When you don’t take advantage of email marketing for your business, you miss out on many profitable opportunities and benefits.
Without email marketing, you will…
- Miss out on engaging and funnelling better-qualified prospects;
- Effectively lose customers who will bounce or abandon their carts on your site;
- Not have a core channel to guide your clients along your customer journey;
- Will lose potential profit to the competition who uses email marketing.
And the biggest loss you’ll have is not having the chance to achieve the excellent ROI that good email marketing can deliver. And the latest research says that, when done right, email marketing can give you a return of up to $44 for each $1 you spend doing it.
All these considerations ring true to any enterprise, especially a Business-2-Business company. In fact, you can say that a B2B should be most reliant on email marketing.
Email allows for concise yet detailed conversations and should be your go-to form of communication as a B2B – your most reliable way to connect with customers and new potential customers.
In this article, we will discuss the many benefits of email marketing to a B2B company like yours.
The Importance of Email Marketing for B2B
In contrast to B2C relationships, where you try to persuade customers to make emotional decisions, B2B sales are based on logic.
It’s easy to make impulse purchases for small items like clothes and shoes, but no one buys, for example, thousand-dollar IT software programs on the spur of the moment.
B2B purchases not only have a higher monetary value, but they also serve a practical purpose. This is in contrast to B2C items, which are frequently purchased for emotional and material reasons, as well as convenience.
When you sell to another company, you must consider your buyer’s exact needs.
Buyers will look for as much relevant content and testing opportunities that they can find, and they will compare your product or service to those of your competitors.
Their primary motivators for purchasing will be logic, utility, and ROI, so you must effectively communicate as much of this information to them as possible.
Email is the ideal medium for this.
According to studies, shorter B2B sales cycles are often around 3 months, but larger and more significant sales can take 6-9 months.
Buyers prefer not to decide immediately, so you must nurture your prospects over time.
This means that sending an email to their inbox once a week or once a month keeps you at the top of their mind so that when they are ready to buy, your company is the first one that comes to mind.
A recent Circle Research study reports that the adoption rate of email marketing in B2Bs is around 88% percent.
The same study looked into the effectiveness of email marketing for B2Bs and discovered that 42% of respondents claimed it was a very effective channel for generating new leads for their company.
Despite the fact that companies are increasingly focusing on modern marketing platforms such as social media and content advertising, studies consistently show that email marketing is an important and effective tool, particularly for B2B businesses.
Here’s why B2B companies prefer and should do email marketing.
Emails enable individualized communication.
Email marketing allows you to segment or categorise your audience more easily.
B2B companies segment similar businesses and tailor email communication to each segment with personalised information.
This strategy is effective for generating prospects and guiding customers through the sales funnel.
Emails are excellent at B2B relationship building.
Email is one of the most popular modes of communication for businesses all over the world.
The majority of business communication takes place via email.
It is a two-way channel of communication that allows both parties to respond when they want, making it very convenient and friendly.
It is preferable to send an email instead of cold calling clients and disturbing them.
It is a money-saving marketing channel.
The investment required for email marketing is minimal, but the return can be substantial. As mentioned earlier email communication has been shown to be one of the most effective marketing channels in a B2B setting.
As a result, companies with limited marketing budgets prefer email marketing because it requires the least amount of investment.
Emails are flexible and mobile-responsive.
With email marketing, your B2B can always be in touch with your prospects and customers because they can carry your messages virtually everywhere they can be.
Engaging with them won’t require anything more than a mobile device.
You can effectively increase your B2B profits with email marketing done right.
Email marketing makes it highly convenient and affordable for you to have a consistent and reliable channel of B2B communication. And its results have been shown by studies to be something you don’t want to miss.
But like any promotional channel, there are practices that allow you to succeed in your B2B email marketing.
Here are some tips for you.
TIP #1 | Ensure to send highly-valuable content with your emails.
In a B2C business environment, email marketing is simple to implement. That’s because B2C goals can be accomplished simply by promoting new products, offering coupons, or updating customers on new deals or promotions.
However, in a business-to-business setting, the products or services you provide are typically less dynamic, more unquantifiable, and highly specialised.
So for a B2B, you should:
- Try adding value to existing and prospective customers instead of pushing cross-sells, upsells, or promotions.
- Rather than informing your customers about your offerings, demonstrate your ability to add value to their operations.
This can be accomplished by sending emails containing useful information that your customers can use to improve their businesses.
For example, you could send them:
- Industry-related tips,
- Ideas,
- Educational materials,
- Industry insights,
- Organizational tips,
- Case studies and success stories,
- Productivity guidelines, or
- How-to articles.
TIP #2 | Test your emails.
When it comes to the most optimal time to send emails in a B2B environment, there are no hard and fast rules.
Because your clients may prefer receiving emails from you at any time of day or week, you must experiment.
Send emails on select days and times of the week and note which ones received the most responses.
Testing should assist you in determining the best time to send emails to your customers.
You can also devise a strategy in which you send emails to each individual client at the times when they are most inclined to respond.
By automating your email marketing channel, you can send personalised emails to each recipient.
TIP #3 | Personalise your messages.
Businesses are personalising their email communication even in B2C settings. And with intuitive and intelligent email platforms, any marketer can personalise email messages on a mass scale with the click of a button.
And because your goal as a B2B is to establish a long-term relationship with a few high-profile clients, it is critical that you personalise all email communication.
According to one study, personalised emails can increase clickthrough rates by nearly 14% and conversion rates by about 10%.
You can also try categorising your email audience if you have a huge customer base. And you can create segmentations using any combination of variables.
The goal is to send an email that connects on a deeper level with the recipient.
Personalised emails demonstrate to your audience that you value their interest in your company and invite them to strengthen relationships with you.
A drip email marketing campaign can provide a more targeted approach.
By pre-defining email communication, you can use the drip campaign approach to guide your customers through the sales funnel.
Drip marketing is simply sending a limited amount of emails to your target audience on a predetermined schedule based on the actions they take or changes in their status.
This can be accomplished by pre-scheduling all email communication and sending emails at specific times.
Personalisation makes your client feel that you are invested in them, even beyond pure business.
TIP #4 | Make your landing pages effective.
If you understand the fundamentals of email marketing, all of your emails will most likely contain a link that directs readers to a page on your website.
Many marketers make the mistake of always redirecting email subscribers to their homepage, but this approach is often ineffective.
Rather than sending email recipients to your homepage, create specific landing pages that relate to the content discussed in your email.
These pages should provide more information while also connecting to other pages on the site.
The goal is to convert your readership, and the more they are immersed in your site, the more inclined they are to convert.
TIP #5 | Optimise your emails for mobile devices.
You must recognise that most if not all of your email audience will be accessing your communications via mobile devices. So all of your email marketing communications must be optimised for mobile phones and tablets.
This means that your audience should not have to pinch and zoom in to view your message comfortably.
A pre-defined template that automatically resizes your messages to fit any screen is an excellent investment. You can make a responsive template yourself or use any software application to do it for you quickly.
TIP #6 | Outsource your email marketing.
It can be simple for you to see how much technical work and copywriting you must do to take advantage of emails for your B2B. And, of course, as a business owner or manager, you may not have the extra time to focus on this marketing channel.
So, it would be wise if you consider outsourcing your email marketing to an expert.
And you can start effective B2B email campaigns with us at the Kas Andz Marketing Group.
We are a multi-awarded full-service email marketing agency. Hire us and you will have a team of senior email marketers running high-ROI campaigns for your B2B.
So whether you want to scale up your email marketing or are simply looking to do less of the work, we can help you effectively accomplish better results.
Book a FREE discovery call today.
Enjoy more customers and better profits for your B2B with email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways by which you can draw more clients to your B2B. And it is cost-effective while high-yielding when done right.
And with excellent practices, you can use email marketing to provide you with a continuous stream of conversions that can lead to constantly increasing revenues.
If you want to learn more about how to do email marketing for your B2B, you may want to check out our Email Marketing Knowledge Hub.
It covers everything from the basics to automation, templates and more.
