Great B2B Email Marketing in 6 Steps

Maybe you’re thinking - why do they still keep babbling about email marketing all the time.

Isn’t that the old rusty way of communication, overwhelmed by social networks? Do I need it for my business? Does B2B email marketing work? You bet.

But you don’t want to take anything for granted, so let me convince you with some numbers.

Currently, there are over 4 billion email users worldwide. In 2024 this number will rise to 4.5 billion including 1.13B business email accounts.

If these numbers alone, aren’t enough I’m sure the Salesforce statistics will be:

• For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment
• 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email
• 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email

Now, that you have no second thoughts about email marketing anymore, let’s walk through the steps to getting great B2B email marketing campaigns.

#1 Step - Build a Quality Email Lists

The real question here is: How to build an email list in a specific industry?

Creating valuable content is your long-term solution. The idea is to attract your potential business partners to your website and get their subscriptions.

The process takes time and energy, but it’s a worthwhile effort. This way you’re building a top-quality email list. You need to provide valuable content to your targeted group.

For instance, if you’re targeting beginners in a specific industry, writing about ways to increase their sales and how to grow their businesses can introduce you as the one who delivers exactly what they want.

Step #2 Set the Priorities In Your Email Campaigns

Only you know about priorities in your campaigns, but it won’t hurt to see what other businesses want to achieve from email campaigns.

According to StrongView survey, for most businesses, the top priority is to increase subscriber engagement.

Source: SuperOffice

This result is nothing but totally expected, if you think about it. Increased subscriber engagement is a big step to more sales and higher revenue.

Step #3 Send the Right Content To Your Subscribers?

When sharing content with your potential business partners, it’s inevitable to understand them in a way that you can deliver what they want to know.

It means sharing thoughts about their problems, providing solutions, and finally convincing them to use your services.

It’s tightly related to a three-stage decision process, where creating content for each stage is crucial to your success.

The following table shows what content should be shared at each stage of the decision process.

Source: Brainrider

It’s just like Bruce Swan said: A smart email campaign drives the buyer through the customer journey.

Step #4 - Send Emails Efficiently and Make a Strong First Impression

Now that you decided to use email marketing to improve your business, you’ll figure out that creating and sending quality personalized emails manually, would require simply too much time and energy.

That’s why email service providers are so helpful. With Jellymetrics you can send an unlimited number of emails to up to 2000 customers for free.

Making the first impression is the point where B2C and B2B marketing differs the most.

When sending emails to customers, you’re grabbing attention with pompous entertaining subject lines, whereas in B2B marketing your goal is to provide a business trustworthy tone.

It certainly, doesn’t mean you have to be formal and boring, but your potential business partner has to see some value in your emails. One more thing.

When you get new subscribers, send them a warm welcoming email. It will contribute to making a strong first impression and building a business relationship.

Step #5 - Improve Collecting Emails

Once you get the visitors on your website, you want them to become your subscribers.

Among so many things you can do to improve subscription rates, I’ll focus on optimizing CTA button, which is considered to be the most efficient.

How to optimize my CTA button?

Use short effective verbs, in the second person. Make sure that CTA tells the same thing as your offer and your landing page.

The visitor must not be confused even for a second, or he can easily bounce. Pick the right color for your CTA button.

That color should stand out, but the final decision will be determined by your site’s color scheme.

ButtonOptimizer can help you in the decision process. When optimizing CTA buttons, every detail matters.

Whether it's shaped, size, shadow effect, small icon attached or some other thing, it can make a difference.

That’s why A/B testing is such a powerful technique. Look at Content Verve example, where they tested two buttons, one with small graphic and other with simple message.

Source: CrazyEgg

#6 How To Measure Success of Email Campaigns?

According to Hubspot every marketer should include the following metrics in their email reports.

Click-through Rate

As a percentage of people who clicked, at least on one link, after opening email, CTR is calculated with this formula.

This metric shows you how well have you succeed to catch attention with your offer. Keep optimizing your emails with A/B tests.

Conversion Rate

After they click through, you want your email recipients to complete desired action - convert. The formula:

You need to know the source of the click if you want to measure the conversion rate. You’ll do that by integrating your email platform and your web analytics.

Bounce Rate

Bounces (emails that didn’t deliver) can be the result of various reasons. If the problems are occasional and temporary, the bounces are soft, and later re-sending should be successful.

Otherwise, if the reason is the invalid email address you will have a hard bounce. Remove those email addresses immediately, if you don’t want to be marked as a spammer.

List Growth Rate

What is your email list growth rate can be calculated like this.

A very important thing to remember is that the main goal of expanding your email list is to expand your reach.

Email Sharing Rate

This is the percentage of email recipients who shared the email content to the social network or forward it to friends.

The importance of this tracking highlights when social sharing brings new subscribers. So, encourage your subscribers to share your content.

Overall ROI

One way of calculating your return on investment is this.

You will probably need to modify the formula so that suits your type of business, but basically, it’s total revenue divided by total spend.

Statistics

B2B email open rate is around 30%.

Source: HubSpot

Assuming that you sent a newsletter to 10,000 customers you can expect around 3,000 opens per campaign.

As you can see, it also depends on the number of monthly email campaigns you sent, but these are just statistics.

The best way is to test on your own.

How many clicks I should expect? An average B2B email click-through rate is 6%.

Wrap up

Email marketing is the best way to reach your potential business partners. By improving it, you will get a major boost to your business.

Steps from this article will help you through the process, but once you get things going you will find your solutions. Don't sit while your competition is leveraging the benefits of email marketing.