5 Steps to Developing a B2B Email Marketing Plan

Sales requires constant communication.

Email marketing is the most direct and effective way to communicate with your prospect, convert them into customers, and turn one-time buyers into loyal, raving fans. But if you do it wrong, it won’t generate any sales for your business.

Although convincing a consumer to make a buying decision through B2B email marketing is not an easy task. It may take a lot of effort to build and maintain strong relationships with your recipients. But, in turn, it helps you to greatly enhance your company’s profit margin. Sound good?

Well, today we are about to break down all the steps to create a successful email marketing plan. As a bonus, you will get some real-life email marketing examples for B2B too.

What is B2B Email Marketing and Why is it Crucial?

B2B or business-to-business email marketing is all about selling/buying of products/services or exchanging information between two or more business entities through conversational emails.

Right now, email marketing has a stupendous ROI of 4400%. And if you are suspecting that social media converts even better, you should think twice. The average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media.

In fact, 79% of B2B marketers find email to be the most successful channel for content distribution

Evidently, Email marketing outperforms other digital channels including social media. According to McKinsey, you are 40x more likely to acquire a new customer from an email than from Facebook or Twitter. On the other hand, you are 6x more likely to get a click from an email than from a tweet.

Pro tip: Learn How to Reach Your Audience During COVID-19.

Stats That Emphasize the Importance of B2B Email Marketing

A great way to remain relevant and stay updated with the latest marketing trend is to keep an eye on the marketing statistic. The following are some important email marketing-specific statistic you should go through:

• Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders.
• 86% of business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes.
• 40 percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the most important tactic in their content marketing strategy.

According to the leading marketing companies, a well-executed B2B email campaign can generate:

• For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment (Experian)
• 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email (ExactTarget)
• 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via email (Earnest Agency)

As marketers, we can’t ignore these statistics. Therefore, it’s important to develop a strong email marketing plan.

How to Create a B2B Email Marketing Plan 

A B2B relationship is solely based on logic. Unlike B2C email marketing, there is no scope of emotion in a B2B marketing campaign. So if you think your B2B email recipients will get excited about your products/services only by seeing their benefits, then think again.

However, you can create a successful email marketing plan for B2B following this five-step strategy to achieve the best outcome from your campaign-

Step 1: Know What Businesses to Target

Knowing well your audience is the first step towards the success of a B2B email marketing. You must aware of the challenges the organizations are facing in this target field. This information allows you to improve your products and invade the market. Whether you are targeting a giant or a dwarf business, this information always brings success to your all type of marketing strategy.

As much as you know about your target field, you are able to deliver top services and products to them- this is simple to listen to but effective in doing.

As an example, you have an ERP solution that is easy to handle by someone who has knowledge of computer operation. Now, you should know about those organizations, who need a similar service for their business operation with limited skilled manpower. Only then, you can communicate with them effectively.

Step 2: Define Your B2B Customer Persona

Creating a representative business persona often goes a long way, even if they are imaginary. It gives a clear concept about your business to the target ones and helps you to draft a perfect email.

You can follow the basic concept while developing a B2B customer persona:

• Suppose you are offering accounting software to your customers. You must know the hurdles they are facing to maintain their accounts with the existing systems, they have. Now find out how your software will make their life easier.
• Secondly, you should understand the type of business they are doing and the size of the organization like the number of employees and annual turnover.
• The prominent task is to know about the people who are dealing with the purchase of a product you are offering. It varies from business to business. Some engage the director level while others put their managers to take a correct decision of purchase. It is also important to know about their job nature and typical purchase.
• You must have some research on how their companies evaluate their performance and how they achieve their today’s position. It will clarify their meaning of success and what can they do for using your product.
• Most importantly, you should be aware of how your persona can influence other vendors about their product. Because the potential buyers can ask the real-time using reference from them via email or over a phone call.

Once you develop a B2B customer persona, you have a clear picture of your target. It helps you to focus on the correct email marketing approach.

Step 3: Create Measurable Email Marketing Goals

Goal directs to setting the correct pillar stones, which is essential for taking appropriate strategies that lead to goal accomplishment. If you set the email marketing goal with your business target, it will move along and bring sustainable success. Meeting your goal always help you to bring new customers to you and confident your existing customer about the products or services.

Therefore, few issues should be clear at the beginning like-

• Spread the idea with the fruitfulness of the products can bring and the problems which can be solved as well.
• Prioritize the prospect along with the CTR and monthly or quarterly improvement while analyzing.
• Categorize the prospect considering several factors like why the company shows interest in you.
• Regularly update the email copy based on their response, effectiveness, and your updates.
• Checking the quality of email and concentrate on modifying the appeals like improvement in conversation timing after the email being read.
• Follow up is an outstanding technique that improves B2B marketing right away.

Rather than setting a vague goal, setting realistic goals are effective. You will understand your strength and fix the ineffective issues. Therefore, once you finalize your goal, the rest of the task become easier for you.

Step 4: Create a Timeline

As discussed earlier, setting a realistic timeline is fundamental to accomplish the goal. If you set a short and unreal timeline, you will be confused and frustrated without seeing the desired outcome. Moreover, an unwanted longtime frame can ruin your business and prospect by wasting your hours and investment.

Therefore, prepare a yearly timeline with specific deadlines and proposed topics for each email. Also, you should know your target business and competitors. It will help you to fix a reasonable time frame to achieve your target on time.

You can also read: How to Utilize Email Retargeting in Your Marketing Strategy.

Step 5: Analyze What’s Working & What’s Not

Once you set the goal, fix the target, and set a suitable timeframe, you may be close the pen by thinking that enough for the email marketing plan. But there one more thing left where you should be very sensitive. That is reanalyzing the plan in a different time frame like weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

This gives you a clear idea and shows the opportunity for improvement in your plan because everything may not move smoothly in the real world as you thought. Therefore, analyzing the outcomes makes you confident about the extent of modification or adjustment needed to achieve the ultimate goal through the email campaign.

6 of The Best B2B Email Marketing Examples

According to Hubspot, 121 business emails are sent and received each day. When you have to deal with that much competition then it’s really tough to stand out of the crowd. Moreover, many companies send too many irrelevant emails that usually irritate readers. In fact, 78% of recipients have unsubscribed from a brand because they were sending too many boring emails.

On the other hand, there are a number of companies that utilize email marketing so well by sending engaging and helpful email. Below, we bring some examples of excellently done B2B email marketing that will inspire you.

nDash.co

This is a B2B software company. They have combined both an onboarding and a welcome email in just one email. It includes a clean UI to elaborate the next steps that new users need to take.

Viscom Agency

Here is another B2B email template. A leading marketing agency designed this to generate more leads by offering a free lead magnet to their website visitors in exchange for an email address. It responds to contacts who fill a form to receive a free marketing audit for their business.

Return Path

This B2B email campaign aims to re-engage the recipients who did not open previous emails. It comes in a unique design to grab readers attention towards the content.

Help Scout

Help Scout sends the following B2B customer care email template. Telling all the ways to recipients- how they can get help. Also shows that the company cares about their experience.

SumAll

Our marketing automation fellows at SumAll comes with a great idea for B2B retention email campaigns. It’s their new year holiday email newsletter.

Uber has run a B2B email campaign to invite for their webinar. They used clear design and 2 call-to-action buttons into their webinar event reminder email template.

Level Up Your Business Using Email Marketing for B2B

Email marketing is still an effective technique to build a strong network with your audience. But it needs a well-planned strategy to execute properly. Start by understanding your customer journey. Then craft a mail that will engage the customers throughout every stage- whether they are in early-stage who are just researching their problems online or late-stage who are ready to buy.

A logical email plays a vital role to give confidence to the target organizations that you know about their problem and able to solve their issues more efficiently.

In fact, 59% of B2B marketers say email is the most effective channel in terms of revenue generation. If you are not still practicing this method inside your business, you lose a potential number of business opportunities every day.

Still, have any questions regarding B2B email marketing? Do use the comment section below and let us know!