Understanding B2B Email Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide
Back in 1978, a young creative thinker, Gary Thuerk, sent out an email promoting his company’s computers to 400 people and made sales worth $13 million from it. Little did he know, that he had sown seeds of one of the most effective marketing strategies the world would ever use: Email Marketing.
Today email marketing is the go-to choice for almost every company as it is the most direct and effective way to convert leads into customers and customers into loyal, raving fans. Interestingly, while every business out there is using emails to reach out to its prospects, trends suggest that email marketing works the best for B2B companies. Now, before dividing any deeper into the effectiveness of B2B email marketing, let’s talk about what email marketing means.
What is B2B Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows companies to reach out to their prospects and leads via email. And when business-to-business a.k.a. B2B companies use this strategy to target clients or client-to-be, it’s known as B2B email marketing or email marketing for B2B companies.
Types of B2B Marketing Emails
Depending on the type of message you share in your email, there are 5 common types of marketing emails that B2B companies use:
Promotional Emails
As the name suggests, these are emails that you sent to promote a standard, one-time offer. This includes sales, discounts, and premium rates that you may plan to offer. These emails are the best choice when you are looking for instant gratification as they drive conversion real quick. The image on the left is an example of a good B2B promotional email by Moo, an online printing and design company for businesses.
Email Newsletters
Newsletters are emails that you send to your prospects and customers to remind them regularly about you. The sole purpose of these emails is to ensure that your customer is connected and engaged with the brand. For instance, the digital writing tool, Grammarly, sends “Weekly Writing Insights” to its users that have details about the users writing performance, common errors, and some articles from the Grammarly blog.
Transactional Emails
Remember that automated email you get whenever you sign up on a new website? Or the one you get when you try to change your password somewhere. All these emails that you get while interacting with a brand, are transaction emails. How they help in marketing, you may ask? Transaction emails guide the user through your brand, ultimately making sure that they don’t feel ignored or lost. That way, users feel connected with your brand.
Lead Nurturing Emails
So, you got a company’s marketing head to sign up on your website to try your product? What next? How do take them from being a prospect merely interested in your brand to a customer? You do this by sending them a tightly connected series of emails with a coherent purpose and full of useful content all nudging them to buy your product or service, and these are known as lead nurturing emails.
Behavioral Emails
What happens if your customer stops using your product/service? Or you want to convert a client from a free trial to a premium account? These are defined customer behaviors that you want to get for your brand. And the emails to derive this behavior or action are known as Behavioural Emails. One of the best examples of this is Apple’s renewal email.
Why B2B companies should go for Email Marketing?
Venturebeat says that there are 43 different marketing categories available for a business. But you can’t use them all, right? Here’s why going for email marketing is a great choice if you are a B2B company.
B2B Email Marketing helps you connect to the right audience
When you have a mailing list of clients or companies you want to target, the message reaches directly to your audience, and not to a random group. As a result, you are more likely to get conversions. A Monetate survey states that for a business 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media. So, you are more likely to make a sale if you communicate directly with your target audience.
Your audience prefers it
Any business leader is more likely to prefer an informational email that comes from a known source than a random Facebook ad while making a business decision. That’s probably why 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email because it is communication that more often than not, they’ve permitted for.
It has more ROI
This is pretty straight forward. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $38, that’s higher than any other platform. As a direct communication channel, email marketing drives more conversions. At the same time, the cost of running an email campaign is far lesser than running a paid promotion on social media. So, your overall ROI is much higher.
Email marketing will never die out
Remember Orkut or Google+? They are nowhere around now, right? Some say even Facebook is dying. While no one can predict the lifetime of these social platforms, we know for a fact email, is here to stay. It can evolve but never die. So planning your marketing around it is fool-proof.
To Conclude
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to businesses to reach out to their target audience. It is more focused, has better ROI, and lets you engage with your customer more efficiently. So, put your time, efforts, and money into building a solid mailing list. You can know more about how to write an effective B2B marketing email on our blog. Remember what Ramsay Leimenstoll has rightly said,
“A small list that wants exactly what you’re offering is better than a bigger list that isn’t committed.”
