Email marketing isn’t just for B2C businesses. B2B brands need to get in on the action too!
Email marketing is the best way for increased B2B loyalty, sales, awareness, productivity, and engagement metrics throughout the customer journey.
For B2B businesses, compared to Facebook and Twitter, email converts leads 40% better. Plus, email is the most powerful channel for customer loyalty and retention. And 40% of B2B marketers regard email marketing as the most important component of their marketing strategy.
But guess what? 59% of B2B companies still don’t use email marketing!
Plus, many B2B brands like yours don’t understand how to use email marketing techniques differently for B2B buyers compared to B2C email marketing techniques.
This doesn’t mean email marketing doesn’t work. No, it means you should take advantage of how effective email marketing is before your competitors catch up.
And we’re here to show you how to leverage email marketing to boost your B2B brand, with the best business-to-business email campaigns hacks and trends!
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A significant difference in email marketing campaigns between B2B and B2C businesses is how long it takes to convert buyers and push them through your sales funnel. This difference should be considered when developing your marketing strategy.
For B2B brands, this process takes a lot longer because before B2B customers make a purchase, they need to consider factors like:
There are also more decision-makers in B2B brands, whereas B2C businesses only have to convince one buyer. So, a typical B2C email marketing sales funnel looks like this:
But the enterprise email marketing sales funnel is longer and more complex. B2C consumers can purchase within minutes, but this isn’t possible for B2B buyers. B2B buyers can take several weeks before purchasing your offering.
B2C and B2B consumers go through emails at different times. For example, it may not be strategic to send B2C buyers emails during office hours as they won’t check their emails regularly. But it may be ideal for B2B emails as your offer influences their work processes.
The best time to send B2C buyers emails are:
On the other hand, a report by Brevo, the states that best days to send B2B emails are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Wednesdays have the highest open rates. Ideal times for these emails are between 12 am and 8 am, with 10 pm also resulting in high open rates.
Here’s a visual on the best time of day to send B2B emails:
For maintaining consistency in B2B and B2C email marketing campaigns, you have to make more effort for B2B buyers. Because B2C consumers make more impulsive purchasing decisions, they don’t require as much lead nurturing as B2B buyers.
Before B2B brands work with you, you need to develop trust. And this means delivering on your promises. So, if you promised fresh weekly tips or monthly industry updates, ensure you fulfill those promises.
You need to maintain more discipline in your B2B email consistency. You have to stick to your schedule, and as I mentioned, keep to your word.
However, while the frequency of B2B emails need to be more consistent than B2C emails, the volume of B2C emails brands send have to be more because:
When it comes to how often you should send B2C emails, the industry standard is 2 – 5 times per month, whereas the standard for B2B brands is 1 – 3 emails per month.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects customers who hand out their content information. Because of this, the GDPR demands that businesses receive explicit consent from consumers before emailing them or using their data.
But how the GDPR affects B2C and B2B email marketing campaigns differ.
The GDPR rules and regulations for B2C email marketing are:
For B2B brands, the GDPR requirements are:
You don’t have to receive explicit consent before processing personal data to send B2B emails, as long as you identify yourself (sender) and provide your contact details within the email. This is considered sufficient for compliance purposes for B2B communication.
If you have a genuine reason, you can continue emailing business email addresses without active consent, provided there is a legitimate interest and you can justify the need to be contacting that address.
The GDPR has stricter rules for B2C communication to protect sole buyers. However, they can’t provide the same extent of protection to B2B brands because B2B brands have greater purposes for communication besides sales and marketing.
Summary: B2B Email Marketing vs. B2C Email Marketing
The key differences between B2B and B2C email marketing are:
Source: Lead Forensics
To give you an accurate interpretation of the B2B marketing landscape, I’ll give you essential statistics on the trends, ROI, and standard industry metrics for enterprise email marketing.
Now that you know what the enterprise email marketing environment looks like, let’s explore the best practices for enterprise email marketing:
To launch a enterprise email marketing campaign that generates traction, conversion, engagement, and brand awareness, use the following best practices:
Define detailed buyer personas: Before developing a enterprise email marketing strategy, create various buyer personas. You probably have an idea of your target buyers already. So, better define these personas and determine which content would work for each persona.
Create valuable lead magnets: Lead magnets are resources you offer leads in exchange for them to subscribe to your email list. You can use e-books, quizzes, guides, and whitepapers as lead magnets.
Summary: B2B Email Marketing Best Practices in 2024
Yes, this hack goes unsaid for B2C email subject lines too. However, B2C emails have an open rate of nearly 20%, with an open rate of only 15% for B2B emails. So, it’s fair to say that B2B companies need to take a more strategic approach when curating personalized email subject lines.
And without the statistics, you can see how this makes sense in your daily life too. Let’s say your favorite delivery app sends you a discount alert, but the subject line sucks. Are you going to open that email? Yes, you probably are.
But if you’re the decision-maker for a business, cold emails with poor subject lines won’t do the trick. You need an innovative approach every time you email subscribers.
These tips can help you develop engaging, targeted email subject lines for B2B email marketing:
Here’s an example of how Boot Camp Digital, an online digital marketing boot camp, used a powerful email subject line to engage B2B clients. Take a look at this email below:
Here’s what’s clear right off the bat from this email subject line:
When email receivers open your email, ensure you strategically structure the content. Keep B2B emails brief because whoever’s reading your email won’t have the time to read lengthy text to try and understand your offer.
When B2B buyers get emails, they’re most likely to scan the content to evaluate whether the email’s worth acting on or not. If your content is easy to scan and includes triggering nuggets, you can convince them to click through or, at the least, read your email.
But brief emails aren’t necessarily ones that don’t cover all your key points. You can wrap up all your essential points with a clean, basic template that’s easy on the eyes.
Remember, all the juicy stuff lies beyond your email. Your email is simply to get receivers to click through and get to your landing page, or website so you can convert them.
To create easily scannable content for your B2B email marketing strategy, use these tips:
For this example, we’ll look at an email marketing campaign from Freshbooks. Take a look at how they’ve formatted this email:
Source: Freshbooks
Here’s what you should take away from this email structure:
For B2B loyalty, send emails beyond sales-driven newsletters. And in case you didn’t know, working toward B2B customer loyalty is crucial for successful brands.
New customers are only 20% likely to purchase, whereas existing customers bump up the chances to 60 to 70%.
So, now that you know how vital customer loyalty is for B2B brands, let me explain how milestone and announcement emails help. The types of emails I’m referring to include:
When B2B brands send these emails to buyers, they keep buyers connected to and engaged in their brand. You want to develop healthy B2B relationships with your buyers, so your emails can’t always be sales-oriented.
B2B buyers don’t like switching providers and migrating their work processes. Should you have used HubSpot as a CRM platform for your organization, would you want to change it every so often? Probably not, right.
Because of this, you have more reason to reel your buyers in and get them to commit to your brand. Plus, it doesn’t mean you can’t use sales tactics through these emails. You can send a brand birthday or anniversary announcement and offer a limited discount.
Take a look at how Atlassian used an announcement email for their B2B email marketing campaign:
The most notable techniques of this announcement email include:
After some time, your email list will start developing baggage. And by baggage, I mean subscribers who don’t open your emails anymore.
You can use strategies to re-engage uninterested email subscribers. If you’re unsuccessful, remove these email addresses from your lists. And here’s why:
But how do you know when you should remove subscribers from your email lists? Here’s what to look for:
When you notice any of the above, it’s time to give your email lists a spring clean.
Andrea Bosoni, the founder of Zero to Marketing, achieved an astounding open rate of 60% for their newsletter.
This is what they did to make this possible:
The first two strategies (which are 50% of his efforts) are related to maintaining clean email lists. While avoiding your emails going to spam also depends on more than just keeping your email lists clean, healthy email lists certainly add to it.
That was a small example, and if it didn’t convince you, consider a list cleaning case study by Sendlane.
Sendlane helped a marketer with 23,847 inactive subscribers and a poor open rate of 3%. And this is what they did:
Rather than Sendlane’s client paying $219 per month for a 25,000-user plan, he could move to a 1000-user plan and pay $25 per month. In other words, he saved $194 monthly and just over $2300 annually!
Take advantage of timely events and use that for your B2B email marketing strategy. Whether you do this in an informative or humorous way (be careful not to make jokes about controversial topics), you should still do this.
The perks of using relevant content for email marketing include:
To use relevant content for email marketing, you need to stay informed. Do this by joining industry-related publications, podcasts, and other social platforms. The quicker you can act on information affecting your sector, the better you can engage your audience.
When you’re deciding how and what relevant content to use, consider factors like:
There aren’t always opportunities to use relevant content. But by staying ahead of industry trends, you can leverage the chance when it pops up.
Flevy is a B2B blog providing insights into the best practices and techniques for B2B brands. To better personalize its email marketing strategy, Flevy uses its founder, David Tang, name as the sender’s email.
Flevy generates its leads through lead magnets like guides, whitepapers, and eBooks, and most of its email content is newsletters.
But when Covid-19 first hit, Flevvy took advantage of this trending, relevant topic. They shaped all their newsletters and email marketing efforts around providing essential insights about Covid-19’s impact on their sector. Plus, they took an extra step and added a Covid-19 dashboard on their website providing real-time updates on Covid-19 cases.
Approaching and answering crucial questions their readers were asking about Covid-19’s impact on them, helped Flevy gain traction quickly. By moving from only sales to educational content too, Flevy boosted their email open rates from 15% to 40%!
This is what you should learn from Flevy:
There are many differences between B2B and B2C email marketing. For starters, B2C emails have stricter GDPR requirements, while the sales funnels for B2B buyers are longer than for B2C consumers. Because of these key differences, B2B brands must develop a unique approach for enterprise email marketing.
The best way to go about enterprise email marketing is to personalize your email subject lines and ensure your formats are easily scannable. B2B brands must also keep their email lists clean, use milestone and announcement emails for engagement, and use timely, relevant content. With these enterprise email marketing hacks, you can drive high lead generation and conversion performance in no time!
The differences between B2C and B2B email marketing include the GDPR regulations, which time of day is best to send emails. the length of email marketing sales funnels and how frequent you should email your subscribers. Read this article for detailed differences of B2B vs B2C email marketing, the top tips for B2B email marketing and hacks and real-life examples for maximum results.
The best practices for B2B email marketing include defining your buyer personas, avoiding spamming for cold email campaigns, leveraging audience segmentation features, picking the best B2B email marketing platform and offering valuable lead magnets. Read this full article to find out more of the best B2B email marketing practices for high conversion, the top email marketing hacks with examples for B2B brands and how B2C and B2B email marketing differ.
The best hacks to get the most from B2B email marketing is to personalize your email subject lines, keep your email list clean, use relevant, timely content for marketing, ensure your email content format is easily scannable and use announcement and milestone emails. For more on the best B2B email marketing hacks explained, top practices for B2B email marketing and key statistics, read this article.
Content Marketing Institute: B2B Content Marketing and B2B Content Marketing 2024
Mailtastic: Earth-shattering email marketing stats (for B2B)
Brevo: Best Time to Send an Email: User Data Study by Industry
CoSchedule: The Best Email Marketing Sending Frequency Backed By 20 Studies
Campaign Monitor: Ultimate Email Marketing Benchmarks for 2022: By Industry and Day
Backlinko: 67 Key Email Marketing Stats For 2023
Snov.io: 101+ Email Marketing Statistics You Should Know In 2024
HubSpot: The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2023
OptinMonster: 164 Best Email Subject Lines to Boost Your Email Open Rates (2024)
DMA: Email benchmarking report 2018
Marketo Engage: What Email Subject Line Length Works Best?
Trustmary: B2B Customer Loyalty – How is it Different?