	Optional	Essential
Social media marketing	As many channels as possible	Selected (Linkedin. Twitter, Facebook)
Ultimate goal	To build trust, credibility, and business relationship and sell product or services to the target audience	To sell products or services toward individual customers only
Example	Business software, infrastructure, industrial equipment, etc.	FMCG, car, bike, etc.

The best strategy for Email Marketing in B2B

To reach the target audience, all B2B brands must follow some strategy. To do so, following the “Buyer’s journey model” is the best decision. You have to draw the model from the business-to-business marketing perspective. The model has three stages under the “Buyer’s journey funnel.” The stages are – Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

The B2B buyer’s journey model describes the process of how your B2B leads will go through the three different stages and become your loyal clients.

You can understand how each of the three stages can affect your buyer’s (client’s) journey. And the model also assists you in understanding what strategy you have to take in each of the three stages. Here are the three stages of the B2B Buyer’s Journey:

Awareness stage

The awareness stage is the first stage of the buyer’s journey funnel. In this stage, you have to determine your brand positioning. You must create a positive brand image in front of your target clients. In business-to-business marketing, your target audience is your business leads who may be interested in your provided solution.

After the B2B lead generation process, you can send a welcome email to them. You may add your website, social media page, or blog link in the welcome email to measure the click-through rate (CTR). But make sure that in this stage, you must create a positive brand positioning on your lead’s mind through your welcome email.

Tips: Including social proof on your website or social media page significantly increases the response rate of your targeted business clients.

Consideration stage

You must identify and segment your targeted business clients in this You must identify and segment your targeted business clients in this consideration stage. After connecting with all your B2B leads through the welcome email, you have to determine who is your potential and actual business client. You can reach this decision after measuring the CTR of your welcome email.

After measuring, you should segment your final business email list. The segmentation process will help you create the brand persona for your targeted clients. Thus, you may start nurturing your targeted leads and encourage them to fulfill your goal.

Note: Measuring CTR instead of open rate is much more effective because of recent changes to Apple Mail Privacy Protection Policy.

Decision stage

The decision stage is the last and most vital in the B2B Buyer’s Journey. It is also called the conversion stage. Because your ultimate objective is to determine how many of your leads respond to your goal. For example, suppose a marketer sells electronic gadgets and accessories online. Their ultimate goal is to sell the product following different strategies.

So, to accomplish your goal, you will send the email campaign to your segmented leads. And your primary intention will be to convert your B2B leads into clients. That is how the decision stage works.

Tips: A/B testing will be the best method to test your one email campaign in two versions before sending it on a large scale. It will help you optimize your conversion rate when you pick the most accepted form of your selected email campaign.

B2B email marketing best practices

If you have come this far, it’s time to know the best practices of email marketing in B2B. You should follow some tips to boost your overall B2B email marketing strategy. Here are five best practices for preparing a B2B marketing email –

1Build business email lists organically

Before starting your B2B email marketing campaign, you must focus on the B2B lead generation process organically. You are already aware that your B2B email marketing journey will begin by sending a welcome email. But in your welcome email, you must ask for permission before using their email address for further emailing. You must use the double opt-in method to grow your email list organically. Getting confirmation from your audience before sending the B2B promotion email is always a wise approach. However, avoid buying B2B leads, which will hamper your business reputation.

2Write an enticing subject line

Hopefully, you are ready to send your email campaign to your B2B leads. Here, the email subject line is the first portion of an email that the email receiver reads. Therefore make your subject short, simple, and eye-catching.

However, there are things to consider. Many smartphone users will open your email through their small devices. So, when it comes to mobile-friendly email, you must use the pre header text. The pre-header text comes right after the email subject line. However, relative emojis with a good subject line can increase the email response rate.

3Send personalized emails with segmentation

Before sending personalized-based emails to your business list, you must collect the audience’s demographic segmented data. But in terms of B2B marketing email, there is a slight difference. Here you can demographically segment the target organizations according to location, ownership, sales volume, number of employees, etc. The segmentation will help you to create a brand persona. The brand persona will help you send personal-based emails to segmented organizations.

However, MailBluster has three different segment-wise email-sending features, which mainly reduce the users’ workload. The most important fact is you should keep your conversion tone humanly in your B2B email marketing strategy.

4Keep responsive email design

Sending email campaigns to computer users is a straightforward process. But when it comes to mobile responsive email, it is a bit tactical. However, according to a study, by 2025, 376.4 billion emails will be sent and received daily. Because the number of daily emails sent and received has been increasing since 2017. These data indicate that people use mobile devices to open most emails. Therefore, you must follow some essential tips to make your email mobile and user-friendly.

5An “Email marketing tool” can be your best support

A mandatory task is to measure all your email KPIs after running a B2B email campaign. All the vital indicators of KPIs will indicate whether your B2B email campaign is successful. Measuring email KPIs is not rocket science. But it is indeed time-consuming. Therefore, it is better to use the MailBluster tool or any other email marketing software to get some help. MailBluster provides email marketing services with a detailed dashboard and report after sending a bulk email campaign. There you will find all your results regarding email KPIs.

Conclusion

In the early times, doing commerce and trade was straightforward but time-consuming at the same time. In contrast, today’s digital world provides us with easy and fast e-commerce. Therefore to boost e-commerce, companies are focusing on B2B email marketing approaches. Besides, communication between two business entities has become more straightforward in this digital era. So email marketing in B2B is undoubtedly the most effective strategy for any organization to build a fast business-to-business relationship.

Indeed, many B2B email marketers, at the beginning of their marketing career, do Indeed, many B2B marketers, at the beginning of their marketing career, do not understand the basic strategy of email marketing B2B. The term “B2B marketing” is broad. But this entire blog might be helpful to you in the case of email marketing in B2B.

Furthermore, With the lowest pricing, MailBluster can be your best assistance in running your B2B email marketing campaign.