We’ll say it. Sometimes B2B marketers need to be reminded. B2B Email Marketing isn’t going away anytime soon.
It’s like the Old Faithful of marketing strategies. It’s been around for so long that it can be forgotten about it but always comes back bursting forth with power.
Why do we believe that some haven’t kept the faith?
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Even though 93% of B2B marketers use email, more than 40% of them saw budget cuts to email since the pandemic.
We’re here to convince you that email is still a reliable and viable marketing strategy worth budget investment – if done right.
Or if you’re still working on leveraging this strategy. We’re here to encourage and guide you in your current emailing campaigns.
With that in mind, here are three types of campaigns to design that can refine your B2B email marketing efforts.
Lead Nurturing
As you work through bringing leads down your marketing funnel, consider crafting a conversion-oriented lead nurturing email campaign.
At a high level, it’s an email sequence sent over a period of time to your lead to engage with the goal of converting them into a customer or client. You’re working to seal the deal via email.
This type of B2B email marketing campaign is also designed to establish a strong relationship between you and your target audience.
The process or campaign generally starts through a gated content or lead magnet download, webinar or trade show contact, or a sign-up for a free assessment, demo, or trial.
Once you’ve captured a lead from the tactics listed above you create an email sequence. The messaging in these emails should speak to each stage of the marketing funnel they are in.
Your messaging should focus also on the unique differentiators of your product or service within your market and position your company as the expert with the solution to your prospect’s problems.
Make sure you are connecting and not just impressing with your messaging and design.
Guide them through to close the deal and deliver your lead to your sales team—ready to buy.
The key here is not to flood their inboxes with needless content. Frankly, many people downloading assets expect to get this, so surprise them with emails that drive value and foster the relationship.
Pro-tips for email lead nurturing
According to HubSpot, “Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.”
Check out our video here explaining what this test involves and how it can help resurrect a failing campaign.
Watch our video here with tips for creating a personal email experience with automation.
Cold B2B Email Marketing
Basically, the idea here is to send an email to someone with whom you’ve never contacted before (or at least haven’t contacted in a long time). They’ve not recently filled out a form or requested a demo. It’s even plausible that they’ve never seen or heard of your business before.
This marketing campaign route is meant to grab attention and start and conversation with your target audience. This audience is usually based on industry, company size, pain points, and geographic location.
It’s also a widespread practice. Many B2B marketers use this cold emailing to tap the unrealized lead potential.
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They invest in marketing tools like…
These tools can pull lists of names based on a target audience to send these emails.
Here’s the question that may be coming to your mind: Is cold emailing worth pursuing?
The answer is yes, but we’d like to introduce or remind you of an even more specific type of cold emailing.
Warning: Sending cold emails can be very risky. When done incorrectly, this type of campaign can identify your domain as spam. At New North, we utilize specialized techniques and tools to prevent spam and improve interaction. Not to overplay our hand, but we recommend hiring an expert to help you launch a cold B2B email marketing campaign.
Account Based Marketing (ABM).
In the B2B sector, many businesses are very niche and specialized, so ABM is an excellent approach.
It involves flipping your marketing funnel on its head and can be very effective but also difficult to get right. Another key characteristic is creating advertisements that help you stand out in your market. It’s a part of keeping your campaign multi-touch—reaching your audience with a consistent message in various formats.
Our video here will help you understand ABM better and how it can help you with B2B marketing.
Pro-tips for cold emailing
SalesFolk has found that shorter emails (at a length of around five sentences) get about a 21% response rate – way above average.
You need multiple touchpoints to build interest and trust or even engagement. It’s easy to miss or ignore one email.
- Use plain text
The best cold emails aren’t highly-designed ‘marketing emails’, they are emails sent from the sales team with short, plain text messages.
Customer Retention
While we focus more on inbound and outbound marketing strategies, we recognize the value of marketing with customer retention in mind.
Customer retention is all about launching campaigns that engage your users, increase customer value, and reduce churn.
B2B email marketing campaigns can play a significant role in improving your customer retention.
Customer onboarding emails
You’ve sealed the deal here. Congrats! Now it’s time to show your newly minted customer or client that you are excited to have them and the next steps they need to take.
For B2B businesses, these steps can be very detailed and complicated. While it’s better to explain your customer’s path forward in person, follow-up emails with further elaboration can be very helpful. You’ll boost satisfaction and loyalty.
Newsletter Emailing
These email campaigns are consistently used by marketers and sales teams alike.
This is your time to demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership.
You’ll keep your business top of mind and improve your brand equity.
Newsletter emails can also be an effective tool for reengagement. It will put offers and value in front of audiences that have expressed interest in the past but, for some reason, never converted.
Make sure you create an effective template and solid messaging, and you’ll see results here.
To help you in your newsletter campaigns, here are a few metrics you’ll need to know. These allow you to measure your newsletter’s success (they are shamelessly borrowed from a past blog we’ve written.)
Delivery Rate – This is generally the % of emails that hit inboxes and were not returned or bounced. These “reached” the inbox, as far as we know.
Bounces – Email bounces are the various reasons that emails do not deliver. There are hard bounces (missing email addresses) and soft bounces ( DNS issues or mailbox full errors). Each of these can help you clean your list and keep it fresh.
Open Rate – This is a tricky one because the tracking of this metric is not infallible. So, what we are saying with this is what % of delivered emails were opened. This is rough at best but gives you some idea of the overall engagement.
Click-Through Rate – this is the metric of how many clicks your email received from the links contained within it. Now, something to think about here: the more links in your email, the greater the likelihood you’ll have a higher CTR. So if you are trying to drive traffic as part of your success metrics, you will want many opportunities for clicks in the design. This will help your CTR.
Shares – If you want to use social shares as a metric, make sure to have social sharing on your email to help the newsletter get shared. This way, recipients won’t have to take the extra step to a social media platform themselves.
Crunch these numbers to balance your results with your investment in these
emails.
Pro-tips for customer retention emails
- Keep consistent cadence and tone.
Make sure all your messaging is synchronous with your brand tone and cadence. Your customer will find major deviation jarring and confusing.
- Know what time of day to send.
The time you schedule your email to go out plays a role in whether it will be opened. It’s recommended that you schedule your emails for mid-morning during the workweek. This, of course, varies depending on your email list.
It’s time to start emailing!
There you have it, the why, how, and when of several B2B email marketing campaigns. I know this might have seemed a little overwhelming. You want to take advantage of this marketing strategy, but we did admit above that there are many ways to do this wrong.
At New North, we’ve spent nearly two decades finding all the ways to do this right.