Online shopping has taken off because it’s convenient to have what you need at your fingertips delivered straight to your door. The alternative is going into a store and hunting down what you need among aisles of alternative options.
Email marketing makes you stand out in a world where having a website alone isn’t enough to connect with new clients consistently. Websites only using organic search rely on customers putting in most of the work finding you and identifying what they need. Instead, you need to incorporate a customized approach and go to where your clients are with content personalized to their needs and a path directly to your website.
Dive into seven B2B email marketing best practices to optimize your email open rates in a competitive market.
Why Should B2B Businesses Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing remains one of the most effective B2B marketing strategies for nurturing and converting leads. Email marketing for B2B lead generation is also an effective way to build your email lists. The average email marketing ROI is $36 per $1 spent.
Image from Litmus
Here are the top benefits of B2B email marketing:
- Directly contact leads: No need to worry about ranking top in search engines for key decision-makers. Email marketing always lands you in front of your target audience in their business inbox.
- Personalize your approach: Email marketing opens doors to personalized marketing. You have more control over who sees the content, allowing you to create content for that audience.
- Focus on an action: Emails work like landing pages. It isn’t a website of information and opportunities. Instead, it’s a targeted promotion of a product or service most relevant to the business.
Challenges for B2B Email Marketing
While email marketing offers many benefits, it isn’t a guaranteed home run. There are several obstacles you must overcome to secure a conversion, including:
- Encouraging email opens: The average email open rate is 16.7%. That’s 83.3 leads who never open marketing emails that flood their business inbox.
- Encouraging email clicks: Even if B2B readers open the email, they don’t always respond to the message. In fact, the average email click-through rate is 10.29%.
- Avoiding spam folders: Spam folders keep the lead from ever seeing your email. If you end up in spam folders too often, it can hurt your email’s trust factor.
7 B2B Email Marketing Best Practices
Here are seven tips for avoiding spam inboxes while boosting your open and click-through rates:
1. Segment Your Email List
All B2B clients come from unique industries with specific needs. If you want your emails to resonate with decision-makers from the first sentence, write the email to those readers.
You’ll struggle to connect with everyone when all leads are on the same email list. To effectively personalize your correspondence, you must divide your leads into groups based on similar business needs or industries.
For example, Hushly’s lead generation form uses data such as B2B lead behavior to understand their interest in your products and their chances of purchasing, so you’re only emailing potential clients based on what they’re looking for.
Another effective segmentation strategy is grouping leads by the place they are in the sales funnel. That way, you can send brand awareness emails to those at the top of the funnel while sending focused conversion emails to those at the end.
A key to segmentation based on the B2B buyer’s journey is lead scoring. Lead scoring assigns a score based on how likely a lead is to buy, automatically sorting leads into groups based on that score.
2. Personalize Your Correspondence
Personalization reduces the chances of B2B leads leaving your email without acting. Through personalization, you provide a solution that resonates with the reader. However, personalization goes beyond simply using the recipient’s name in the email. It uses data to create personalized content around specific pain points, industry needs, and tailored solutions.
To personalize your B2B email marketing campaigns, you can use data such as:
- Purchase history
- Website behavior
- Social media activity
Hushly’s tools enable first-party data gathering to improve your personalization, so every email connects with the assigned segment.
3. Optimize Your Subject Lines
Your subject line is the first thing B2B subscribers will see when they receive your email. It’s the storefront of your email. If it doesn’t entice and resonate with the recipient, they won’t ever open the email, which may ultimately end up in the spam folder.
Optimizing your subject lines increases open rates and prevents that spam mark on your account.
Some of Mailchimp’s subject line best practices include:
- Keep it short, under 60 characters, so it all shows up in the recipient’s inbox window.
- Minimize punctuation to under three marks so the email doesn’t end up in the spam folder.
- Be careful with emojis. While one can catch a reader’s eye, too many can look like spam or hinder the message (especially if a recipient’s system doesn’t translate the emoji).
- Use powerful words, like exciting descriptions and emotion-based phrases.
4. Use a Clear Call to Action on a Designated Landing Page
The call to action (CTA) is the part of your email that tells your B2B subscribers what action to take. Your CTA should be clear, concise, and relevant to the content of your email. It should also be prominent and easy to find. A clear CTA increases the chances of your subscribers acting after reading your email.
When your readers click the CTA, send them to a personalized landing page based on the reader’s industry, role in the company, and needs. Landing pages allow you to continue tracking the recipients’ journey to understand what interests them and where their pain points are. The landing page also helps promote a single action, like purchasing a service, registering for an event, or downloading an asset.
5. Test and Optimize Your Emails
Performing A/B testing is essential to ensure your emails are effective before investing in a large-scale campaign. You can use A/B testing to test different elements of your emails, such as subject lines, CTAs, and content. Testing helps you identify what works and doesn’t so you can make changes accordingly.
You should also monitor your email metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, and use this data to adjust your campaign.
6. Adhere to Email Regulations and B2B Email Marketing Best Practices
Avoid the spam folder and being blocked by ensuring your email stays compliant.
Some key email regulations include:
- Sending emails only to subscribers who have opted in to receive them
- Including an unsubscribe link in every email
- Using a clear and recognizable sender name and email address
- Being transparent about the content of your emails
- Complying with all relevant regulations, such as CAN-SPAM and GDPR
7. Automate Your Email Journey
Automating your B2B email marketing campaign ensures you can send targeted and personalized messages at the right time. It saves you time and resources while increasing engagement and conversion.
Automated email correspondence can perform specific actions, like:
- Sending abandoned cart reminders
- Sending welcome emails
- Following up after a purchase
- Sending a reminder email after a previous message remained unopened
- Starting an email drip campaign when someone fills in a form
By streamlining your email communication, you can create a seamless and consistent customer experience, ultimately leading to better results for your business.
Preview these B2B email marketing examples for more ideas to level up your email marketing.
Boost Your Email ROI with Hushly’s All-in-One Conversion Cloud
Create email experiences that are home run every time through Hushly’s platform.
With Hushly, you can design customized email templates that can be scaled to reach a larger audience and drive conversions. We can also help you create effective CTAs that allow you to measure the performance of your campaigns and optimize them accordingly.
It’s time to level up your email marketing B2B campaigns game with the only email automation platform you need to reach your conversion goals.
Request a demo to learn more about our all-in-one conversion cloud tools.
