Out of the innumerable marketing strategies available to businesses nowadays, email marketing has been one of the most effective ones, especially for B2B companies. We had earlier covered why email marketing is a great choice for B2B businesses.  But merely knowing that you should send emails to communicate with your clients and prospects is not enough. You should also know how to write these marketing emails, right? After all, as William Carlos Williams rightly says, “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.”

This brings us to the next big question: what’s the right way to write a B2B marketing email? Given the fact that there are different types of emails and what you write in an email depends entirely on the message you want to convey, we can’t give you a ready-to-use email. However, what we can do is to give you tips to write any B2B marketing email effectively.

5 Tips to write an Effective B2B Marketing Email

Here are some tried-and-test tips and best practices that you should keep in mind while crafting a B2B marketing email.

#1 Know your audience

Imagine serving meat to a purely vegetarian family? It’s a catastrophe waiting to happen. Similarly, if you serve an email to an audience that you don’t know well, your audience is unlikely to understand the message you are conveying.

Knowing your audience means understanding their preferences. Based on these preferences, you set the content, visuals, and tone of your email. For instance, an email to a millennial would have to be conversational and witty. You could even include Gifs and memes in it. But an email to the CEO of a company about trying out the demo of your product can have nothing of that sort. It has to be crisp, to the point, and with informational visuals only.

The key is to always create your email as if you are talking to them.

#2 Be concise

It’s rightly said, brevity is the soul of the wit. No one wants to read long dragging emails about why they should become your client. MarketingExperiments even did an experiment to prove that concise emails work better. They sent a longer copy version and a shorter copy version for the same campaign to the same audience at different times. While the longer copy got 183 conversions, the shorter one got a whooping 366. That’s literally a 100% more conversions. So, you need to cut to the chase and tell the receiver exactly what you want to convey.

That being said, don’t go overboard while trying to be catchy and clickbaity. A famous fail at this was Buzzfeed’s email about getting fired. However, clickable the subject line was, it got Buzzfeed in a huge controversy because of its apathetic copy. So, always know your limits too.

#4 Define clear next steps or CTA

Imagine an email that says, “Hey we are launching a new product, and here are its features.” Do you think it will work? Definitely not. There is no direction in the email about what the receiver should do with the information you just shared. Instead, if the email says, “Hey we are launching a new product, and here are its features. Why don’t you try it out? Doesn’t that sound more complete. Because now your reader knows the next step he should take after reading the email. That being said, you don’t want to make them too confused. So, don’t put too many different CTAs. For instance, you can’t write ‘try it out”, “reply if you are interested” and “buy now” all in the same email. Focus all your content on one key action.

#5 Take care of the technicalities

While most businesses keep focussing on getting the content and visuals of the email right, they forget on the technical details. A good email is one that loads easily and is easy to read. To ensure this, you need to keep the size of images in the email low, so that it even loads on a poor network. Not just that, you should also add alt tags to images, in case they don’t load.

Another thing that most companies forget in terms of technicalities is making their email responsive to different devices, especially mobiles. Emails that don’t display well on mobiles are likely to get deleted within three seconds. This was the cause of failure Macy’s Wardrobe Sale Email.

In the End

While these tips would help you write awesome marketing emails, don’t overdo it. 69% of email users unsubscribe from a business or non-profit email because the organization sends too many emails. So, plan your emails such that you are not bombarding the receiver with a huge volume of emails.

The best way to manage the frequency of emails and even automate emails, and personalize them is by using a good email marketing tool for your business. That way, you can manage your mailing list and send bulk emails seamlessly.

Overall, the key is to have a plan. Plan your email’s content, when it would be sent, to whom it would be sent, and what is its goal. If you do that accurately, your email will reap great results.