Email Marketing Best Practices for B2B: Nurturing Leads and Closing Deals

With as many as 87% of B2B marketers using email to distribute content, it’s clear this tactic works. However, there’s a secret formula to ensure business owners click on a subject line instead of moving it straight to the trash.

In this blog post, we’ll review some of the best email marketing practices for B2B clients. You can then choose the strategies that work effectively for your business, allowing you to nurture qualified leads and close more deals.

What is B2B email marketing?

The term B2B is short for business-to-business. In the marketing context, this refers to businesses that promote their products and services to other firms. In contrast, companies that use B2C or business-to-customer marketing tailor emails to individuals.

While some businesses may serve both customers and businesses, it’s useful to segment your email list and prime your campaigns for your specific users.

7 B2B email marketing strategies to try

Whether you’ve just started to dabble in B2B email marketing or have been using this technique for years, here are some best practices to level up your campaigns.

1. Identify your target market

The old adage is true — when you try and please all, you end up pleasing none. Before crafting your email copy, ask yourself who will open your emails. Are they the same people who control the company’s purse strings?

Narrow down your target market more effectively with firmographic data. This is the information that defines organizations, such as:

• Company size
• Business location
• Industry
• Employee headcount
• Annual Revenue

Once you’ve fleshed out these details, go one step further by determining your target audience. These people represent the business and will receive your email in their inbox. List demographic information, such as age, gender, race, and behaviors, to help you define your audience effectively.

2. Pull on the heartstrings

While businesses are about making a profit, the people who run them are passionate about more than just figures and graphs. They have wants, needs, and worries just like everyone else.

As 95% of all purchasing decisions are subconscious, marketers need to leverage emotive language in their emails to close deals. Craft your email copy with strong verbs, sensory phrases, and scintillating adjectives to evoke the emotions you want.

The tone of your emails is also equally important as diction. A conversational tone often works best, as this helps to connect with your audience on a deeper level and start a dialogue.

3. Keep it short and sweet

The people behind the business you’re targeting are busy — so get to the point with shorter emails. According to Hubspot, the ideal email length is between 50 and 125 words. Emails that go under or over this word count will likely offer limited value or bore the reader.

Short, punchy subject lines are another best practice. This helps to create a sense of urgency and intrigue, motivating the prospect to open your email.

4. Show don’t tell

While it may seem challenging to adequately convey your products and services in a short email, you have another tool in your arsenal — optimized images.

Images help to increase your brand awareness, break up long chunks of text, and drive your message home. Ensure emails with graphics load quickly by reducing the image resolution and compressing the files.

5. Get personal

Your prospect is likely to receive hundreds of emails a day, so may yours stand out with personalization. As 74% of marketers say personalized emails yield higher engagement, this is one proven way to increase your open rate.

Some tried-and-tested ways to add a personal touch include:

• Addressing the recipient by name
• Marking important anniversaries, such as birthdays or annual memberships
• Signing off with your unique name instead of your business
• Using prospect data to inform the content

6. Send emails consistently

Finding the perfect number of emails to send each month will take some effort. Too many and you may annoy your recipient to the point where they unsubscribe. On the other hand, too few emails may cause them to forget you exist at all.

While 35% of marketers send between two and three emails each month, others find more success with sending more or less than this quota. Experiment with what works best for your business, and consistently send emails on your specified day and time.

7. Test, test, and test again

There’s no one-size-fits-all email marketing strategy for B2B. As all businesses are unique in terms of their prospects and products, you’ll need to test which practices work best for you.

A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of content and tracking the results. So, if you wanted to figure out the ideal length of a subject line, you would create two versions of varying lengths. You would then need to track the open rate of emails to determine the optimal number of characters for email headlines.

Nurture leads and close deals with WebUp

B2B products and services are usually on the higher end of the price spectrum, making your lead and sales funnels more complex. Email marketing offers an effective solution, as captivating emails help you nurture qualified leads and remain top-of-mind.

WebUp is a digital marketing agency specializing in email marketing for B2B. Learn how we can help you generate more sales with our lead nurture services for email, or get in touch for a tailored digital marketing proposal!

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