B2B Email Marketing: Building Relationships and Generating Leads

Intro

As a marketer, you have various marketing channels at your disposal, to achieve different marketing metrics in the B2B space. For example,

• Social media is fantastic for connecting with your audience
• Influencer marketing can be effective in building trust
• SEO can be great for increasing website traffic

However, when it comes to generating leads and building long-term B2B customers, email still remains the most powerful tool.

This is backed by the fact that nearly three-quarters of B2B marketers, about 73% to be exact, include email newsletters in their content strategy.

That's not all - 66% of marketers also send out other emails, except newsletters, making it one of the popular approaches in the B2B channel!

But, how can you set up your email marketing to foster connections and attract leads for your business? Let's find out!

First, let's start with the basics.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a great way to reach out to people online. You send emails with special offers or news to folks who've signed up to hear from you. The aim is to build good connections with possible customers, increase awareness of your brand, and generate new leads.

Source: Neil Patel

B2B email campaigns target potential buyers with valuable content in their emails, fostering engagement and nurturing relationships. This approach helps guide the customers alongside their purchasing path.

With engaging content and tailored messages, these campaigns effectively build interest and curiosity, ultimately leading to conversions.

The Power of B2B Email Marketing

Whether you run a smaller business or a major company, the advantages of B2B email marketing are huge. Here's why you should consider it:

1. Reaching the Right People: With email marketing, you can pinpoint exactly who sees your messages. By sorting your email list by industry, job, or location, you can craft messages that speak directly to each segment. This personal touch boosts engagement and the likelihood of making a connection.

2. Building And Nurturing Relationships: Regular, value-packed emails establish you as a dependable expert in your industry. This reliability builds trust with your audience, fostering loyalty and encouraging referrals. Over time, these strong relationships not only retain current customers but also attract new ones through positive word-of-mouth.

Did you know? In just 12 months, a whopping 77% of marketers are noticing more email engagement than they did in 2022.

3. Drive Leads and Sales: You can use emails to generate leads from your customers such as visiting your website or purchasing through strategically placed calls-to-action (CTAs). By nurturing these leads through email campaigns, you can gradually convert them into valuable customers.

4. Affordable with Great Returns: Email marketing is not only budget-friendly but also offers excellent returns—marketers get an email marketing ROI of $36 for every dollar spent! It's an efficient way to connect with potential customers without breaking the bank.

5. Track Your Success: One of the best parts of email marketing is its transparency. You can see how many people opened your emails, clicked on links, and more. This feedback is crucial for tweaking your approach and boosting your campaign's effectiveness.

6 Effective B2B Email Marketing Lead Generation Strategies

A recent survey from Influencer Marketing Hub shows that 60% of B2B marketers haven't set up an effective strategy to achieve email engagement from the audience. If you start one, you're already stepping ahead of the crowd!

Here are 6 effective strategies to craft a successful email campaign that draws in the right leads:

1. Create Lead Magnets To Attract Hot Leads

Starting a B2B email marketing strategy without contacts? You'll be spinning your wheels. Your first move should be to draw in qualified leads with something they can't resist.

Think of this as your "lead magnet" — typically things like e-books, guides, webinars, or reports that people get after they give you their info.

Creating simple forms is key. You want just the right amount of fields to gather useful info without scaring people off. Too many fields and folks might not bother, for reference have a look at this image.

Source: Ahrefs

Forms with two to three fields are just right, seeing about a 25% conversion rate.

But did you know? Webinars are also a gold mine for collecting data; People are happy to share their details for a good webinar, making it the best type of lead magnet out there.

Landing pages outperform other sign-up methods like pop-ups or banners with a whopping 160% higher conversion rate!

That's why it's essential to have high-converting landing pages.

For example, the below image shows the landing page of Ahsuite, a client portal company, offering a free trial as the lead magnet.

Source: Ahsuite

2. Know Your Customers Better Than Them

To kick off any lead generation campaign, it’s crucial to know who your customers are. This helps in customizing your marketing efforts to meet their specific needs.

Let’s talk about lead generation through email marketing. First, you need to define what qualifies as a lead for your business. Could it be someone who signs up via a form on your site, downloads your ebook, or joins a webinar you've hosted?

Segment your audience based on:

• Demographics: Sort prospects by region, spending power, age, and more to tailor our approach.
• Behaviour: Track interactions like website visits or email clicks to gauge interest.
• Funnel Stage: Identify where each lead is in the buying process to send them targeted content.
• Buyer Persona: Define personas to highlight relevant features and use cases.
• Engagement: Segment leads into active, inactive, or lost to customize our follow-up strategies.

By tailoring campaigns to specific groups, marketers have boosted their revenues by up to 760%!

Sample of Subscriber Segmentation

Source

“Build relationships through opt-in email engagement.”

"Aim to connect with your ideal customers. Encourage them to willingly sign up for your email list. This way, you ensure that your email marketing strengthens your connection with your audience, rather than severing it.”

[Vineet Gupta, Founder, 2XSAS]

3. Personalise Your Emails As Much As Possible

Give your emails a personal touch!

Did you know that emails with personalized subject lines are opened 26% more often? Plus, when folks get content that matches their past actions, they're 58% more likely to take action.

So, if you want to boost your open and click-through rates, make sure your emails feel tailor-made. For instance, below in the image, nDash, a B2B software company, used personalised email for both onboarding and welcoming new users.

Source: Automizy

Use email marketing tools to split up your audience based on where they live, what they do, and how they engage with your stuff.

You could even record a personal video email and send it directly to your sales prospect.

This lets you send messages that really connect with them, instead of sending generic emails.

4. Use A/B Testing

To make your B2B email marketing strategy work better, you can use A/B testing to optimise. It's like a little experiment. You send two different versions of an email to see which one your subscribers like more.

Here’s what you can play around with:

• The headline of your email.
• The little teaser text that shows up next to your subject line.
• The images you use.
• The overall layout and design.
• The buttons that ask your readers to do something (your call to action).

Example of A/B testing

Source: Omnisend

Once you've done a few tests, you'll see patterns. You'll know which email subject lines make people want to open them and which CTA buttons make them click.

5. Leverage Automation To Put You at Ease

Automating stuff for your B2B email thing can be super helpful. It means you don't have to keep doing the boring, same tasks over and over. Instead, you can focus on more important stuff.

What's really exciting about email marketing automation is its capacity to enable personalization on a large scale. You can put in place automation for a variety of tasks, such as:

• **Triggered emails: **The go-to tactic in B2B email marketing strategy. Automatically send emails when leads take certain actions or meet criteria.
• **Drip campaigns: **Launch a series of emails to nurture leads or welcome new users. Set your rules and watch the emails roll in.
• **Segmentation: **Instantly categorize leads with automation based on set criteria. Streamline your CRM data and keep your lists updated.
• **Reporting: **Use automation to track email performance and produce reports on key metrics. Get clear insights into your campaign’s effectiveness.

6. Optimise Your Emails to be Mobile-Friendly

It's amazing how lots of folks are using smartphones now! Many people are checking their emails on their phones—like, about 60% of the time. And that's probably gonna keep on increasing.

That's why it's super important to make emails that look good on everything, like computers and phones. When you make emails that work well on mobiles, your messages will always look awesome, wherever people read them.

For example, the mobile-optimised email allows the user to read and use the CTA without scrolling.

Source: Campaign Monitor

This not only keeps your emails looking sharp but also helps you stay one step ahead of the competition. Make sure your emails are ready to go wherever your readers go!

Key Takeaway

Email marketing is a great way to find new business leads, especially for B2B companies. With a clickthrough rate of 3.2%, which is pretty good, email marketing usually earns more revenue than you spend.

But to make email marketing work, you need a good plan. With the tips we've talked about, you can email the right people in a way that makes them interested in your business. Let's use these ideas and get more people interested in what you're offering.