Business-to-business marketing or B2B marketing as it is commonly known involves selling a company’s products to other companies by satisfying their needs. To better understand this concept, let’s say you have a knitting company. To reach your customers, you need to contact them and at the same time, promote your valuable and professional business.
Who are your customers? Well, you can sell the raw materials directly, in your store or other stores and I’m sure there are enough enthusiasts who prefer to buy raw materials and tailor their own clothes. However, you will sell more if you market your company to other companies that depend on the types of products you are producing. For example, you can market your products to specialized companies that produce finished products from your raw materials.
Now that we know that email marketing is effective when it comes to B2B sales and B2B lead generation, let’s dig a little deeper and talk about a few more important things to know before embarking on a journey like this:
1. Think about Your Customers and Understand the Differences
B2B marketing, while somewhat similar to direct marketing, is not the same. Customers behave differently and make different decisions. B2B marketing is targeting a more rational audience. How? Regular customers are sometimes less informed about what they are buying, are susceptible to whims and recklessness.
On the other hand, commercial customers know from the beginning what they need. They don’t base their buying decisions on whims or indulgences. Instead, they are making rational decisions based on what they need and value for money. As a consequence, when addressing business customers, you need to take into account the fact that they are different and act differently from regular customers.
What kind of customers should be addressed with B2B marketing?
- First, there are companies that use their products to produce other goods. For example, a company that uses textile materials to produce T-shirts and other products.
- Secondly, there are companies that use their products for office automation or other secondary tasks. For example, a company that buys computers, paper, or pens from you.
- Thirdly, there are government agencies and institutions (hospitals and schools) that can be chosen as potential consumers if their products fit their needs. To them, for example, you can sell anything: computers, soap and toilet paper.
- Finally, we have reseller companies that buy their products only to redistribute them to other customers. Here, we include local stores, but also brokers and wholesalers.
Now that you know what B2B sales is and who your offer is for, you can go ahead and create your first email newsletter. Here are some important things to keep in mind.
2. Pay Attention to the Email Header
This is the most important visual aspect of your email campaign. If you want B2B sales, you need content that’s right for your audience, but first, you need to somehow grab their attention. This is what your banner should do.
Considering that the average office worker receives 121 emails daily, you have only seconds to grab their attention. This means you need to convey a clear message, right in the header section, the first thing your audience notices when they open your email.
What do you need? A clear vision of what your banner should look like, you need your logo to be visible so that your audience can recognize you and you also need a tool to generate and design that banner. You need to save time while still looking professional. To achieve that, I recommend you use an online tool like Bannersnack, which has a great variety for creating great looking email banners.
3. Content Marketing Starts with the Title and Subject Line
Especially think of the subject line as if it were the only line of text in your email. Why? When the email you sent lands in your customer’s inbox, the first thing they’ll notice is your subject line. You don’t get more than a few seconds to make them curious about your offer, and that’s why you need to tell them everything they need to know from there.
On the other hand, the title is also important, it has to get the customer to open the email. The subject line will make your audience click through and open the email and as a consequence, the headline should convince them to read the rest of your content. And don’t forget about little CTR tricks, like adding an emoji. Which of the following 5 emails stands out?
4. Don’t Direct Your Email to a CEO
Considering that your goal is to generate B2B sales and leads, you should know that not all decision makers for your target audience have the same roles in their companies. I know that at first you want to directly contact the CEO of the companies you have targeted in your campaign, but this is not always the best option. Why?
Let’s say you want to sell office automation products. There are institutions that need these products, but there are also large companies, local stores, individual entrepreneurs, etc. There are different types of people who are in charge of supplying such goods to their companies.
They all have different educational backgrounds, different social statuses. You will be targeting the CEO, business owners, and perhaps even your employees, and this is why you need to create a message that is easy for anyone to understand.
5. Create Your Content
You have a header template, a theme, and maybe a title for your newsletter. Now is the time to give your audience something of value to read. It’s time to create content that will generate B2B sales and leads.
Things to consider at this point:
- Content is important even if you are only promoting products. In this case, the most valuable content will be the content description you will write for your newsletter.
- Choose evergreen themes. If you want to add more to your email than just product descriptions, think about creating evergreen, valuable content relevant to your audience. The best pieces of copy, in this case, are those that manage to answer questions, tips and tricks, articles, and advice that your audience can apply to their own lives or businesses. It’s important to aim not only to win new customers but also to keep existing ones, considering that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
- Make sure the content is unique. People listen to different types of music because music makes them feel a certain way. They buy specific shoe brands for the same reasons. They choose things based on their ability to trigger some emotions or a rational thought that they need to buy them. Nothing differs when it comes to content. You need something unique, something to tell your audience that you not only put in the effort for this but also have something valuable to give them.
- Choose quality over quantity. You don’t need a novel to send a message. The length of your newsletter should not be a concern, always constantly remember that what you deliver should be of high quality and not too much information. You can create very short email newsletters and get a better ROI if your message is effective. Efficiency, in this case, means that you must express yourself in as few words as possible, that your texts and images are professionally composed and processed, that your style is properly adjusted for the type of audience you seek to convince to buy your product.
- Make the content easy to read. There are some people who like to read long articles or large blocks of text, especially people targeted here are people who receive many other emails every day and don’t have time to pay attention to all of them. That is why you need to make sure that your message is readable and understandable. Use headings and subheadings, bullet points and highlight the most important data. Use short sentences and paragraphs and make sure you have enough blank spaces
6. Select Your Delivery Service
There are many Email Service Providers (ESPs) available, and while many of them offer professional services, not all of them are good for you. You will have to do some research and evaluate the most notable ESPs. My advice is to look up a list of the best services like this and study each of the top ten most trusted ESPs before settling on one or the other.
7. Authenticating your Domain
Ending up in the spam folder can drastically decrease the total number of emails opened, which in turn affects the number of clicks on your website. One way to improve your opens and delivery rate is by authenticating your domain.
How much impact can email authentication have? Kinsta had a customer who switched DNS providers and their newsletter immediately went into the spam folder for almost a month before anyone noticed. This was due to the lack of authentication records.
By going straight to spam, their open rate decreased by 4.79% from the previous month and their click-through rate decreased by 1.56%. That’s why you don’t want to end up in the spam folder and why email authentication is important.