B2B Email Marketing: Strategies, Tools, And Best Practices

Believe it or not, people still open and read emails. Despite the prevalence of mobile chats, email usage is at an all-time high and is still increasing. Of the 8.2 billion global population, 4.26 billion, or 52%, are email users, as reported by Statista. 

Additionally, a 2020 worldwide survey proved that businesses receive a great return on investment in email marketing. As reported by Statista, brands earned 36 USD for every 1 dollar spent on their email marketing campaigns. That’s a whopping 36x ROI!

With these impressive figures, you must pay attention to the power of email marketing. If done correctly, email marketing can boost your brand recognition and, eventually, your bottom line. 

An Overview: What is Email Marketing

Email marketing is a direct marketing tactic that uses email or electronic mail to enhance or develop the relationship between involved parties. The email can inform, sell, or promote the sender’s offerings to its recipients. Moreover, email marketing has three main goals:

1. To enhance the relationship with current or previous customers
2. To acquire new customers or to convince current customers to do a particular action
3. To promote collaboration with other entities

5 Key Components of Email Marketing

Any email marketing campaign must have these five essential components. You must carefully accomplish each to ensure its success. 

1. Email List

Your campaign will only be successful if you have email recipients; therefore, you need a curated email list. This list consists of email addresses from users who agreed to receive updates from your business.

Moreover, this list must not consist of random email addresses. You must carefully curate this list to be well-targeted and well-segmented to increase the success rate of your campaign. As much as possible, you want your emails to land in the hands of people most likely to take your desired action, such as purchasing or signing up. 

2. Email Content

After identifying the correct recipients, you need to craft the body of the email carefully. Consider this the main meat of your communication strategy. It is the message sent to your recipients, so you must ensure your content is personalised, engaging, compelling, and relatable. In addition to text, you can include optimised images, videos, and links. 

3. Email Service Provider (ESP)

ESP is the platform where you execute your email marketing campaigns. It helps manage and send your emails. These platforms include many features, like layout design templates, automation, analytics, etc. Therefore, you must select the best ESP for your business because it can ease your campaign or make your life difficult. Examples of email service providers are Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and SendGrid. 

4. Automation

Marketers can set automation on their chosen ESP to streamline the email marketing campaign. Automation is sending instant emails depending on the predefined criteria or desired action. You can place triggers to send emails funnelling the user to the desired result. You can also set which emails to send depending on specific user behaviour.

5. Analytics and Reporting

Like any other marketing campaign, tracking progress and insights is essential in email marketing. ESPs typically have built-in dashboards that display the performance of the email campaigns. 

You can also measure success through metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and bounce rates. These data can help you evaluate your campaign’s performance and pivot immediately if necessary. 

Benefits of Email Marketing

If you are still not convinced to utilise email marketing, then here are some of the advantages for your brand:

•  Cost-Effective:Email marketing is inexpensive compared to other traditional marketing channels. Therefore, it allows brands to widen their reach at a low cost. 
• Targeted and Personalised: As discussed above, the email list can be curated, allowing you to target specific audience segments. It makes your content more relevant and engaging to the recipients. 
• Measurable: Many email service providers offer dashboards that display detailed analytics. These dashboards also allow report generation, helping marketers measure success and evaluate campaign performance. 
• Scalable: Scaling is relatively easy in email marketing. Your brand can go from ten email subscribers to millions! You can expand your reach without significant cost. 
• High ROI: Email marketing gives an ROI of 36x, a high result for any campaign. With good content and targeted recipients, your campaign can have positive results, such as engagement rate and conversions. 

B2B vs B2C Email Marketing: Knowing Which Strategy Works for You

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of email marketing, let’s discuss the difference between B2B (Business-to-Business) and B2C (Business-to-Customer). Below is a comparative matrix that lists the features of the two email marketing strategies according to different aspects. The table below will help you determine which plan best suits your marketing objectives. 

Aspect	B2B Email Marketing	B2C Email Marketing
Target Audience	Businesses, professionals, top decision-makers	Individual consumers
Decision-Making Process	Rational, based on business needs, ROI, and efficiency improvements	Emotional, driven by personal desires, trends, and immediate needs
Content Focus	Detailed, technical, industry insights	Engaging, entertaining, and visually compelling
Email Frequency	Less frequent, scheduled around business cycles	More frequent, often based on consumer behaviour and seasonal trends
Email Tone	Professional, formal, informative	Casual, friendly, promotional
Personalisation	Tailored to business needs and pain points	Personalised based on consumer preferences and past behaviour
Sales Cycle	Longer, involves multiple touchpoints and decision-makers	Shorter, often impulsive purchasing decisions
Metrics and KPIs	Focus on lead generation, nurturing, conversion rates	Focus on open rates, click-through rates, and immediate sales
Examples of Content	Case studies, whitepapers, webinars, industry reports	Discounts, new product launches, seasonal promotions
Call to Action (CTA)	Encourages actions like downloading a report or booking a demo	Encourages actions like purchasing and signing up for a newsletter.

The comparative matrix above aggregates MailChimp, Hubspot, and Campaign Monitor discussions. In summary, B2B email marketing focuses on nurturing long-term relationships among businesses in the same industry. Meanwhile, B2C email marketing communicates directly with consumers to drive immediate sales and engagement. 

Types of Email Marketing Campaigns

Now you know the difference between B2B and B2C email marketing, here are the types of email marketing campaigns you can do. Knowing which types of emails to send can help you craft compelling content. With this in mind, you can identify the tone, manner of presentation, and call-to-action to make your campaign successful. 

• Newsletters: You regularly send the newsletter to update the recipients about the brand. The content can be news, articles, or any other relevant content. 
• Promotional Emails: Promotional emails promote a specific product, service, sales, or event from the name itself. You encourage your subscribers to engage with what you are promoting, eventually leading to conversion. 
• Transactional Emails: You include transactional emails in your campaign to inform the recipient about their transaction or action taken. These can be purchase confirmations, transaction receipts, shipping notifications, or password resets.
• Lifecycle Emails: Customer behaviour and customer journey are essential in creating lifecycle emails. These are automated emails based on the stage of the customer journey. It includes welcome emails, onboarding sequences, and re-engagement initiatives.
• Event Invitation: If your brand has an upcoming event, you can use your email list to promote it and gather attendees. Webinars and conferences usually use this tactic.

Now that you know the basics of email marketing, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty. This part includes in-depth discussions, guides, and examples to help you create an effective email marketing strategy. After this, you can expect to be confident in launching and executing your email marketing strategy.

The Process: Crafting an Effective B2B Email Marketing Strategy

Finding the Right Email Service Providers (ESP)

An ESP platform facilitates email management, automation, design, analytics, and more. Finding the correct ESP is crucial for a successful B2B email marketing campaign. An ESP can make your life as a marketer easy or difficult; therefore, you need to consider these things before deciding on which ESP to subscribe to:

• Scalability: The ESP should support the growth of your email list. You should check if it can handle high volumes of emails and the potential development of your campaign. 
• Deliverability Rates: The spam folder is a sad and dark place for ill-made emails. You do not want the emails that you carefully crafted to go to the spam folder. Most likely, they will need someone to read them.  Hence, your ESP must ensure emails reach the recipient’s inbox to guarantee favourable open and engagement rates.
• Automation Features: The ESP must have advanced automation capabilities to streamline the email marketing process and ensure timely and relevant messages.
• Integration Capabilities: Check if the ESP can integrate with tools like your CRM systems, third-party analytics platform, or other marketing automation tools.
• Reporting and Analytics: Data is vital to any marketing campaign; therefore, you must prioritise having this in your ESP. Check if it can generate detailed analytics and reports. These will help you evaluate the campaign performance, leading to data-driven business decisions. 

To help you decide which ESP is best for your marketing goals, here is a comparative table of the top email providers according to particular aspects. Afterwards, you can see in-depth discussions per platform.

At a Glance: Top 5 Email Service Providers Compared

Feature	MailChimp	HubSpot	Marketo	ActiveCampaign	Brevo / Sendinblue
Ease of Use	User-friendly interface, drag-and-drop email builder	Intuitive interface, integrated with CRM	Complex requires training or learning curve	User-friendly, intuitive design	Easy to use, beginner-friendly
Automation	Advanced automation, trigger-based emails, drip campaigns	Comprehensive automation workflows	Robust automation capabilities	Powerful automation, customisable workflows	Good automation features, easy setup
Segmentation and Personalisation	Robust segmentation, personalised content	Advanced segmentation and personalisation	Highly advanced segmentation	Detailed segmentation, personalised messaging	Effective segmententation, personalisation options
Analytics and Reporting	Detailed analytics, performance reports	Extensive analytics integrated with sales data	Advanced analytics, in-depth reporting	Comprehensive analytics, real-time reporting	Solid analytics, performance tracking
Integration	Integrates with many third-party apps and services	Seamless integration with HubSpot CRM and other tools	Integrates with Salesforce and other marketing tools	Integrates with hundreds of apps, including CRM and e-commerce	Integrates with CRM, e-commerce, and other platforms
Customer Support	Email, chat support	Phone, email support, online resources	Dedicated support, with training resources	Email, chat, phone support, helpful resources	Email chat support with tutorials and guides
Pricing	Free tier available, paid plans starting at USD 10/month	Free tier for basic features, paid plans starting at USD 50/month	Premium pricing, custom quotes based on needs	Affordable pricing plans starting at USD 9/month	Competitive pricing, free tier available, paid plans starting at USD 25/month
Best For	Small to mid-sized businesses and startups	Mid-sized to large companies looking for all-in-one solutions	Large enterprises with complex marketing needs	Small to mid-sized businesses	Small to mid-sized companies which are budget-conscious
Unique Features	Creative assistant for design, with social media integrations	Integrated CRM, marketing, sales, and service tools	Account-based marketing, advanced lead scoring	Customer experience automation, deep data insights	SMS marketing, transactional email features
Use Case	Small business launching an email campaign for a product launch	Mid-sized company nurturing leads and managing sales	Large enterprise running complex and multi-channel campaigns	E-commerce business automating customer follow-up emails	Small to mid-sized companies using multi-channel marketing with limited budget

In-Depth: Top 5 Email Service Providers’ Key Features

MailChimp

When discussing email marketing, one of the platforms that comes to mind is MailChimp. Marketers are fond of this platform because of its ease of use yet comprehensive features and tools. Though MailChimp is mainly used by small to mid-sized businesses, large enterprises can also quickly adapt to this platform as it is flexible.

Key Features

• Ease of Use: It has a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop builder features.
• Automation: It has trigger-based automation features with drip campaigns for personalised communication.
• Segmentation and Personalisation: It has strong segmentation capabilities, targeting specific audiences with personalised content. 
• Analytics and Reporting: It has detailed analytics and can generate comprehensive performance reports.
• Integration: It can integrate with numerous third-party apps and tools, such as e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, and social media networks. 

HubSpot

HubSpot is a famous and comprehensive marketing platform. It can integrate email marketing with CRM, sales, and customer service tools. HubSpot aims to provide businesses with an all-in-one marketing solutions platform. 

Key Features

• Ease of Use: It has an intuitive, beginner-friendly interface and seamless integration with its CRM. 
• Automation: It offers customisable, comprehensive automation workflows depending on your marketing goals. 
• Segmentation and Personalisation: It has advanced segmentation and personalisation features to target particular audiences and deliver relevant content.
• Analytics and Reporting: It has extensive analytics and can integrate with sales data. It also displays in-depth campaign performance insights.
• Integration: It can integrate with other third-party tools. 

Marketo

A part of Adobe, Marketo is a robust marketing automation platform for large businesses. With its advanced features, Marketo can cater to complex marketing needs such as lead management, account-based marketing, and targeted email marketing. 

Key Features

• Ease of Use: The platform provides extensive training resources because Marketo requires a high learning curve.
• Automation: It has sophisticated workflows and other robust automation features.
• Segmentation and Personalisation: It allows precise targeting and tailored messaging.
• Analytics and Reporting: It provides in-depth analytics and reporting about campaign performance and ROI.
• Integration: It integrates with Salesforce and other popular marketing tools. 

ActiveCampaign

Being user-friendly yet versatile, ActiveCampaign is perfect for small to mid-sized businesses. Its main features include customer experience automation and integration of CRM functionalities. 

Key Features

• Ease of Use: It is user-friendly and has an intuitive design, simplifying the creation and management of email campaigns.
• Automation: It has powerful automation features And customisable workflows.
• Segmentation and Personalisation: It has features to target specific audiences to deliver relevant content. 
• Analytics and Reporting: It displays comprehensive analytics and generates real-time reports.
• Integration: It can integrate with hundreds of apps, such as CRM and e-commerce platforms. 

Brevo/Sendinblue

Formerly known as Sendinblue, Brevo is a comprehensive marketing platform that offers email marketing, SMS marketing, and automation tools. It is perfect for startups and small to mid-sized businesses because of its affordable cost. 

Key Features

• Ease of Use: It is beginner-friendly and fit for businesses with limited marketing experience.
• Automation: It is easy to set up.
• Segmentation and Personalisation: It can target specified audience segments.
• Analytics and Reporting: It can deliver sufficient analytics and reporting. 
• Integration: It can integrate with CRM, e-commerce, and other third-party platforms. 

Segmentation and Personalisation: A Step-by-Step Guide

Segmentation targets an audience based on specified criteria. Meanwhile, personalisation crafts and delivers tailored and relevant messaging. These two processes are essential to increase engagement and conversion rates in email marketing. 

Of course, you want your intended recipients to read the emails you put effort and time into. And above all else, you want to ensure that the emails effectively drive the recipients to your marketing objective. Hence, here is a step-by-step guide to segmentation and personalisation:

How to Do Email Marketing Segmentation

• Identify the segmentation criteria: You can consider these things in identifying your criteria:
  • Demographics: Who are your recipients? What do they do for a living? Where do they live?
  • Behavioural Data: What websites do they often visit? How do they engage with emails? What are their past purchases? What events do they typically attend?
  • Lifecycle Stage: Is the recipient a prospect? A lead? A customer? Or a repeat customer?
  • Pain Points: What are their challenges or needs? How does your product or service solve their problems?
  • Application: You can segment your email list into recipients’ work industries, such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, education, etc., and tailor your messaging to these industries. 
• Collect and analyse data: Gather information through CRM systems, website analytics, or previous email campaign data to analyse or identify functional patterns for your segmentation strategy.
  • Application: Based on your findings, you discovered that leads from the finance sector read global news and respond well to webinars. 
• Create segmented lists: After identifying segments, use your ESP to divide the email list and create and manage the segmented lists.
  • Application: You can separate lists according to industry segments and create sub-segments according to job role or level, such as rank-and-file, supervisors, managers, and C-level executives. 
• Develop target content: Now that you have identified the segments, you can easily craft content that explicitly addresses each segment’s needs and interests.
  • Application: For your finance segment, you can send finance news, analytics, and informative pieces about investing, opportunities, and risk management.
• Implement and monitor: It’s time to launch the segmented email campaigns and monitor their performance. You must track success metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
  • Application: You can compare each segment’s metrics and identify which responds well. You can also conduct A/B tests, like creating two versions of messaging that you can send to other segments. 

How to Do Email Marketing Personalisation 

• Collect Personalised Data: You must gather information about your subscribers, such as their names, company names, purchase history, and past interactions with your brand. You can collect this information from forms, surveys, and the like.
  • Application: You can disseminate survey forms inquiring about the subscriber’s content preferences.
• Personalise Email Content: The common practice is using merge tags to insert personalised information into your emails. These are emails with the subscriber’s name and relevant purchase recommendations. You can also set a personalised subject line to increase open rates.
  • Application: “Chris, do you know why your sales are declining?” This subject line has more chances of getting clicked than “Why Businesses’ Sales are Declining.” 
• Use Dynamic Content: You can set tailored images, offers, and content sections for each subscriber according to user behaviour.
  • Application: If a recipient is interested in shopping, include a dynamic content block with articles and offers about fashion and styling trends or shopping discounts. 
• Create Personalised Customer Journeys: Developing automated workflows can help your email marketing campaign to be effective. You can set personalised emails according to predefined triggers such as website visits, email opens, and past purchases. You must map out the customer journey and identify key touch points for personalisation.

• • Application: Once the subscriber downloads your lead magnet, like a lesson or guide, you can send follow-up emails containing relevant resources. You can also send another follow-up email that encourages purchase. 
• Test and Optimise: Keep creating content and testing personalisation tactics to see which resonates with your audience. You can also use A/B testing to compare the effectiveness of personalised versus non-personalised content. Afterwards, continue to optimise or pivot if needed.
  • Application: Test different subject lines and call to action to identify which drives the best results. 

Content Marketing Integration

Content is the meat of any email marketing campaign and is your tool to encourage recipients to take the desired action. Therefore, you must integrate your email marketing strategy into a good content marketing strategy. With this teamwork, recipients can receive valuable, relevant, and educational content to solve their pain points. 

To make this successful, consider these two things:

• Content Types: You can play on various content, such as whitepapers, news, case studies, reports, and blogs. 
• Content Relevance: With segmentation as your guide, you must ensure that the content aligns with your subscribers’ interests and stage in their customer journey. 
• Application:
  • Case Studies: You created an email campaign highlighting your product’s benefits. You included case studies and testimonials stating how your product changed customers’ lives.
  • Webinars: Your brand wants to educate your audience about its newest product. To promote your webinars, you can execute an email campaign with a call-to-action, inviting your recipients to discuss the topic and luring them with attractive freebies or promos. 

Automated Email Campaigns

You can use automation to streamline the email marketing process and help manage repetitive tasks. You need to consider these things in executing an automated email campaign:

• Trigger-based Emails: You predefine criteria that your campaign automatically sends once the user qualifies. For example, users can receive an automated welcome email when they download a lead magnet.
• Drip Campaigns are automated emails that nurture leads over time. They follow a schedule to avoid content fatigue.
• Application:
  • Welcome Series: You set an automated email to send to new subscribers, introducing them to your offerings. 
  • Re-engagement Campaigns: You send automated emails to inactive subscribers to rekindle their interest. You can also send discount promos to lure them into re-engaging. 

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the phase in email marketing wherein you solidify your relationship with your subscribers through relevant and consistent communication. To be successful in lead nurturing, here are some of the key considerations:

• Content Mapping: Using the customer journey as your guide, you need to align the content you target to specific segments according to their stage in the journey. 
• Multi-channel Approach: Consistently sending text-based emails can lead to content fatigue. Therefore, mix them with video formats, webinars, event invitations, etc.
• Application:
  • Educational emails: You provide informative content to educate your subscribers about the value of your offering. You can deliver this through a video or an invitation to a webinar or event.
  • Success Stories: You must also share encouraging stories to boost brand credibility. You can incorporate compelling visuals showing how your product improved customers’ lives. 

A/B Testing and Optimisation

You do A/B testing in email marketing by comparing two versions of an email to see which performs better. Through this, you can evaluate which tactics work so that you have a basis for campaign optimisation. Consider these things before doing your testing:

• Testing Elements: Identify which email element you want to test. Do you want to test the subject line, the email content, the CTA, images, or sending times?
• Data Analysis: Pay attention to each performance and use the results to make data-driven decisions. Based on your findings, optimise the email strategies. 
• Application:
  • Subject Line Testing: Test two subject lines to see which performs better.
  • CTA Optimisation: Test two calls to action to identify which drives more clicks and conversions. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is B2B email marketing, and how is it different from B2C email marketing?

B2B email marketing targets businesses, focusing on building relationships and nurturing leads among professionals and decision-makers. B2C email marketing targets individual consumers, emphasising emotional appeals and quick conversions.

How can I improve my B2B email deliverability rates?

To improve deliverability, maintain a clean email list by regularly removing inactive addresses, use a reputable ESP, authenticate your emails with SPF and DKIM, create engaging and relevant content, and avoid spammy language and excessive punctuation.

What types of content work best in B2B email marketing?

Effective content includes industry reports, case studies, whitepapers, webinars, product updates, and educational articles. These materials provide value, establish authority, and address specific business needs and pain points.

How do I measure the success of my B2B email campaigns?

Track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. Additionally, you can measure ROI by analysing the revenue generated from email campaigns and comparing it to the costs involved.

What are some best practices for segmenting my B2B email list?

Segment your email list based on industry, company size, job role, geographic location, past behaviour, and the buyer’s journey stage. Use this segmentation to send personalised and relevant content to each segment, enhancing engagement and conversions.