Get Secrets That Other Email Agencies Won't Reveal
Email is the digital multi-tool in your business-to-business (B2B) marketing toolbox. It integrates with every other marketing channel, from search to direct mail, banners to retargeting ads, even offline tools like direct mail, print, out of home and broadcast.
You can use email to greet new prospects, nurture the people already in your pipeline and qualify them for further contact by your sales team. Unlike other channels, email doesn’t have to wait for someone to discover it. You have permission to enter that most private space – your customer’s inbox. No other channel gives you the same opportunity to achieve such close one-to-one contact.
Like any tool, however, email is most effective when you handle it carefully and strategically. It requires proper care and handling to be most effective. Consider this post your user guide for getting the greatest value from your email efforts, whether you are launching a new marketing plan from scratch or want to strengthen the plan you already have.
As you read through the guide, you might have questions about the content and how to use it in your own B2B email marketing program. Post your questions in the comments section at the end of this email or contact us. Email is our specialty, and we would love to help!
B2C (business to consumer) email marketing is what most people think of when they think about email marketing – the messages they get from the brands they buy from in their personal needs. B2B and B2C share many similar characteristics, but they have one major difference, as you’ll see below.
B2B and B2C marketers used to think they had little in common with each other. But over the years, especially as email became a strong component for each, the two sides have discovered they have a lot to learn from each other. B2B and B2C share many similar characteristics, but they have one major difference, as you’ll see below.
B2B marketing has always been more data-driven than B2C, most likely because the path to purchase is so much longer. B2B marketers are more likely to ask for and act on data from prospects and customers and to use that data to shape messaging models such as drip and nurture campaigns. (See Section 5, “B2B messaging strategies,” for more on these and other models.)
B2C marketers also can learn how B2B email marketers use education to keep customers engaged when they aren’t in the market to buy. A consumer in the market to buy a new car might need just as much help making a decision as a company does when buying a new fleet of trucks.
B2C email marketing has led the way in personalized, customer-focused messaging and in connecting channels to discover purchase intent and readiness – again, because consumers usually take less time to shop, use the products faster and are more likely to buy again quickly.
B2B emails often come across as institutional in tone, while B2C emails are more informal and conversational. Remember the old saying: “People buy from people, not companies?” By adding a human “voice” and using data to personalize their messages, B2B marketers can turn their emails from lectures into conversations.
We polled a group of email marketing leaders to learn the greatest misconceptions about B2B email marketing. Here’s a sample of what they told us:
“It seems many B2B marketers still believe that email is an acquisition channel, it’s not. Email is a great nurture, info/educational, sales, etc. channel. But buying a list and trying to engage that list 99% of the time it will fail and damage your domain and IP reputation.”
“One I’ve encountered is a question of whether the same permissioning / opt-in standards apply to B2B as for B2C lists. I’ve even met some B2B list owners who still use discredited practices like web-scraping to build their email lists, which is nearly unheard of now in B2C due to its known impact on deliverability.”
“The biggest B2B misconception is that decision-makers/influencers, in organizations behave purely rationally and make all their decisions without emotion. People are people – organisations don’t buy, people do!
‘If you understand the needs and the state of mind of the person or persons making the buying decision, you’re in a better position to resonate with them. It is essential to shift your focus away from products, features and functions towards people and their needs within the context of the organization.
“Sure, specs are important in technical sales, but the decision will be as much if not more about how the organization you’re buying from makes you feel.”
“If I make a decision to buy a new WiFi solution for home and it’s rubbish, I just get a look of disappoint from my son.
“If I make the wrong decision at work over a marketing platform, personal, financial and political elements all conspire – hell yes, it’s emotional. It reflects directly on me.
“I absolutely believe that relationships are the new B2B battleground. To paraphrase from the trusted advisor team, a competitor can copy your product, spend more on advertising or offer a lower price, but the one thing a competitor can never do is copy your relationships. It is personal, and it does differentiate you.”
One of the greatest things about email marketing is how easy it is to get started. It’s truly a low barrier channel. All you have to do is collect some email addresses (with permission!), find an email sending platform, create a message and off you go!
Right? Not quite.
Your marketing plan will work best if it evolves from the goals and objectives you have set for it. This guides your program, helps you use your marketing resources (time and money) wisely, create better messages and understand how to measure whether your campaigns have succeeded or failed.
Your marketing plan should include objectives, strategies and tactics. Each one serves a specific purpose.
Warning: It’s easy to let tactics lead your planning. But if you focus more on tactics than the objectives and strategies of your email marketing plan, you could end up wasting resources on things that don’t work because you aren’t using them properly.
Objectives and Strategy Before Tactics and Technology: Sending messages is actually one of the last things you’ll do if you’re creating a brand-new marketing program. And, if you’re upgrading an existing program, adjusting your messaging properties like frequency, cadence and content will also be far down the list.
Have a specific email marketing challenge you need met? Or have no idea where to start? InboxArmy’s corps of email marketing strategists provide actionable advice and suggestions to improve and optimize your email marketing programs to enhance ROI.
Decide what you want to achieve, both for your overall email program and for each campaign or message you want to achieve. Write down your objectives and share with your team to make sure everyone understands your game plan.
To borrow a concept from email thought leader Kath Pay, look for SMART objectives. These are:
Your objectives, whether broad or specific, will guide your sequencing, follow-up messages and even the tone of voice and images you use in your copy.
Common objectives are “Increase revenue from email by 20% in the next 12 months” or “Increase qualified leads by 10% in Q2.”
If objectives are the “why” of your marketing program, strategy is the “how.” How will you increase revenue from email by 20% this calendar year or increase qualified leads by 10% in a quarter?
The answers will vary depending on your business, but knowing your ultimate goal will make it easier to decide which strategies would support your objective.
To increase leads, for example, you might launch a series of webinars to attract more prospective customers who have not gone through your marketing program yet.
Tactics are the “what” in your marketing plans. They are the specifics you choose to carry out your strategies and achieve your goals. This is where all the strategic and objectives planning you did earlier will pay off. You have dozens of tactics at your disposal when you’re planning an email program or a campaign, but not all of them are designed to do what you need.
A hammer and a screwdriver are two essential tools in a homeowner’s toolbox. Each one is designed for a specific use. You might be able to pound in a small nail with the handle of a screwdriver, but the hammer will do the job right the first time and every time.
Here’s a tactical maneuver: To attract more prospects to your webinar series you offer attendees a white paper with exclusive information they can use to do their jobs more effectively.
If they share their email addresses to get the paper, you can invite them to sign up for your email newsletter. That move can load them into a nurturing plan that you’ll use to gather more information about them and better target your messaging.
These are the objectives common to B2B marketing plans. Below, you’ll see how email can help you achieve each one:
This is one of the most hotly debated topics in all of email marketing. Do you need to get permission to send marketing messages to prospects and customers?
The answer: It depends, but when in doubt, get permission first.
Here’s why: In almost every country on the planet but the United States, marketers have to get permission from consumers before sending them promotional messages – anything other than an email related to business transacted with that brand.
In the U.S., you may contact people via email without permission, but you can’t scrape emails off the web, and you have to remove any email whose owner asks to unsubscribe.
B2B email permission is a little murkier, even in countries like Canada, which has one of the strictest laws governing email marketing and communications. That’s because the law does allow businesses to temporarily email people with whom it has a business relationship without getting permission first. Read Why You Should Never Buy an Email List
The best reason we can think of for getting permission first, and not using purchased or rented lists, is that permission lists perform better:
The best source of deliverable and valuable email addresses is your own website, social media channels and other owned or paid channels.
Besides inviting site visitors to sign up for your email newsletter (be sure to explain the benefit of subscribing instead of just asking for the address) on your website, these can be excellent sources of email addresses:
Learn more Email List Building
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Now that you have those addresses, you can begin messaging. Call on your set of objectives, strategies and goals to help you decide what kind of messages will align with them.
Many B2B email marketing programs rely on a combination of broadcast emails (one to everyone) and targeted messages that reflect customer activity, interests or position on the sales journey (that is, how close they are to buying for the first time or buying again).
Personas are people! Well, almost. A persona is a representation of one of your customer groups, based on gender, demographics, needs, wants, challenges, beliefs and other data that you collect or infer from preferences, polls, qualifying forms, web behavior and other sources.
The terms “persona” and “segment” are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same thing.
A segment is a group of customers in your database who share similar characteristics. Personas are fictitious characters you build to understand their emotional triggers, motivations and other psychological aspects.
The two concepts are complementary. You can use both for the most effective message creation and targeting. You can use segmentation data to help build your personas and you can segment your database by personas while writing copy that addresses the variables that make up each persona.
Here’s how one email company uses personas to focus its messaging: The company, which provides services to email marketers, created “Natalie,” a persona that represents the group of marketers it is trying to reach.
Natalie is a lower-level email specialist rather than a higher-level decision-maker. She is a younger female, likely in her first or second email job and juggles a number of responsibilities, few of which tap into her creative and executive abilities. The company knows her struggles and targets its messages to relieve some of her more onerous duties and give her more time for creative thinking and planning. Each message the company sends sounds like a personal note to Natalie.
Start by analyzing your data and looking for common patterns. You can use multiple sources – web behavior, usage trends, demographics, focus groups, user interviews – anything that gives you insight into your data.
Include characteristics that reflect their position in the decision-making process. Is your persona someone who has the final say, who recommends a purchase or gathers initial data?
This is where personas and segmentation come together in your database. identify customers whose records match most or all of your persona data, and form them into a segment. Give that segment an identity, and visualize your persona as a human representation of that data.
If you’re just beginning to build your B2B email marketing program, you might not have a lot of data to call on to build personas. But you probably have more than you realize.
Here Are Some Sources of Customer Data You Can Use to Create Segments:
Learn more about Email Segmentation
Okay, you’ve done the first round of hard work. Now it’s time to put your strategic and tactical planning to work by designing the messages you will send as part of your B2B email marketing program.
All the work you did up to this point pays off when it comes to your messages, because you are sending only the messages you need to send to support your objectives and strategies. Those objectives and strategies become the guidelines you need to create the right kinds of messages to support your customers and promote your company at all points on their journey with your brand.
Each point on the journey where your customers or prospects come in contact with your brand should have a corresponding message.
We will be talking about messaging in conjunction with another essential element of a solid marketing strategy: message automation. You can’t really talk about one without the other.
Your B2B email marketing program has a lot of moving parts. Automation allows you to send the widest range of messages most efficiently by managing everything from repetitive tasks to deep data integrations.
You’re probably familiar already with most basic email automations, like the confirmation email you get when you sign up to receive a brand’s email messages. The brand doesn’t have someone creating a new “thank you” message every time someone signs up. Somebody created a basic message, loaded it into the email platform, set the rules for sending the message and then hit “save” and went on to the next task.
Even the process of sending emails is an automation – you don’t have to send each issue of your brand newsletter or your transactional message out by hand. You created message templates and told the system when and where to send them.
As the saying goes, your work there was done. (Or was it? Keep reading to find the answer.)
Automation frees you up to spend your time doing more than creating, testing and sending messages. You couldn’t possibly do the kinds of complex personalizations and data integrations that today’s demanding B2B customer expects, especially those who are looking to your company for guidance and support in purchasing and post-purchase emails.
Note: Automation is Not ‘set It and Forget It
Your B2B email marketing program has a lot of moving parts. Automation allows you to send the widest range of messages most efficiently by managing everything from repetitive tasks to deep data integrations.
You’re probably familiar already with most basic email automations, like the confirmation email you get when you sign up to receive a brand’s email messages. The brand doesn’t have someone creating a new “thank you” message every time someone signs up. Somebody created a basic message, loaded it into the email platform, set the rules for sending the message and then hit “save” and went on to the next task.
Even the process of sending emails is an automation – you don’t have to send each issue of your brand newsletter or your transactional message out by hand. You created message templates and told the system when and where to send them.
As the saying goes, your work there was done. (Or was it? Keep reading to find the answer.)
Automation frees you up to spend your time doing more than creating, testing and sending messages. You couldn’t possibly do the kinds of complex personalizations and data integrations that today’s demanding B2B customer expects, especially those who are looking to your company for guidance and support in purchasing and post-purchase emails.
Check our email marketing automation services if you need help in setting up your flows and journeys.
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A well-executed design and perfectly coded email drives action and generates revenue. Our legion of expert email designers and coders are focused on building mobile-friendly, responsive HTML email templates that render correctly across all of the leading email clients.
Why it’s important: This is the email you send out as soon as your system adds a valid email address to your database. It’s not the message you use to ask subscribers to confirm their opt-in request. Rather, it’s the email equivalent of you standing at your front door and welcoming guests to your email house.
Learn more about Welcome emails
Why it’s important: The brand newsletter is where you begin to show your value to your prospects and customers. These are highly curated messages that focus both on educating customers and prospects with information about the industry to help them do their jobs better, and on how your brand is uniquely suited to help them
Newsletters in the past have been mainly broadcast emails (the same message to every active address on the mailing list). However, advances in email technology now allow brands to mix dynamic content that appeals to specific segments of the database with static content aimed at all customers.
Newsletters also have slimmed down considerably, especially as the email population has transitioned to reading messages online. Content-heavy newsletters laid in two or even three columns with 10 or more clickable items packed into the page are hard to read on mobile screens and often contain nothing of interest to customers who are focused on one aspect of your brand.
Refer our Guide on 60 Newsletter Examples To Inspire you
What they are: Automated programs that sort subscribers into different tracks based on their behavior, preferences, purchasing needs and time to purchase or any other relevant characteristics.
These programs run on data collected from as many sources as possible. Behavior can be one of the motivators that move customers through the messaging track or from one track (such as “browser” to “motivated buyer”).
Read More about Email Drip Campaign
What They Are: These can be part of your brand newsletter, but they also can go out to customers whose interests match the product’s capability, who have signed up to hear about this specific product or service or who have bought it in the past but would benefit from new versions, added enhancements or user tips and tricks.
What They Are: These are highly personalized messages that go out over the signature of a salesperson who has received a qualified lead from marketing and focus on moving the prospect farther along the path to purchase.
They also can be post-purchase follow-up messages from an account rep or other company employee assigned to work with the customer.
Although the messages can go out from individual salespeople, they must be coordinated with the marketing team for several reasons:
What They Are: Emails that go out in mid-cycle between newsletters and other scheduled (that is, non-triggered) messages. Participants’ answers can help you decide whether to move them from one track to another, such as from a track for customers who are ready to be contacted by salespeople or to those who need more nurturing.
What They Are: Similar to post-purchase emails sent by B2C companies, these emails aim to stay in touch with clients, to make sure they are successfully using the products or services they bought. They can coordinate with or supplement more informal check-in calls with account reps or managers.
These certainly don’t run the full gamut of email messages that a B2B brand can send to prospects and customers. However, they make it clear that you have many more messaging options than a basic email newsletter.
Just like its counterpart in B2C email, B2B email has come a long way in the 25 years that email has been a viable commercial channel.
B2B email is no longer just a digital version of the old print campaigns that marketers used for decades to attract, interest and convert their business clients. B2B email has shed its stuffy, stodgy past and often looks and sounds as consumer-friendly as the jazziest consumer emails.
Work correspondence has become less informal and more conversational, and B2B email marketing has evolved to echo it. Streamline communications to highlight benefits, not just features. Use animation, video and even audio content to reach out to time-compressed executives, many of whom are facing internal revolutions in their own industries.
One feature has not changed – B2B email aims to educate and guide prospects, not just sell. Uncertain economic times are leading B2B buyers to seek out more information, guidance and advice from the brands they are considering.
Is your brand positioned to offer this assistance without turning every conversation into a sales pitch?
Brands that can combine news, advice, tips and guidance along with gentle, logical nudges to qualify leads for sales contacts will provide the greatest service, both to their customers and to their companies.
We hope this guide helps you to create, clarify or update a workable B2B marketing plan for your company. Check our email marketing management services if you need help in improving your b2b email marketing. Email is our specialty, and we would love to help!
Get in touch to start a conversation.