- Step 1: Understand your audience
- Step 2: Build compelling subject lines
- Step 3: Make an impact with your email content
- Step 4: Focus on email formatting
- Step 5: Test and optimise your B2B email
B2B email marketing is designed to:
- Drive interest in a service or a product
- Generate leads
- Use the marketing funnel to convert opportunities.
In this post, we look at how you can send an effective B2B marketing email.
What are B2B marketing emails?
In a nutshell, business-to-business email marketing (also known as B2B email marketing) refers to a form of online marketing in which email campaigns are sent to businesses rather than to individual consumers. You communicate with potential customers (B2B buyers) through their work email, inform them about your offerings, and transform them into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for the sales team.
Understanding your audience
Understanding your audience is one of the most fundamental aspects of B2B marketing, but in this context, “audience” refers to more than just one individual. It requires becoming knowledgeable about a whole team and communicating effectively with all of them.
You need to take into account a wide variety of audience subgroups, each of which plays an important part in the actual purchasing process. If you do not begin by locating and defining these divisions, you run the risk of squandering a significant amount of time and money by conveying incorrect information to the appropriate audience.
Buying from one business to another typically entails participation from three to five distinct departments. To generate demand for your B2B service or product, you need to have an understanding of how the various departments within an organisation collaborate to make purchasing decisions and who the individual personalities are that have an impact on those decisions.
Building compelling subject lines
The subject line is the very first point of contact that a user has with your email, making it also the very first and most important factor. People decide whether or not to open an email, delete it without reading it, or forward it to their spam folder based on the subject line of the message. Some quick pointers to help you to craft a compelling subject line include:
- Avoid going into the spam folder: Once you end up here, it is very difficult to claw your way back out. You should avoid using all capital letters in the subject lines of your emails, as well as phrases and words such as “lowest prices,” “click here,” “risk-free,” “sign up now,” and others. They give your email a dubious and untrustworthy impression.
- Use emotional triggers and power words: Find expressions that can instantly capture the attention of the people listening to you. Keep in mind that you are writing for a business representative when you are drafting the subject lines of the outreach emails you are sending out.
- Test things before sending: To test the success of a particular type of subject line you should create two different variations of a subject line for one outreach email. You may, for instance, evaluate the performance of innovative subject lines in comparison to simple ones, emojis in comparison to no emojis, and customization in comparison to no personalization.
- Personalization: There is more to personalization than simply inserting the recipients’ names into the subject lines of the email. Make your subject lines more personalised by using the additional information you have on your receivers. When creating unique subject lines, the most important thing to keep in mind is to properly align them with the content of the email.
Keep it short and sweet: On desktop computers, the number of characters allowed for subject lines is capped at sixty symbols. It is a total of 30 symbols for mobile devices. Because many company representatives check their email on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, it is in your best interest to keep the subject lines of your emails as brief as you possibly can. It is important that the subject line, regardless of how brief it is, makes sense.
Make an impact with your email content
Once you have got your subject line sorted, it is time to think about the real meaty part of your B2B email marketing: the content.
The key thing to remember with the email content is that it needs to provide value to the audience, otherwise, there is no point in sending it.
Some key things to consider when crafting your content include:
- Choose evergreen subjects. If you want to add more to your email than simple product descriptions, you should consider writing some valuable evergreen, and relevant content for your audience. This will allow you to add more value. The most helpful pieces of writing in this scenario are those that are able to provide answers to queries, articles that provide tips and techniques, and advice that readers can implement in their own personal lives or businesses. When you consider that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one, it is imperative that your primary focus not just be on acquiring new consumers but also on maintaining the attention of the customers you already have.
- Make sure the content is unique. You need to come up with something original, something that will demonstrate to your audience not only that you have invested work into this endeavour but also that you have something of worth to offer to them.
- Make sure you prioritise quality over quantity. The content you offer should be of high quality so it doesn’t need to be pages long. If your message is persuasive, you can generate very brief email newsletters and still obtain a better return on your investment (ROI). Effectiveness, in this context, means that you should communicate your point using as few words as possible, that your texts and images are professionally prepared and processed, and that your style is appropriately adapted for your audience.
The Importance of Email Formatting
Few individuals enjoy reading lengthy articles or large blocks of text, in particular the individuals to whom you are sending the email. They are likely to get a large number of additional emails daily but do not have the time to read all of them. Because of this, you need to double-check that your message can be read easily and is easy to understand. Make use of headings and subheadings, bullet points, and appropriate typefaces, and make sure that the most relevant information is highlighted. Make use of brief words and paragraphs, and check to see that there is sufficient white space.
Testing and Optimising your B2B Emails
The A/B test in email marketing, also known as split testing, gives you the ability to compare two different versions of an email to see which one is more successful. You may improve your email marketing efforts for increased opens, clicks, and conversions by testing out various aspects of those campaigns.
This can be accomplished by sending one version of the email to a select set of recipients, followed by sending the other version to a separate group of recipients that is of a comparable size.
You may discover which version of the email is more effective by comparing the engagement rates of the two groups in A/B testing email campaigns. You can then use this information to better your future campaigns by using this information to determine which version of the email is more effective.
After doing A/B tests on your emails, it is essential to thoroughly examine the results and search for patterns and insights that might guide your future email marketing efforts.
This can help you find areas that could use improvement and guide you in making the required adjustments to maximise the success of your emails.
Part of the optimisation may be choosing the right time to send a marketing email to business clients. You can find an endless amount of advice online about when to send emails or post on social media, but at the end of the day, it is different for every business because your prospects may have different routines. You can find an endless amount of advice online about when to send emails or post on social media. We suggest giving a number of different strategies a shot through A/B testing and observing which ones produce the best results for you.
Additional Resources for B2B Emailing
At Instiller, we provide all the resources that you will need to craft professional high-quality B2B marketing emails. From shared email templates to make it quick and easy to send emails to link and image testers to make sure everything works as it should, and full campaign optimisation, there is everything you need to get your B2B marketing campaign off to a great start.
Email marketing has been shown to be an effective marketing method over the years, whether you are addressing individual clients or business customers. This holds true regardless of who you are marketing to. In order to produce B2B sales, you can rely on email marketing, and the purpose of this article was to throw some light on the most critical actions you need to tick off your list before beginning your campaign.
Sign up for a free trial, and find out how Instiller can help you with your B2B email marketing campaign. Get in touch today.