5 Strategies For B2B Email Marketing
TLDR: Using email marketing to send ads to other business’s can be a great way to land big clients but it takes a different approach compared to marketing directly to customers. Buyer persona’s are incredible important and you need to structure your campaign around the industry standards as well as model towards which entity in a business you will be speaking to.
The Differences Between B2C and B2B Marketing
It’s important to remember the variations in structure and application when comparing consumer based versus business-targeted marketing. Certain factors come into play when attempting to make a sale towards another company, like the length of the sales cycle and the number of people within the business that has to be marketed to.
Protitp: Memorable and engaging content can easily catch the eye of most industry participants while not relying on numbers to get recognition.
Sales Cycle
The marketing cycle for B2B campaigns is typically much longer than those geared towards consumers. A business will ultimately have any number of logistics they need to balance and consider before buying your product or using your service. The implication of a longer sales cycle includes focusing more on nurturing the customer as they travel down the sales pipeline, which often has more stages in this instance. This will change how the format and schedule of your campaign are executed if you want to encourage them to make the purchase.
Protip: In B2B marketing it is highly likely that you will have customers moving back and forth through stages over time. Be prepared to send the correct ads during the proper stages.
Multiple Stakeholders
Selling your goods to a single consumer is not typically part of B2B email marketing. You will find that more people are involved in the buying process when a company has to determine whether a sales purchase is worth it for them. If, for example, you were selling an email marketing software you could easily expect to be pitching your product to the company’s head of marketing, their senior email marketers, someone from the sales department, and perhaps even the CEO themselves.
Protip: Designate who you will have to make the initial pitch to and craft your strategy around what their priorities may be. Always create multiple campaigns for the other evaluators of your product.
Knowing the difference between ad targeting an individual consumer and an entire business is only part of the things you should consider. Make sure that you have everything planned out and ready to execute before you launch your email marketing campaign.
How To Get The Most Out Of Your B2B Email Marketing Campaign
1. Develop a buyer persona
Imagine the ideal target for the campaign you want to run. Utilize things such as an individual’s age, location, job role, income bracket, and preferred marketing channels to develop a way to accommodate their business and its needs. Your product or service should be geared to function with the company’s size, and its budget and solve any problems that they deal with.
Not sure where to look for pertinent information? Here are a few ways around that:
- Survey other’s in the same industry for their take on your product. Speaking with similar existing entities can give you insight to whether or not what you’re selling is valuable.
- Ask an existing customer to answer these questions in the form of a survey. They will be more inclined to do so if you reward them in some way for participating as well, like a future discount or small gift.
2. Develop an email list
Obviously having the contacts to market to in the first place is necessary, but consider how you are getting those contacts. An organically developed list with fewer contacts will always be more valuable. Sending out an email blast to someone who didn’t sign up will not only push away potential customers but may even have legal implications.
Put effort into growing your list rather than going the easy route and paying for a gathered email marketing list. If you need tips on how to grow your list organically you can:
- Look through your past network. Re-examining your past clients and reaching out again with a new or more targeted offer can be fruitful. Sharing sign-up information so they can also recommend others is key.
- Build a solid sign-up form that covers all of the information you need to develop your email campaign and optimize it to show up on search engines. Google is an extremely common starting point for product research.
3. Design your emails with the industry in mind
While marketing to business professionals demands a subtle touch it is still important that the emails look and feel like they were made for that industry. The beauty industry for example conveys a sense of relaxation so using shocking colors or an excited tone in your writing can be off-putting, whereas more team-oriented industries may enjoy an optimistic voice and brighter colors in the email.
Being an expert in graphic design isn’t necessary to nail the design of your email campaign:
- Research into the industry can go a long way, especially if you examine your competition. Join a competing company’s email list to see what they send out to their targeted market.
- Magazines are an excellent tool for looking into an industry’s design choices and preferred tone.
- Utilizing good software often provides built-in email marketing services and templates. Taking a template that’s built for a specific industry and adjusting it to add your brand can give you a great jumping-off point.
Developing email campaigns is easy and intuitive if you are using good software. CHIIRP is an all-encompassing tool for designing, scheduling, and automating your campaigns to get the most success out of your marketing efforts.
4. Show caution when sending cold emails
Sending an unsolicited, copy-pasted generic email with little to no industry relevance almost always means losing consumer interest fast. If you want to send cold emails be sure to research examples of ones that have seen success and remember these 2 rules:
- Sending a cold email to a buyer persona you have developed and already seen success with is a safer bet. But pay attention to who you are emailing and make sure they are the appropriate contact.
- Get the personal information right and you can convey better intent with a cold email. Knowing your contacts first name and role while referencing the company’s achievements and struggles shows that you aren’t just sending random emails to try and land any sale.
5. Develop target groups and send them your emails over time
Having clear and defined ad groups gives you flexibility when moving between the stages of your sales pipeline and ensures that you are sending better-targeted content. Having a campaign specifically for correspondence with the CEO versus the business’ marketing leaders for example means you can effectively sell your product to any entity within the company with less notice and more personalization.
Sending your emails slowly, over time, at opportune moments within the marketing funnel is also essential. Drip campaigns based on pre-identified triggers send the most pertinent information and the best time.
Protip: Follow-up is also incredibly important in order to drive the processing behind making the purchase.
Key Takeaways
Once you understand the nuances of B2B email marketing campaigns, creating a solid strategy is much simpler. Selling a product to multiple people with different priorities and more stake in the purchase demands a higher degree of customization. Prepare your campaign by:
- Creating buyer personas
- Developing an organic email list
- Designing your emails based on industry standard
- Avoiding cold emails or at the very least be cautious in how you utilize them
- Targeting specific ad groups and using automation tools to exert more control.
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