Effective marketing that brings in sales and nurtures your audience can be challenging to get right. Most companies and marketers are looking for fast results and expect sales, opens, RSVPs, or whatever metric they’re tracking to be improved upon immediately.
However, while email marketing is a long-term strategy, it offers one of the best ROIs out of all other marketing efforts. In fact, 89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads.
This blog will discuss how these five B2B (business-to-business) email marketing best practices can help your audience stay engaged with your brand and increase your overall metrics.
Is B2B Marketing Different Than B2C?
Email marketing best practices vary depending on if you’re a B2C (business-to-consumer) type of company or B2B. This is because your audience has two completely different goals in mind.
For B2B email marketing best practices, you will want to target how your products or services can impact their overall business, not just the individual receiving the email. Since there tend to be more people involved in the B2B decision-making process, it can occasionally take longer to turn prospects into leads and eventually into loyal customers.
Because a consumer’s response to B2C email-marketing campaigns is often immediate and based on emotions, it’s important to quickly communicate the value in your offer and spend time optimizing the call to action. These types of audiences often open emails during weekends, while B2B audiences do not.
As you can see, the type of audience you target completely changes major key factors of your email marketing campaigns.
5 B2B Email Marketing Best Practices to Boost Your Brand
1. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly
We’ll start with what we think is the most crucial B2B email marketing best practices tip here!
Although most emails are designed on a computer, desktop opens accounted for just 18.2% of opened emails in 2021. Not optimizing your emails for mobile devices could be the difference between unsubscribing and converting.
Here are a few ways you can optimize your emails to be mobile-friendly:
2. Validate Your Emails
Email Validation is a process of verifying if an email address is deliverable and accurate. Invalid emails and hard bounces will affect the overall effectiveness of your email campaigns and potentially damage your reputation.
If you are a newer company, or at least newer to email marketing, validating your email address is essential. There isn’t much point in having an email marketing strategy if your emails don’t reach the intended recipient’s inbox, right?
The easiest and quickest way to validate your emails is by using software designed for this purpose. Our favorite tool is EmailListVerify, and your first 100 verifications are free!
3. Nurture Your Audience With Drip Campaigns
Not every subscriber will be on the same path as someone else. Those who are brand new to your list will need unique content to help welcome them to your brand, and long-term clients require a different type of content to keep them loyal and engaged.
The best way to personalize the path and emails your audience receives is by segmenting and placing them in drip campaigns.
You can segment your audiences based on their spending habits, send personalized recommendations to your buyers, and even cross-promote and upsell items based on previous experiences. This makes drip campaigns one of our most influential B2B email marketing best practices.
To learn more about the benefits of drip campaigns and best practices, click here.
4. Focus on the First and Last Lines
Fun Fact: most users don’t read the middle of your emails. The reason for this is because of the Serial Position Effect.
The Serial Position Effect is a person's tendency to remember the first and last items in a series best and the middle items worst.
Therefore, if you want to keep your audience engaged and understand the point of your email, put all the “must-know” information in the first and last few lines.
5. Only Use One CTA per Email
Including more than one link or CTA in your email can lead to confusion, overwhelmed feelings, and the dreaded analysis paralysis.
Analysis paralysis describes when overanalyzing or overthinking a situation can cause forward motion or decision-making to become "paralyzed," meaning that no solution or course of action is decided upon within a natural time frame.
When your readers are given too many choices, they often make the easiest one…do nothing.
Including one easy-to-understand CTA in your emails can help break this confusion and give your reader a clear understanding of what to do next.
Key Takeaways
Our B2B email marketing best practices ensure you first have the right kind of leads and emails in your system. Before you can validate them or segment them in a new drip campaign, you first have to capture their information.
One of the best ways is with an Express Site with Zoek. In just as little as a few business days, you can have a fast and high-converting website in your hands. When your web design captures your audience's attention and makes them feel like you can solve their problems, capturing their email address is simple.