Crafting an effective email marketing strategy starts with truly understanding your intended audience.
You need to create detailed buyer personas that capture your ideal customer’s goals, challenges, values, and more. This will allow you to tailor messaging and offers based on what motivates different segments to convert. You also need to include technographics such as which devices they use and channels they prefer.
Read the rest of this guide to discover 15 email marketing tips for B2B businesses to boost conversions.
The Role of Email Marketing in B2B Businesses
Email marketing plays an integral role in the success of any B2B company. Unlike consumer audiences, business buyers are harder to reach and require more nurturing before making purchase decisions. Email provides that consistent touchpoint to build relationships over time.
The data speaks for itself, too. B2B marketers earn around $40 for every $1 spent on email campaigns on average. Some even see returns as high as $75!
Beyond revenue, it also offers the following benefits:
- Strengthens brand awareness;
- Captures more qualified leads;
- Enables better analytics thanks to trackable links.
Whether you are a small startup trying to get off the ground or an enterprise company looking to engage C-suite executives, email marketing deserves a place in every smart B2B strategy.
It allows you to segment and target different roles with hyper-relevant messaging while automating complex nurture streams.
Simply put, B2B brands that fail to utilize email marketing properly are leaving lots of money on the table from both new customer acquisition and current customer retention. It is one of the most affordable ways to boost conversions across the entire buyer’s journey.
1. Understand the B2B Audience
Unlike consumer audiences, B2B buyers represent organizations with multiple decision-makers and long, complex sales cycles. Your messaging must resonate across roles — whether they are C-suite executives managing budgets, mid-level personnel focused on use cases and requirements, or on-the-ground operations wanting execution.
Targeting broad audiences spells failure. You absolutely must deeply understand audience demographics, firmographics, goals, and pain points. Then you can tailor emails and nurture streams specifically to what motivates each persona to engage. Use clear segmentation and hyper-personalization in your campaigns.
The image below shows some of the factors you might take into consideration:
For example, decision-makers care about business outcomes and ROI. Talk value over features to showcase how you solve pressing problems. On the flip side, daily users want to understand functionality and technical integrations. Go granular there with visuals, tutorials, and demos.
In other words, B2B email marketing requires much more heavy lifting upfront to create that 1:1 level of relevance. Once established though, that strong foundation will drive unprecedented engagement rates and conversion performance over the long haul.
2. Build and Maintain a High-Quality B2B Email List
A robust email marketing strategy demands having a strong list to engage. Use these best practices for acquiring and retaining quality business subscribers over the long term.
Opt-in strategies deserve special attention. Incentivize sign-ups by offering exclusive discounts, gated content, and helpful resources in exchange for email addresses. These lead magnets convince contacts to willingly provide their information.
Also, make opt-in checkboxes and subscription forms ubiquitous across high-traffic pages and CTAs instead of hiding them. Finally, import leads from integrated systems like your CRM, webinar platform, and help desk software.
Conduct personalized outreach campaigns by segmenting your CRM database and handpicking key accounts and contacts to target. Enable sales reps and account managers to promote subscriber sign-ups during conversations using unique opt-in landing pages.
Maintaining list health is equally important. Actively monitor KPIs like bounce rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribes, removing bad data before it affects deliverability. Import updated contact info from the CRM and other sources to keep your list current. Also, scrub for inactive subscribers twice a year to ensure relevancy.
The payoff is earning the permission to consistently engage each contact directly in their inbox. Treat your list like the valued asset it is.
3. Optimize Lead Capture Forms
Your lead capture forms are make-or-break for converting site visitors into engaged subscribers. Optimize every element – from design to incentives – to accelerate this process.
Visually, ensure forms stand out with contrasting colors from your site’s branding. Place them prominently in the visual hierarchy above the fold near natural content breaks. Keep fields cleanly aligned and description text brief but benefit-driven.
Streamline by only requesting essential information initially – namely a valid business email, name, and company. Additional attributes can be appended later after establishing a relationship. Reduce overall friction to encourage sign-ups.
Effective incentives overcome skepticism about exchanging contact information. Offer exclusive access to premium content in exchange for subscriptions – ebooks, tip sheets, whitepapers, template bundles, or webinars on highly relevant topics.
Showcase the offer’s value while summarizing what they will receive. Avoid generics like “subscribe for updates” that seem spammy. Time-limited availability and social proof also heighten desirability.
Combined, optimized forms with compelling incentives convince contacts to voluntarily take that first step into your funnel. Then you gain permission to nurture them until sales-qualified without cold outreach.
4. Send New Lead Welcome Emails
The first impression you make on new subscribers sets the trajectory for long-term nurturing and conversion. Make welcome emails count by leading with value and clarity.
Visually, branded design elements like logos, fonts, and color schemes establish professionalism. Include a brief company boilerplate highlighting credentials like years in business, customer logos, and industry awards. This content anchors your expertise and reliability.
Strategically showcase 2-3 published assets ideal for new contacts like ebooks, tip sheets, blogs, and tools. These downloads demonstrate the level of helpful information you provide while encouraging engagement—hyper-personalize suggestions based on captured data like role, industry, or known challenges.
Transparency builds trust quickly. Clearly define the preferred frequency, channels and types of insights contacts can expect based on preferences. Give a roadmap that guides awareness stage subscribers onto consideration by showing how you will nurture valuable insights consistently over time.
Proactively surface subscription management options as well. Link to preference centers and one-click unsubscribe functions. Assure new contacts they control receiving relevant content from you, not the inverse. This courtesy and respect for their time/attention accelerates loyalty.
In summary, avoid hard promotional messaging upfront. Launch relationships by leading with utility that proves your worth. Success depends on converting new email subscribers into engaged, loyal audiences over the long haul. Make powerful first impressions.
5. Confirm Opt-Ins for Permissions
Gain verified consent from every new subscriber to uphold compliance, maximize engagement, and accelerate growth. The industry’s best practice is actively confirming opt-ins.
Require all new email sign-ups to complete a quick, automated double opt-in (COI) process. First, they fill out and submit a lead gen form. Your system then sends a verification email where contacts click a unique link to authenticate. Only after confirming are they subscribed, as shown in this example from MailPoet.
Avoid automatically defaulting all form entries into your list or importing batch records without scrutiny. While convenient, this gray area approach risks sending to unqualified leads who never actively agreed. Or even worse – purchased, rented, or scraped lists.
Confirmed opt-ins prove every recipient willingly signed up to hear from you specifically. This addresses CAN-SPAM requirements for clear consent while future-proofing against policy changes. Moreover, engaged subscribers genuinely interested in your content maximize critical metrics like open, click-through, and conversion rates. Higher performance keeps your sender’s reputation strong.
Compare that to mailing loosely verified names who don’t recognize you. Inevitable spam reports, abuse complaints, and unsubscribe requests hurt deliverability. Why jeopardize the sender score by chasing disinterested contacts?
In short, confirmed double opt-ins are a win-win. Subscribers gain assurance you respect their attention. You gain compliant permission to nurture truly interested segments for revenue growth. Uphold this practice to scale securely.
6. Segment by Firmographic Attributes
One size fits none in B2B marketing. contacts represent organizations with varied attributes that influence their needs and motivators. Reflect this in precise segmentation across email campaigns for exponential conversion lifts.
Common firmographic factors to define subscriber groups include industry, company size bracket, and job role or title. While individual demographic traits still apply, these business lenses reveal priorities based on organizational challenges and resources that dictate solutions fit.
From there, craft hyper-targeted messaging and content recommendations reflecting segment-specific pressures and opportunities they care about addressing. Show how your offering eases pains and enables gains in relevant terms. Back with peer case studies and ROI stats from companies like theirs.
Closely aligned firmographic segmentation maximizes relevance for each audience. Contacts feel understood and empowered to evaluate solutions made for them specifically versus generic pitches. Combine this approach with activity-based streams based on interests and behaviors for an exponentially more personalized subscriber experience. One that converts.
In B2B marketing, no two contacts and companies are identical despite similar traits on paper. Reflect real-world diversity in your segmentation strategy and nurturing. Shared context cuts through the noise to drive action.
7. Personalize Content
Personalizing email content makes each B2B subscriber feel valued as an individual while increasing engagement and conversion rates.
There are several best practices to employ here:
- Use Basic Personalization Elements: Incorporate first names, company details, job titles, and other known attributes into copy and messaging using merge tags. This validates you understand them from the start.
- Leverage Intelligence for Deeper Relevance: Lookalike modeling can predict interests based on concrete data points like past behaviors and attributes of similarly aligned contacts. Use these insights to recommend content topics and offers likely to attract their engagement.
- Advance with Adaptive Content Blocks: Installed templates featuring dynamic content blocks that populate unique text, imagery, calls to action, etc. based on subscriber attributes to take things further. Now messaging not only feels personalized, but adaptively relevant.
- Tailor Subject Lines Based on Past Engagement: Tools even enable triggered version testing of email subject lines based on past message exposure and performance. Contacts who ignore earnings recap subject lines receive alternate content-focused headers that speak to observed interests instead.
Essentially, employ personalization techniques spanning basic to advanced. When executed successfully, subscribers feel understood at a 1:1 level through hyper-relevant messaging. This proven approach pays dividends in heightened engagement, response, and loyalty over time.
8. Strategic Subject Line A/B Testing
Email opens largely hinge on subject lines that intrigue subscribers to take action. Constantly optimize this critical touchpoint via segmented A/B testing tied to performance data for exponential lifts.
Base testing on intimate knowledge of target subscriber groups. Pull problem-solving themes from research, outreach call transcripts, and chat conversations around group-specific pain points. Test these subjects against alternative broad appeals to identify standout performers per segment.
Always integrate dynamic personalization elements as well. Incorporate first names, company details, trigger event data, and milestone dates into subject line variants. This further localizes appeal.
Review historical send performance metrics frequently, not just for top-level results but drilling down by segmented groups. Limit testing volume for poorer performing subjects until refinements lift metrics. Scale test frequency for those subjects that resonate better to validate impact across larger sample sizes.
Zero in on optimized messaging for each subgroup identified by consistent metric lifts over sizable sends. Then dial these segmented subjects proven to compel action higher in subsequent campaigns to truly maximize their engagement potential. Just a 1% optimization lift has the potential to impact thousands as your audience scales.
In summary, applying personalization, segmentation, trigger events, and past performance data to relentlessly test subject lines multiplies opens, CTRs, and conversions exponentially. Deploy this as an always-on capability driving major bottom-line growth.
9. Benefit-Focused Copy
You only have a few seconds to capture attention amid overflowing inboxes. Lead with benefit-driven value demonstration, not product features. Present this content in easily scannable layouts that drive the next best actions.
Open by addressing a common pain point in clear terms the target segment relates with, then introduce your solution as providing relief or enabling an aspirational outcome in easy-to-understand “what’s in it for me” language. Use case examples to cement relevancy.
Avoid leading with (or focusing heavily on) specifics around product capabilities and functionality. That deep detail should come once engaged. Lead nurturing is about starting high-level translating why you solve problems the prospect cares about fixing.
Structure copy using concise paragraphs, chunked bullet points, bold/italicized benefit statements, meaningful subheads, and other scannable elements allowing readers to digest value quickly even on mobile devices. Call visuals like bar graphs or conceptual renderings communicate complex information easily.
Well-executed copy equates benefits to needs so contacts self-realize the potential in continuing conversations – whether clicking for a demo to see capabilities addressed in action or having sales specialists assess tailored alignment to initiatives already on the roadmap.
View emails as leading nurture stream conversations, not just promotional messages. Guide understanding through benefit-rich copy tailored to each audience designed to facilitate value realization on their terms. This drives profitable actions.
10. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness
As business professionals increasingly access email via phones and tablets, ensuring mobile responsiveness is now non-negotiable. Optimize deliverability across devices or forfeit opportunities. Testing email campaigns on actual mobile devices pre-send is critical to validate information hierarchy, CTAs, and design elements rendered properly on small screens.
Many email service providers (ESPs) now enable creating dedicated mobile templates that apply responsive design principles natively so content reflows for compact viewing while retaining primary desktop layouts.
Building mobile-specific versions quickly is advised to make emails shine on any device subscribers use to engage content. For more precise customization, use media query CSS styling to serve adjusted element sizing, layouts, and fonts based on screen widths.
Additionally, leverage Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) via major email clients to cache assets for near-instant load times on devices. Slow load speeds risk losing subscriber attention and abandonment of CTAs even when initially interested in engaging. Today’s business professionals rely on mobile devices to access inboxes on the go.
Failure to optimize email campaigns for seamless mobile delivery forfeits many subscriber engagement opportunities waiting to be captured. Design responsively and accelerate loading to drive conversions.
11. Set Up Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Strategically nurtured leads convert up to 30% more by receiving highly relevant information matched to their buying stage. Establish targeted, automated email campaigns that guide audiences through the journey by providing value at each major milestone.
Engage early awareness stage prospects still focused on identifying core issues by sending emails addressing common pain points they want to understand better. Share related use cases and define key terminology through educational content overviewing challenges without direct selling. Help contacts grasp problems.
Transition nurturing focus as leads show consideration stage behaviors weighing options now that foundational knowledge exists. Provide helpful comparison sheets detailing capability differences between alternatives, along with product summary assets and reputation-boosting social proof so informed decisions can advance evaluating your solution.
For further down-funnel evaluation, stage leads already engaged with sales, enable targeted product-led touches that cement conviction. Place demos, free trial sign-ups, and ROI calculators front and center through emails at this late stage while insight value. Remove friction keeping them from experiencing your differentiation first-hand.
Automated multi-stage nurturing via triggered email sends provides consistent value carefully matched to evolving needs from initial education through final selection. Segmentation and tailored streams help buyers realize solutions fit instead of overt selling. This strategy earns conversions over the long term by building trust.
12. Leverage Account-Based Campaigns
Capitalize on direct sales alignment and intelligence by coordinating specialized email campaigns focused on supporting targeted account acquisition and expansion initiatives for outsized growth wins.
Integrate ESP and CRM systems to enable sales interactions, event participation, and Known Opportunities to trigger hyper-personalized account nurturing email flows. Build data models that identify in-market accounts then craft aligned value stories speaking to their needs.
For new customer acquisition efforts, support account executives by sending market overview assets to contacts that educate on capabilities and establish your firm as an industry leader. For retention and growth within existing accounts, promote expansion use cases through capability emails accessible to endemic teams evaluating initiatives. Deploy specialized account-based newsletters that provide existing accounts a cadence of value.
Summarize the latest product enhancements matching their unique profiles. Spotlight-related executive thought leadership and customer success stories build confidence in your partnership. You can also coordinate invitations to special roadshow events or executive roundtables to anchor face time.
Combined, orchestrating account-centric email campaigns provides consistent, tailored air cover keeping target accounts engaged, informed, and receptive to buying more over time thanks to demonstrated value. This strategy powers material revenue growth by coordinating sales and marketing.
Aligning email nurturing to support named account sales objectives proves a force multiplying enablement capability driving major account wins recognizable on revenue reports.
13. Integrate Retargeting Ads
Double down by extending email reach through coordinated ad retargeting that sequences display and social campaigns in sync with nurture stream messaging to qualified contacts already expressing interest.
Based on email click-through rates, orchestrate tailored display ads, Facebook / LinkedIn and Google feed spots synced to themes contacts showed an affinity for by taking suggested actions like downloading assets or visiting key site pages.
Then serve complementary messages expanding engagement by exposing subscriber segments to brand impressions across devices while addressing pain points or reinforcing solutions value highlighted via email interactions.
The repetition and coordination accelerate decisions by nurturing awareness to consideration funnels with consistent messaging tailored to individual interest when retargeting display or social spots summon in a distinct but related context beyond the inbox, the appeal of your brand strengthens exponentially thanks to messaging depth and omnipresence focused on moving each account relationship forward.
This drives conversion cycle velocity powered by intelligence integrating efforts to maximize outreach.
Extending email reach via intelligent retargeting campaigns allows showcasing relevant value across channels to accelerate decisions by linking touchpoints into nurturing sequences personalized to how contacts engage.
14. Send Transactional Emails
Ongoing automated relationship emails focused on account status changes, renewals, contract updates, and time-sensitive opportunities provide recurring touchpoints to reinforce the value that outperforms batch campaigns.
Send confirmation emails after key account interactions like renewals or milestone achievements and thank contacts while linking helpful next-step resources that nurture momentum whether launching services or planning future growth initiatives together. Use date, CRM, and billing triggers to deploy targeted relationship review newsletters ahead of upcoming renewal deadlines with capabilities matching and positioning future vision they signal.
Provide easy contracting portals to expedite frictionless renewals when satisfaction merits continued investment. For reports, statements, and pending actions related to infrastructure changes that impact accounts directly, leverage real-time transactional emails that inform contacts of developments relevant to company operations.
However, you must resist overuse – inundating with mundane details strains engagement. Reserve for value-driving events.
Together, relationship lifecycle emails timed around impactful, ongoing account activities earn 5X higher transaction rates over general newsletter campaigns. Schedule to coincide with events signaling commitment.
Automated relationship emails addressing timely, relevant account developments provide recurring high-value touchpoints that convert substantially better than generalized nurturing.
15. Continuously Measure Your Results
Robust analytics and constant testing are integral for optimizing email marketing performance over time. Monitor core metrics like email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion values to benchmark sender reputation and guide refinement.
Analyze results trends such as engagement based on subscriber attributes and behavioral data. Compare the impact of different segments reacting to email types, subjects message variants as well as linked offers. This intelligence fuels smarter campaign targeting and personalization for lifts.
Tools provide analytical dashboards tracking email metrics across customer lifecycle stages, so target lagging areas with nurturing optimizations. Continually A/B test subject lines, content formats, and calls-to-action against control groups to validate impact at scale based on target response scoring.
In closing, creating an optimized, high-return email marketing engine depends entirely on continuously measuring performance and then refining strategy and execution informed by ironclad data intelligence. Commit to excellence here for ultimate subscriber value.
Email marketing remains a primary channel for engaging target accounts to build relationships over time. When applied strategically, it becomes a formidable driver of brand growth and bottom-line profitability. Follow these best practices outlined to maximize value while forging lasting subscriber loyalty in the process.