Emails are considered one of the leading ways of professional communication. When you think of growing your brand or selling your stuff, email marketing is one of the most effective yet popular tools for marketing campaigns.Email marketing is a powerful tool, a form of direct marketing as well as a digital marketing strategy that makes use of email to advertise your company's goods or services. In simpler words, it is the use of emails to engage with the audience. It increases customer engagement with your brand and updates them along your journey. It plays a pivotal role in an organization's marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships, along with keeping customers engaged between their purchases through various types of marketing emails. As an email marketer, your position is as a guest in the recipient's inbox; this enables you to communicate with them on a more personal level. Email Marketing can further be divided into 2 forms named as:
Email Marketing is simple to set up and can be tracked with ease. For instance, you can add a newsletter sign-up option to your website. As people continue to sign up, you can send them your updates via the newsletter and keep your market growing. Moreover, you can also direct people to sign up for the newsletter through your social media platforms.A regular newsletter is one of the easiest and most effective ways to keep your customers engaged by sending them updates regarding your company, upcoming events, or special offers. Email software also makes it simple to schedule automated promotional emails. Email Marketing allows you to target specific groups of customers and even individuals as well. Offering deals to customers individually can help you gain recognition, increase brand awareness and improve customer loyalty.
B2B stands for "Business to Business." It is a business model where businesses sell their products and services to other businesses/companies instead of customers individually.So, B2B Marketing technically refers to any marketing content or strategy directed towards a business or an organization. Companies selling to other companies usually use B2B marketing strategies. Its major purpose is to familiarize other organizations with your brand name and your products or services.
In B2B Email Marketing, email campaigns are designed specifically to target other businesses. Here, emails are sent to companies instead of individual customers with the intention of educating them on the products and services offered by businesses for businesses. Its major goal is to nurture relationships with potential customers, increase brand awareness and generate sales. B2B campaigns provide information to the recipients encouraging them to move down the marketing funnel and make a purchase.
B2B Email Marketing has tremendous benefits despite the size of your organization. Some of them are discussed below:
A recognized and trusted brand name allows the business to prove itself to the industry. A renowned brand image holds importance in the growth and success of every business. Email marketing can be used by companies to stay in the minds of their customers by sending them constant updates, advice, trending news, special offers, and all the other information regarding the products and services they offer.
Email marketing gives organizations the benefit of dividing the audience among various segments depending on their information, the industry they belong to, job titles, and demographics. This enables businesses to fine-tune their emails and target customers accordingly at various stages of their buying journey. Emails can be used to reach the audience of a business along with sending them personalized messages and targeting them at various stages of their buying journey, which as a result, nurtures leads, sending them down the sales funnel.
B2B Marketing is a great way of generating leads. It encourages the use of CTAs (Call to Action), such as visiting a website or a custom-made landing page, filling out a form, or contacting the company for more information. Slowly but eventually, email marketing campaigns qualify leads to potential customers.
Compared to other marketing solutions available on the market, B2B email marketing services are the most cost-effective yet yield maximum results. It is an affordable way to reach most of the potential customers, along with saving budget and time.
Most B2B email marketing services software that offers automation and other services also enable businesses to measure the results of their marketing campaigns. Moreover, email marketing software helps capture various metrics, such as click-through rates, open rates, and conversion rates which decide the success and impact of the marketing campaigns deployed by organizations.
B2B and B2C marketing are different from each other. They differ in their strategies, content, applications, audience, and the ways used to communicate with them. But they have a common goal: to generate higher revenue and enhance customer engagement. As far as B2C marketing is concerned, companies mostly push a product and make the email recipients purchase it. Thus, success is calculated in terms of revenue. Whereas, in B2B email marketing, the companies tend to educate their users, make them move along the sales funnel, and help out the sales team in generating sales. Here, success is measured in terms of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).B2B and B2C marketers define their success differently as well because email recipients, in both cases, have a difference in decision-making authorities. B2B email recipients are mostly the representatives or stakeholders representing an organization, thus, having a bigger budget than B2C recipients. It is a natural approach from their side that they consider a lot of points before deciding on any purchase. In some cases, multiple people are also involved in the decision-making process. The key rule for generating results is to put yourself in the shoes of the B2B buyers, understand their challenges and provide them with your promotional content accordingly.
Your B2B email marketing strategy is basically your game plan to get to your prospects and convert them into potential customers. With a marketing strategy at hand, you follow your objectives in an organized manner. The following mentioned are some points to keep in mind.
Before jumping on to the basic strategies that you can actually implement, it is crucial to understand the buyer's journey. Due to the higher price point of B2B products and services, the B2B sales cycles tend to be much longer than the B2C cycle. Nurturing these prospects through marketing comparatively takes a longer time as well. So, some classified techniques are required at each stage in order to drive the prospects towards a purchasing decision or a demo request. In other words, it could be said that B2B marketing is not easy as setting up Instagram ads and waiting for responses. The buyer's journey is divided into three main stages that are named as:
After understanding the buyer's journey, B2B organizations can create a customer journey map which is a customized version of the buyer's journey. The customer journey map helps you understand which marketing strategies will be the most effective at each stage.
After grasping the concept of the buyer's journey, it is crucial to understand the audience you will market your product/service. Where B2B marketing is involved, companies identify their target market with firmographic details such as:
This information will help you create buyer personas which will help you understand their purchasing patterns and identify the marketing channels they are most likely to use.
Before initiating any email activity, you require a contact list of potential prospects. A list of 1000 prospects is a good size for a first campaign. It is basically the total number of customers or website visitors that have subscribed to receive the emails and updates sent by the organization. Growing your list is a bit hard for B2B businesses, but it is not impossible. You can attract customers through the content the audience would be interested in. Organizations can have their website visitors subscribe for gated content like webinars, demos, eBooks, guides, video tutorials, whitepapers, free trials, and free consultations. Social media marketing and content marketing channels can promote content and gain more potential subscribers.
Dividing the email contact list into segments further enables organizations to send highly personalized messages and targeted campaigns. Having segments based on job titles and industry will help create email campaigns that target specific people in specific industries working at specific positions. One of the ways to create segments is to have a separate segment for each type of buyer personas. These segments can be created based on various traits such as company, industry, and type of job description.
Cleaning up the email contact list means removing inactive users from the list. If the email list is outdated and the email addresses are no longer valid, the emails will start bouncing back or stay unopened in the inbox that is not in use for now. This could have an effect on the sender's reputation. Therefore, businesses must aim for a 0% bounce rate.
A/B testing is where marketers become scientists and thus calculate the results of their campaigns. In A/B testing, two or more versions of a variable are created from an email and are split between the members of the same segments of recipients. In the case of emails, the following variables can be changed:
The A/B tests help pinpoint what exactly works and does not work for the email campaign an organization plans to go forward with.
After implementing the designed email marketing campaign, it is best practice to analyze the results as well. It is very common that the first campaign only produces the desired results at a time. So, analyzing the results and making changes in the email marketing strategy accordingly is the key to gaining success.
Some of the B2B Email Marketing Best Practices are listed below:
Now you have the perfect intel to initiate your marketing campaign, and you require some professionals who can assist you in the implementation process. Databeys is recognized as a professional B2B Email Marketing Agency that provides its services across the globe. They help you to get better click-through rates by providing smarter solutions and adding a touch of creativity to your email marketing campaigns. Not only this, Databeys Consultants will help you track your results by analyzing your campaign, suggesting solutions, and implementing changes accordingly. Databeys specialize in B2B Email Marketing Services, so book a consultation call now to excel in your emails.