Email campaigns are an excellent way to stay in touch with your visitors and hot leads.
Over half of the world population uses email and in the professional world, it’s an essential method of communication.
At the same time, the average office worker receives 121 emails in their inbox each day.
It’s a challenge to not only prove yourself and earn a spot in their inbox but get them to open and engage with your emails too.
Use these B2B email marketing best practices to personalize every communication and boost engagement.
8 B2B Email Marketing Best Practices You Need to Personalize Your Campaigns
According to data from Salesforce, 65% of businesses say they’d consider switching vendors if a brand didn’t make any effort to personalize communications.
Personalization isn’t just “nice to have” in B2B anymore – it’s essential for generating leads, converting them into customers, and keeping their loyalty.
These B2B email marketing best practices can help you create a personalized experience that your young buyers expect.
1. Start with Clean Data
62% of businesses say they’re working with data that’s up to 40% incorrect. Collecting accurate data and gaining access to that data when marketers need it is an ongoing problem in B2B.
Clean and current data is at the heart of every successful personalization strategy.
You can take a few measures to make sure you’re always working with the best information on your subscribers and we’ll explain those in a little more detail below. However, we also recommend tracking a certain type of information called intent data. Intent data tells you why someone visits your website.
Where most databases force you to work reactively, intent data allows you to create proactive email marketing campaigns. Willingness to buy isn’t the same as advocacy and intent data can help you fill these gaps.
2. Employ Human Lead Verification
At the top of B2B email marketing best practices is a high-quality list of engaged subscribers. It goes without saying that you should never purchase email lists. Those “leads” don’t want to hear from you and it’s a legal gray area at best.
Instead, use your high-quality content to attract leads and human verification to vet them.
At Hushly, we use a combination of algorithms, software, and human lead verification to make sure every email subscriber comes from a real business address and their information matches that of public sources like LinkedIn.
3. Get Rid of Forms
According to Think with Google, buyers spend between two and three hours every day researching on their mobile devices. By next year, 70% of all business searches will happen on smartphones.
Forms aren’t mobile-friendly, and no one likes them.
Ditching forms will give visitors a positive first impression of your website and put them in a position of power over email communication – trust us, this is a good thing.
4. Use Self-Nurturing Landing Pages to Build Your List
A self-nurturing landing page lets your website visitors educate themselves at their own pace without filling out forms.
As opposed to dead-end landing pages, a self-nurturing page supplies an endless stream of relevant content – just like Netflix.
By the time a lead feels comfortable giving their email, they’re further along in the sales funnel and positive that they want to hear from you.
Source: Hushly
5. Run Hyper-Personalized Retargeting Campaigns
Even with massive amounts of data at marketers’ fingertips, 80% of buyers still say that brands don’t understand their business. Taking charge of your data and using it to personalize your communication is critical for demonstrating your understanding.
When you un-gate your content and supply samples, your leads consume more content during each visit.
On your end, this is good because it gives you more first-party data to work with. You can glean information about blogs, podcasts, eBooks, tutorials, and other content the lead consumed on your website to gain a better understanding of where they are in the buying process.
From there, use that information to craft personalized email campaigns.
6. Set Up Automated Campaigns Based on Triggered Events
You have some articles, eBooks, videos, and other content on your website that covers some pretty niche topics.
You can gauge how far along a lead is in the buying process based on which pieces of content they consume, too.
Create email campaigns ahead of time to accompany some of your best pieces of content. When a lead visits the eBook, podcast, video, or blog post, this will trigger your algorithm to send them the personalized email.
7. Segment Your List
No list of B2B email marketing best practices in 2019 would be complete without mentioning segmentation. Instead of focusing on demographics as consumer brands do, B2Bs instead should focus on firmographics:
- Industry
- Buying stage
- Job title and role
- Purchasing power
- Company size
- Company name
Breaking your list up can help you nail down your account-based email marketing strategy and provide personalized content. With nearly seven people involved in each buying process, segmentation is absolutely critical.
8. Write in a Conversational Tone
Social selling tactics can improve your close rate by 1.2x and deal size by 1.3x – those are big numbers when you consider the massive size of B2B contracts.
Your relationship-building strategy should take charge of every communication you have with leads – including email.
Don’t write “at” them. Make it a one-on-one conversation and encourage them to interact with your content or ask questions. Not every email needs to have the goal of converting a lead into a sale – in fact, it shouldn’t if you truly want to build relationships.
B2B Email Marketing Best Practices in 2020: Ditch Forms and Watch Qualified Leads Grow
At Hushly, we push businesses to get rid of clunky forms in favor of user-centric features like self-nurturing landing pages and adaptive content hubs. By simply removing forms from your landing pages and letting your leads educate themselves at their own pace, you can improve your data and generate 51% more lead conversions almost instantly.
Don’t believe us? Check out our software now to see how it works!
