Email remains a great medium to build relationships with your prospects and existing customers. Yet many business-to-business (B2B) organizations get overwhelmed and fumble in their email marketing efforts. If you’re here, you might have questions like:
- How to integrate email marketing in your sales funnel and leverage it to drive lead generation efforts?
- Which is the right email service provider for your B2B needs? GetResponse is a great choice (read our unbiased review here)!
- What metrics should you use to measure the success of your B2B email marketing efforts?
- How do you craft persuasive email subject lines and compelling email content your audience loves?
- What do the top B2B email marketers do differently to drive a strong return on investment?
In this guide, I’ll answer the above questions. You’ll also learn email marketing tips, look at examples, types of effective B2B email marketing campaigns, and more.
Let’s begin with:
What is B2B email marketing?
B2B (business-to-business) email marketing is the use of email campaigns to promote products and services to other businesses or organizations. It is different than regular email marketing or direct-to-consumer marketing due to many reasons that include:
- The target audience: In B2B, marketers usually address decision-makers within a company, such as executives, managers, or officers.
- Profitability: In most cases, businesses, enterprises, and organizations are willing to spend more on specific solutions with a specific value compared to individual customers.
- Use cases: While individual customers typically seek solutions to address a specific problem, businesses often look for solutions that not only solve problems but also enhance profitability, boost productivity, ensure compliance, manage risks, and provide a competitive edge.
- Conversion window: The decision process within businesses or organizations is usually longer than that taken by individuals. That is due to the complexity of the purchase process, which often involves multiple stakeholders, budget approvals, and a more rigorous evaluation of potential vendors.
Does email marketing still work in 2024?
The short answer is yes, email marketing is still relevant and that is mainly because of it high Return on investment (ROI) and cost-effectiveness)
Moreover, according to the 2024 B2B content marketing benchmarks report, 73% of the top B2B content marketers use Email newsletters, while 66% use other types of email as one of their main content distribution channels.
Also, according to the same report, 44% of B2B content marketers pointed out that Emails (Other than newsletters) were one of the channels that produced the best results. 39% of these content marketers also pointed out that Email newsletters produced some of the best results for their B2B campaigns.
How do you align email marketing with your sales cycle?
Gartner’s research found that B2B buyers spend 27% of their time during the purchase process researching the product or service online before contacting the business.
That’s why you need to sit down with your sales team and find your prospects’ top questions, pain points, and average sales cycle length. Then, based on this information, tailor your content and email marketing efforts to align with your sales cycle.
What is a good B2B email open rate?
Plezi, in an analysis of four leading industry studies, found the average B2B email open rate to be 22.2%. Depending on the source and sector, the rate can be as high as 29.64%.
Editor’s note: To compare your results with those of others in your industry, you may want to check the GetResponse Email Marketing Benchmarks report. It features average email opens, clicks, and unsubscribe rates and includes expert comments to help you better understand these metrics.
How long should a B2B marketing email be?
A 2015 study by the Boomerang app found that email length between 50 and 125 words is the sweet spot, leading to above-50 % response rates. However, two caveats are that the research is old and not specific to the business-to-business niche.
B2B email marketing tip #1: Segment subscribers and personalize your emails
In the B2B niche, multiple people from a company are involved in the sales cycle. For instance, the final purchase decision about your products and services may include a product manager and the head of technology at a prospect’s organization. So, engaging solely with the final “decision-maker” and writing emails while keeping them in mind doesn’t make sense.
To persuade the whole team, you need to segment and address audiences’ concerns separately. This requires collecting more information from prospects to identify their needs and sending them personalized content.
For instance, Hootsuite asks for eight fields of information for downloading their free guide on growing a LinkedIn audience:
GetResponse Email Marketing Benchmarks report found that forms with more than four fields see a considerable drop in conversion rates:
Note: Your results are likely to be higher if you truly understand your audience and focus on driving traffic that would benefit from your offer.
However, asking for appropriate information on your landing page is crucial. It will enable you to tag prospects in a fitting buyer persona segment and send them relevant emails later.
Among other questions, “the number of people using the company’s official social media accounts” is important information for Hootsuite (a social media scheduling tool). It lets the company filter leads that might be genuinely interested in their products.
Sid Bharath, the CEO and founder of Broca (a company specializing in AI-powered content marketing), expresses how creating “very specific segments” has done well for them.
When customers onboard our software, we capture details about their company, like their industry. We also capture the usage of our product. It lets us create highly personalized emails based on their interests and what they’ve done in our product. Such segments have worked really well for us.
If you’re considering leveraging email for content distribution, collecting the correct information about your subscribers could help send the most relevant content to address their individual needs.
Want to limit fields in opt-in forms? Use progressive profiling!
If you’re afraid of turning off your visitors by asking too many questions early on, then there’s another tactic you can try:
In the beginning, request only a small amount of meaningful information from your prospects. Then, progressively profile an email subscriber through their future touchpoints with your brand through forms, emails, and surveys. If needed, take help from your sales and customer support teams.
GetResponse lets you use tags to add labels and custom fields to add relevant details about your subscribers. Here’s the difference between the two as per GetResponse’s guide on building an email list the right way:
Here’s an example showing the difference:
You can also score each user based on their actions, such as link clicks, ebook downloads, and webinar sign-ups.
How about assigning a tag to an engaged subscriber once they reach a certain score? It can trigger an automated workflow that could be handy (as discussed later in the article).
Consider multiple lists for different B2B email marketing campaigns
Besides tags, it might also make sense to create multiple lists based on your email marketing needs. A “master list” of all your brand advocates (the leads), an exclusive one of your customers alone (when a lead makes a purchase), one of your frequent customers, and the like. Such an organizational method can help personalize your communication.
For instance, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) provides eight subscription options on its email updates page. They all represent various characteristics of the audience and help CMI send personalized updates:
Ensure that you perform the necessary steps to prevent subscribers in multiple lists from getting repetitive emails. GetResponse can prevent a contact on multiple lists from receiving a message more than once except for Autoresponder messages.
Send personal reports and updates
The GetResponse Benchmarks report found that personalized body content in emails increases open rates and CTR. It shows the importance of sending personalized emails that highlight your customers’ personal achievements through your products.
For instance, I love my weekly summary reports from RescueTime, a time-tracking software. They share specific information about my work week and personally relevant and useful trends. Here’s an example RescueTime email report:
Similarly, Ahrefs (an SEO suite) shares a monthly update on my new and lost backlinks, referring domains, top new pages earning links, etc. It’s irresistible because of its actionable insights.
Tip #2: Nurture leads based on their behavior
In their benchmarks report, GetResponse found that automated emails triggered by the subscriber’s behavior have one of the highest engagement rate:
So, apart from sending educational blog posts and company updates, leverage email marketing campaigns to connect with your target audience at crucial stages in their buying journey.
👉 Learn how to nurture your email leads with our guide.
Smoothly onboard new leads (and treasure the welcome email…)
If you want to make your email marketing investment worthwhile, guiding your valuable leads around using your product is a great way to start. When new prospects sign up for your product, their engagement is typically the highest. Welcome emails were found to get an average open rate of a whopping 86.03%:
So, don’t waste the opportunity to initiate a conversation about your product(s). Also, use this email to add some value to your new leads who have expressed interest in your offerings. When I signed up for Thinkfic, an online course platform, the co-founder of the company extended a warm welcome with an invite to their live webinar:
Adding customer training webinars in your welcome email could be a great way to engage a lead while they are most interested in your product.
Otherwise, you can run a dedicated welcome email sequence that walks the new customer (or prospect) through your product by breaking down the specific steps they can take. Here’s Alitu, a podcast editor, reaching out every day to guide me through their features:
To save time, GetResponse lets you create complete funnels for your webinars and comes up with pre-made templates for you to begin with:
Wield your email service provider’s superpowers: automated workflows
What happens when a prospect in the consideration phase steps back and cancels their engagement with your brand?
You can ask for their feedback to improve your products. Depending on the information available about the prospect, you can kick off a different kind of engagement with them. An email campaign can work well for this.
When I canceled my Alitu trial account, Colin from the company (who also took me through their welcome email series) reached out to me asking what they could do better:
You can consider continuing your communication with them as well. After their onboarding series, Buzzsprout (a podcast hosting platform) automatically added me to their newsletter.
But please be careful and let your email subscribers know that you plan to continue sending fresh content. Else, it might annoy them. Remember, email marketing is about permission-based marketing communications.
Top email service providers will help automate parts of your B2B email marketing. GetResponse, for instance, lets you start a workflow based on established subscriber actions. Indeed, even if a custom field value is updated (for example, your customers are moving to a new city), you can trigger an action:
Tip #3: Create personality-filled email newsletters
Alex Birkett, a co-founder at Omniscient Digital, shares that his agency likes to use a “very informal and personality-filled copywriting” in their emails. “We want to talk to our audience like we’re their friend, just shooting the shit and giving great content marketing advice that they can’t get elsewhere,” he quips.
Their approach has merit, as people might be surprised by a friendly tone in B2B email communication. Here’s how to emulate the same approach for your B2B email marketing strategy.
Getting playful in a B2B email marketing campaign
Are you interested in using a “substack newsletter” like a personal tone in your B2B email messages? Then puns, conversational language, provocative language, and wrongly-done punctuation are all welcome.
I got in touch with Robin Nichols (the managing editor at 360Learning) to understand how they adapt a light and playful tone in their newsletters. She takes us behind the scenes of a campaign to illustrate how they choose a newsletter theme, subject lines, informal language, and more:
But can every brand pull off such an informal tone?
Nope.
It’s more important to:
Keep every email marketing campaign on brand
Being informal is nice, but every B2B email marketing campaign should reflect the voice and tone of your brand. For example, Buffer, a social media scheduling company, is known for its transparency, kindness, and positivity. A bunch of emails I received from them below reflect that. They share valuable content related to social media, posts about their company culture, and more:
Even if you take out their name, it’s easy to recognize an email from the company by reading it.
Remember your email’s design also plays a role in branding. So besides the email copy, you can splash some personality in your b2b email by using photos, and videos like Michal does below for GetResponse (rich media also tends to improve the email engagement rates).
Try AI-based content software for drafting emails quickly
Birkett has started experimenting with using Jasper in his email copywriting process for copy-heavy newsletters.
He elaborates on how he uses it:
I use it most often when I’m struggling to come up with a copy, but I have an idea as to what the message and tone should be. Like, if I know I want to write a nurturing sequence, I’ll plan out each step of the sequence, but then I’ll use Conversion.AI to help me write the first draft of the copy. Then I go in and spruce it up a bit with my own voice and personality.
Integrating AI-generated content can help say goodbye to writer’s block and even speed up your writing process.
Repurpose evergreen content in your email campaigns
When I signed up for their newsletter, YCombinator sent a bunch of their interesting (probably all-time popular) posts to kick off our relationship:
Sending your most liked content to your new newsletter sign ups is a great content distribution strategy as it kicks off your relationship on a positive note.
You can even package these into ebooks, downloadables and use them as lead magnets in exchange for a prospects’ email.
You can also use “Thank You” landing pages to serve some relevant content to your new sign ups. For example, when I subscribed to BigCommerce’s blog email list, they shared links to five of their latest feature articles.
Tip #4: Play the “long game” and set KPIs for each email marketing campaign
The business to business sales cycle is often long and intricate. So sending a sales email message as soon as a person signs up on your B2B email list could hurt your efforts.
Instead, you should invest time in earning trust and building a relationship with your audience. Send them educational content that helps them achieve their goals. Birkett shares his agency’s email strategy is simply about getting people to like them.
We can’t expect to convert people directly to agency deals from an email list, but people do business with those they trust and like, so we craft our emails with that (long game) goal in mind.
That doesn’t mean the company doesn’t have KPIs for their email campaigns. Birkett continues, “Of course, we have quantitative goals attached to their automated email campaigns and nurture sequences. These are set at:
a) engagement (do they click on the articles and offers in the email)
b) course sales (we have a popular content strategy course).”
You can similarly choose a mix of metrics that closely tie with your bottom line and audience engagement. It’s important that while committing to play the ‘long game’, you try to gauge the effectiveness of your B2B email marketing efforts in the short term through relevant metrics.
For instance:
- Disengaged subscribers will negatively affect your email deliverability rate. Keeping a check on your CTR and open rates is essential. Low numbers might call for running reactivation campaigns or changing your email service provider.
- An email marketing campaign with the goal of lead generation for your freemium SaaS should generate free trials or paid subscribers. So a declining engagement of a new user with your automated email sequence should trigger an early warning.
But remember to look at these metrics in the larger context of your marketing strategy and the evolution of your business. Nichols looks at the unique pageviews 360Learning gets from their newsletter and compares it with other big traffic sources.
Currently, the unique pageviews is around 8% from the newsletter, which is down significantly from when we launched the blog. That’s actually good news since it means our other target channels are growing.
Analyzing metrics from each email marketing campaign can also inform your future content and marketing strategy. “I’ll look each week at which article from the newsletter was most popular, and try to draw conclusions about what content performs best in the newsletter vs. channels like organic (SEO) traffic, social media, and the like,” Nichols affirms.
Continue to this guide for a complete overview of B2B marketing automation and take it beyond email!
B2B email marketing best practices
Before we conclude, here are some additional email marketing best practices to ensure that you deliver an exemplary email experience to your audience:
Taking your email subject line from good to better to best
Your email’s subject lines will probably be judged alongside tens (or hundreds) of other unread emails. And you only have a few seconds to make an impact with them. If you’re too formal, you might end up being boring. If you’re clickbaity, your email might end up in the spam folder.
Being straightforward helps. However, subject lines that are too descriptive can get truncated, especially on mobile phones. Here’s an example from Brennan Dunn trying to squeeze in more specifics of his “SparkLoop review” but sees his subject line get shortened.
The GetResponse email benchmarks report found that longer subject lines tend to get the highest opens. But this data could be skewed because merely 10% of the sample had more than 100 characters.
Using words such as “free”, “infographic”, “video”, and the like don’t seem to have an impact on the open rate. Ultimately setting expectations by using relevant text is key.
Don’t forget to use a preheader in your emails. Consider it as the “subheadline”, which provides additional space beside your subject line to summarize the theme of your email. It was used by merely 14% of marketers in the GetResponse sample set, and it positively affected their open rates. The best subject line would be relevant and build a story with the preheader.
Keep one call to action per email campaign
Do you want to increase sign-ups for an upcoming webinar or drive traffic to a new blog post on your website? Each expertly crafted marketing email should have a clear and compelling call to action. Asking for too many clicks from your audience will negatively affect your conversion rates.
Mind your frequency
Email newsletter fatigue is real. They can potentially even hurt your business as per Peep Laja, the founder of ConversionXL:
Given the high volume and competition, it makes more sense only to communicate when you’ve a relevant update to share with your email audience. Content distribution through email is fine, but try packaging all of your month’s blog posts in a monthly email or only sending your best content.
Stay consistent with your email marketing efforts
I recently got an email from Disneyland Paris (whom I didn’t remember signing up for). They cited technical issues, which led them to not communicate with me for over a year.
Barring technical glitches, regularly communicating with your email audience is important for building a formidable relationship and ensuring that they don’t forget you (unless you’re in Disneyland Paris).
If an email subscriber hasn’t engaged with you for a month or two, reach out and confirm if they are still interested in receiving your emails. A stale email list lowers your engagement and can affect your inbox placements. Here’s a format for such emails from The Creatives Hour you can build on top of:
Being cheesy and sharing songs such as “Let’s Stay Together” can help. Here’s a re-engagement B2B email by Chris Von from Content Mavericks showing how it’s done:
If you haven’t guessed it, the first two links in the mail lead to this song by Al Green.
B2B email examples
Before we conclude, let’s quickly look at some cool B2B email examples you can emulate.
1. Personalized email “hook” from Cloudflare
Remember how personalized email subject lines work better for getting opens? Cloudflare (a web performance and security company) does a great job at using my site’s performance as the hook:
After sharing snippets of my security, the company moves to announcements:
Later, they pitch a product, share some content pieces, and promote an upcoming webinar.
Such an integrated approach where you begin with personally relevant information might make people more receptive to the links you promote later in the email. However, be mindful of your email’s length.
2. Vibrant webinar invite email by GetResponse
GetResponse announced the launch of its website builder and invited its audience to see its features live with a personality-filled email below. Note the usage of emojis, the vibrant use of brand colors and a colorful visual, the inviting smiling faces—all the way to a benefit-driven CTA, “Secure my recording.”
What’s not to like?
3. Straightforward demo request email by Udemy
If you want to generate demo requests for your product, the b2b email below by Udemy for Business is a great example.
The email itself is short with a few links, including their product’s landing page with a video explaining its features, one with a detailed form for generating demo requests, and a course catalog page.
Want more examples? Make sure to check this list of more than 20 email marketing examples.
On top of its drag-and-drop Email Creator, GetResponse also offers a bunch of newsletter templates that you can customize for various use cases we saw above and more:
Call to action for your B2B email marketing strategy: Measure, analyze, and iterate
With social media platforms constantly changing their algorithms, it’s becoming harder for brands to reach their audience organically. However, email marketing remains a reliable channel. Here’s a recap of the 4 main tips for a successful B2B email marketing campaign:
- Segment Like a Pro: Don’t blast out generic emails—divide your list into hyper-targeted segments based on roles, interests, and behavior. Personalization is key to making your emails stand out and drive action.
- Sync with Your Sales Cycle and nurture leads based on their behavior: Your emails should perfectly align with your sales funnel. Tailor your content to answer your prospects’ burning questions at each stage, guiding them smoothly toward conversion.
- Create personality-filled emails: Even though it’s called B2B, you’re still dealing with humans who’d appreciate a bit of informality and a light, playful tone.
- Play the Long Game: Building relationships beats quick wins every time. Focus on delivering consistent value with educational content that earns trust and keeps your brand top of mind, so you’re the first choice when they’re ready to buy.
Take advantage of the B2B email marketing strategies, tips, and tactics discussed in this article. Choose email marketing software that fits your business needs, and continuously measure your performance to refine your strategy.
Haydn Fleming, a marketer at Reeview.co, and Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, the company’s CMO, offer some final questions to consider when evaluating your email marketing success:
- Are your customers opening your emails and engaging with the content?
- Are they clicking on your calls to action?
- Are they connecting with you on social media and in your communities?
- Are they excited about your partnerships?
As they conclude, “At the end of the day, increasing lead generation is great, but doing it in a way that creates value for our customers, partners, and community is the key to success.”