If you’re running an online business without effective B2B marketing, you’re leaving thousands of dollars on the table. Although it’s hard to implement effective b2b marketing strategies, this is essential to reach your target audience. Before heading into the depth of the B2B email marketing guide, let’s take a quick look at the concept of B2B marketing.
B2B email marketing
As the name suggests, B2B or business-to-business marketing exchanges information and products or services between companies. A company or organization that sells to other companies falls under B2B umbrellas. B2B email marketing is an exact method that helps you reach both individual consumers and business consumers.
Did you ever think why 93% of B2b marketers use emails?
This is because email is one of the best channels to engage the subscribers and turn them into leads then into potential customers. Moreover, email marketing could be a powerful channel for promoting your brand’s content. Almost 83% of brand owners are using email newsletters as part of their content marketing.
Let’s suppose when someone visits your website, there are fewer chances to purchase on their first day. After reviewing, once they leave your website, there is no guarantee that they will come back. So, what will you do to get back to them? When you have their email addresses, you could get them back.
Quick Guide to B2B email marketing
An effective and powerful email marketing can help your business generate leads, online sales, and get a potential customer. B2B marketing is something that could help your business stand out in the market.
Understand the Goals of your B2B email marketing campaigns
Before you proceed to email efforts, make sure you understand your B2B email marketing campaigns’ goals. Building trust and credibility for your services should be your first goal. If this is still not included in the list of your goals, add this before you start your campaign.
Moreover, you need to change customer’s perceptions of your business, and even you will have to establish your company as a thought leader for your industry. Not only that, but you will also have to build your business from existing customers. Existing customers are assets for any business, so make a friendly and long-term relationship with them.
If you’re looking to grow your business in a short time, you need to create offers that generate leads and online sales. This step could help you in developing your market database as well as in improving your brand awareness.
Define your Audience
After defining your goals, now you need to define who you’re trying to attract. By specifying your audience, you would be able to understand their needs. This is considered one of the most important steps; unfortunately, many companies skip this because they think they know their audience. So, they don’t like to put themselves for an extra effort that is too essential.
When you know why it’s important to define your target audience, it will make it easier to put the right amount, time, and resources into this stage of your b2b email marketing. When you know your target audience, you could see the world from their perspective. You can also identify the problems they have and need to overcome.
By defining your audience, you would know what services and product categories your audience interested in? What information they will they find valuable and want to receive? What offers will they find useful and want to respond to?
Define your Competitors
Understanding and knowing your competitors about who they are and offers could help you make your company and services stand out. Here we share a secret about marketing with you. Create a private email address that should not identify you or your company and subscribe to competitors’ newsletter or email list to know what they are offering.
When you join their email list, try to know what the primary focus of their emails is? What do you like about their marketing strategy, and what do you dislike? You can use this knowledge to create your B2B marketing strategies to avail your competitors’ weaknesses.
Define the purpose of your B2B email marketing campaign
You need to define the purpose of your email marketing campaign because you’re going to want some engagement back from your audience. No matter whether you got them from subscribing on your website to a newsletter or you purchased their names from an email list. However, the purpose is typically some engagement back.
The level of engagement you’re looking for depends on how you’re going to create your email and even how you’re going to make it creative. Email marketing’s effectiveness is less because marketers just ruined it over the past few years. So, you should get it straight to the point.
CRM system
There’re many CRM systems out there. Like me, you can be using a free one, like MailChimp and constant contact. But they have limitations whether they’re free or paid. Hubspot is a very popular CMS system. However, I’m not a fan of Hubspot because they’re expensive and even could lock you into a multi-year contract.
Infusionsoft is a great option that we’re using and would like to use in the future. Because they have the plain text and a ton of back automation to put the audience through campaigns and nurture them, ShopSpring is another great CMS system because it involves in some advance tracking and advance list building.
Email Format
You can’t make your email look like home. Remove the images, band of text at the top, headline, and logo. This should be in simple plain text. If you’re using HTML format, go for a rich text format. You’re using HTML format because you want to embed your code and tracking to track your audience whether they are clicking or not and what they’re clicking and what not.
Email format needs to be simpler that looks like you type this email. You can add some intro and then go straight into some text. However, avoid using long polarographs and multiple-links. Put one to two links maximum; otherwise, this stuff is going to get flagged as spam.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, B2B email marketing could be a good lead generation and a sales generation strategy. Start your email marketing campaigns and get your millions of dollars that you leave on the table every day. You don’t need to do anything; follow this guide.