The Essential Guide to B2B Email Marketing: How to Increase Engagement and ROI

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Do you want to learn how to increase your B2B email marketing engagement and ROI? If so, you have come to the right place. In this guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about email marketing for businesses. We will discuss different methods that you can use to increase engagement, as well as tips for improving your ROI. By following the advice in this guide, you can start seeing better results from your email marketing campaigns!

If you are new to email marketing, you may be wondering what strategies you can use to increase engagement. One method that is effective is to personalise your emails. You can do this by including the recipient’s name in the subject line or in the body of the email. You can also segment your list so that you are sending relevant content to the right people. By personalising your emails and sending relevant content, you can increase engagement and ROI.

Another method that you can use to improve your email marketing campaigns is to A/B test different subject lines, calls to action, or email layouts. This will help you determine what works best for your audience. You can also use analytics to track your email marketing results and see what is working and what needs improvement. By using these strategies, you can improve your email marketing campaigns and increase ROI.

If you want to learn more about how to increase your BOB engagement and ROI, download our free guide today! We will teach you everything you need to know about email marketing for businesses. Follow the advice in this guide, and you can start seeing better results from your email marketing campaigns!

By following the tips and advice in this guide, you will be able to improve your email marketing campaigns and increase ROI. Download our free guide today to get started! Thanks for reading!

Traditionally, B2B email marketing campaigns have been more serious, dryer, and less interesting than B2C campaigns. Email experts maintained that B2B purchasing decisions were influenced by emotion, while B2B purchases were based on analysis and numbers. That isn’t always the case. While there are several so-called “best practices” for B2B email marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that guarantees success.

Smart marketers are realising they can learn a lot from B2C email marketing campaigns when it comes to engaging customers and creating memorable content.

The most successful B2B marketing campaigns push boundaries and make people think and feel. They win awards and they get industry recognition (for the right reasons).

We’ve put together a list of B2B email marketing strategies to help you build a solid foundation that will let you unleash your creative side and create content that you’re proud of.

What’s the difference between B2B and B2C email marketing?

It’s crucial to comprehend the distinctions between B2B and B2C email marketing so you may better target your campaigns to your B2B target audience.

Sales cycle

The sales cycle for B2B marketing is often much longer than that of B2C marketing. This is because customers usually take less time to decide which candy bar or ice cream to buy, while businesses have to deliberate factors such as software sameness and company car needs before making a purchase.

You may be sending more emails to nurture the customer down the sales funnel and nudge them towards a purchase. There are also numerous stages in the sales pipeline, which means you’ll have to send different material at different times during the procedure. This implies that you must deliver appropriate information for each stage of the process.

More stakeholders

Oftentimes, only one person is responsible for choosing which product to buy in a B2C setting. However, depending on the transaction, friends and family may also play a role in the final decision. When it comes to B2B marketing though, numerous people are involved with this business-centric process.

An example of this B2B targeting could be when choosing email marketing software. You might have to include the head of the marketing department, your most senior email marketers, the head of sales, the head of purchasing, and even the CEO in this decision.

This means you would decide which stakeholders you want to target with your material. It’s possible that you create unique email campaigns for each stakeholder group.

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Top 7 B2B email marketing strategies to try

Don’t put the cart before the horse. Make sure you’ve thought through your strategy before beginning to execute a large number of email marketing initiatives. Before you start sending out emails, think about these seven B2B marketing tactics.

1. Create buyer personas

Fictional representations of your ideal customers are called buyer personas. B2C buyer personas take into account characteristics like age, location, job role and income when they’re created. Social media platforms and marketing channels also play a part in defining these personas.

The information that goes into each buyer persona is based on the sort of business you are attempting to reach. This entails business size, industry location, job function(s), budget, and problem areas where you can help.

Tips to create buyer personas:

If you want to create buyer personas that are all-encompassing, then talking with people and learning everything you can about their business is essential.

  • Talk to people in the industry: 

Reach out to your network of current contacts and inquire about what kind, size, and type of enterprises might be interested in your product, who the decision-makers are, and what challenges they face.

  • Survey existing customers: 

Send a survey to your existing consumers to learn as much information as possible about their unique situation and company details. If you offer an Amazon gift card or a discount on their bill, you’ll get more replies.

2. Grow your email list organically

Although it may seem like a small number, 10 email contacts is actually significant if they are all people who care about your product. You should never buy B2B email marketing lists because people get annoyed when receiving emails from businesses that they didn’t sign up for–unless of course, the email says they won $1 million. Not only does this alienate potential customers, but you could also get into legal trouble.

Therefore, you should focus on expanding your email list organically. Although it requires more effort than purchasing a list, your B2B email campaigns will be more successful. Additionally, this goal will become easier to achieve if you have already created buyer personas.

Tips to grow your email list organically:

Focus on quality leads rather than just getting as many people as you can to sign up by following these B2B email marketing tips on how to grow your list organically.

  • Reach out to your network: 

You may be able to think of several individuals who are interested in your product if you look back over your career. Contact them and inquire whether they would want to receive your emails. You may also tell people on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and other platforms about how to join your list.

  • Create a sign-up form: 

Consider the information you need to gather from prospective leads, like company size, industry, and if they are the call-maker. Also, be sure to enhance this form so that it appears on search engines; a lot of people start their product research on Google.

3. Focus on B2B email design

The design of your website or product is always relative to the industry you’re in. For example, a site for selling car parts will have a different design than one marketed for make-up. However, there are some concepts that remain consistent regardless of what you’re trying to sell. When marketing via email to business professionals, it’s important not to go too crazy with the design and copywriting. Although B2B and B2C audiences may seem similar at first blush, they definitely respond better to emails that look still look clean and professional.

Tips to focus on B2B email design:

To create a professional email campaign, you don’t need to be a graphic design specialist. Follow these ideas below to improve your email design.

  • Research your industry: 

Look at what kind of marketing emails your rivals send, as well as the design and content they employ. You may get ideas from these B2B marketing examples.

  • Read industry magazines: 

To stay knowledgeable of the industry trends, monitor the style and copy of well-known publications. In doing so, you’ll know what type of voice and design to use.

  • Use pre-built email templates: 

When you’re looking for an email marketing service, find one that comes with templates already made. This way, you have a starting point that is specific to your industry. From there, you can edit the details to better reflect your brand identity.

4. Send cold emails carefully

If executed properly, B2B email marketing tactics such as cold emails can be successful. Although we would not suggest this method to a B2C marketer, you may want to look into finding some examples of effective cold emails used in the past by other businesses.

Tips to send cold emails carefully:

People don’t like being spammed with emails that are irrelevant to them. So how do you make sure your emails are interesting?

  • Research contacts: 

Only email individuals who are likely to be interested in your product or service. To do this, consider both the company they work for and their job role. For example, if you’re trying to sell email marketing software, avoid messaging the HR department.

  • Personalize content: 

At the absolute least, you must get the first name correct. However, if you’ve done your homework, you should be able to send highly customized content that refers to their business, job role, and any other pertinent data you have discovered.

5. Segment your customers

Both B2C and B2B email marketers use customer segmentation in a similar way. You don’t want to send the same material to all of your email subscribers, so you break them down into groups. This enables you to deliver more relevant, tailored emails. nWith B2B email marketing, the sorts of segments you establish may be somewhat different. There could be distinct job roles inside the same firm (for example, accountant versus CFO), company size, industry, and budget among others.

Tips to segment your customers:

Every lead is unique, and not all of them want the same thing. That’s why it’s critical to have a plan in place for reaching out to a smaller group of prospects and customers in order to get better results.

  • Refer to your buyer personas: 

Consider the qualities you assigned to your buyer personas while developing them. Combine several of these elements, such as job title and location, to create more precise segments.

  • Use your existing data: 

This is an excellent chance to learn more about your customers and prospects. Search for consistencies in your data. Perhaps you discover that you have a lot of project managers working in firms with fewer than 10 employees, and none of them has ever purchased anything. Create a segment based on these characteristics and feed them intriguing content to entice them to buy your product or service.

6. Prioritise drip campaigns

Drip campaigns, also known as automations or autoresponders, are an excellent tool for encouraging consumers to move down the sales funnel. Drip campaigns are sequences of emails that are activated when a consumer performs a certain activity, such as signing up for an email newsletter. Instead of having to individually generate follow-up emails for each customer following every action, the communications are sent automatically.

Drip campaigns are essential to keeping consumers engaged, no matter their stage in the sales cycle, as B2B email marketers typically have lengthy sales cycles.

Tips to prioritize drip campaigns:

If you want to know how to create drip campaigns that encourage consumers to make a purchase, keep reading. By providing value, you can increase the chances of them doing so.

  • Identify triggers: 

To begin using drip campaigns effectively, you must first consider what options customers have. However, it is more beneficial to create drip campaigns that are specific to your business rather than generic sign-up offers. For instance, if you’re a software vendor, this might be a request for a demo leading to a drop campaign. If you own a stationery store, this could be something like a request for a product catalogue .

  • Create engaging content: 

You must come up with content for each stage of the drip campaign, and it must be relevant and interesting. To help you get prospects to the next step of your sales funnel, make sure you invest in high-quality content marketing.

7. Track results

Your every task as a B2B email marketer is never finished. You must track the progress of all campaigns, understand why certain efforts were successful or unsuccessful, then modify future marketing efforts based on those learnings. Also keep in mind that effective strategies today might not be effective tomorrow; as a result, you’ll need to measure results on a regular basis.

Tips to track results:

Each firm’s success will be unique, so keep your attention on what you desire to accomplish rather than industry norms or what your rivals are doing. Here’s how to do it;

  • Set measurable goals: 

It’s impossible to evaluate performance if you don’t know what success entails. At the start of each campaign, create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) objectives to ensure that it has reached its goals.

  • Track relevant metrics: 

If your objective is to increase the number of people who follow you on social media, you’ll need to keep track of how many people visit your social media profiles. If your goal is to obtain demonstrations, you’ll need to calculate the number of signups per campaign.

The best email marketing software for B2B companies

Consider the specific needs of B2B customers when choosing an email marketing software solution. The following list provides some of the best options available to help you make a decision quickly.

1. Active Campaign

The way B2B companies keep track of their contacts differs from the way B2C marketers do it. While B2C marketing professionals would link one individual to one prospect, B2B marketers must handle multiple contact details within the same lead. To accomplish this, Analytics activity into Accounts inside its contact management feature.

2. Get Response

Get Response’s Get Response helps B2B marketers who have long sales cycles deal with leads skipping back and forth between phases. To do this, Get Response has divided its functionality into several marketing funnels that show you what steps you need to take to get consumers to move down the sales funnel and how these activities will help nurture your leads.

3. HubSpot Marketing Hub

With its CRM-style contact management, the HubSpot Marketing Hub connects B2B sales and marketing teams. Account information, such as customer lifecycle stage, segments they are in, and drip campaigns they are receiving, is accessible to both sales and marketers. You can also check out a client’s past interactions so that sales and marketing don’t flood people with too many emails.

Laying the foundations

At least at the start of their careers, many email marketers want to collaborate with fascinating brands and businesses in interesting industries such as fashion, lifestyle, and travel. The same goes for content marketers and journalists. Many of my coworkers spent a great deal of time attempting to gain a foothold in these coveted areas.

If you want to stand out from your competitors, make sure your content is interesting. Research what interests your target audience, invest time into crafting quality pieces, and utilize automating tools to take some of the manual labor load off of yourself so that you can focus on being creative.

The Path From Engagement to ROI

The only way to guarantee increased engagement is by ROI-centric marketing. But what does that entail?

It’s giving your audience and customers what they want from you. Our State of User-Generated Content report highlights 5 consumer trends that will have a direct bearing on marketing practices in 2022. We focused on these trends because listening to and learning from your audience strengthens bonds, allows amplify their voices experiences, fostering a more meaningful long-term relationship. Here’s how you can leverage 3 of the trends to boost your top KPIs.

How to Increase Engagement And ROI Based on 3 Consumer Trends

If you’re a marketer, the answers to your questions may be found in your audience. They’ve made their desires very clear to us.

Consumer Trend 1: People Want to Connect With the Brands They Love

In 2022, marketers must shift from a one-way street to a two-way street. A billboard with brand-written text discussing the features of a product will not be enough to help brands reach their KPIs, stand out in their industry, and obtain a billion impressions. To better connect with their audience, companies must incorporate user-generated content (UGC) into their story. Consumers also want to engage with businesses both online and offline.

Customers provide brands with numerous chances to interact with them through unboxing videos, a response to your tweet, sharing their Instagram photo on their story, taking a picture of their hotel room, and posting it to Facebook. It is up to the brand to return the high five every time a delighted audience member or consumer creates user-generated content. Brands that allow user-generated content to go carelessly about online in the hopes that it will lead to recommendations and purchases are optimistic.

Consumer Trend 2:  People Expect Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

For the previous several years, we’ve seen consumers demand greater and more diverse brand images and videos. At the same time, we’ve also observed people delighted to produce user-generated content and be more than ready to grant companies use of their photos, videos, and comments across their marketing channels (because they want to be associated with the brands they like!).

The State of User-Generated Content (SOUGC) report for 2022 found that a majority of consumers believe it is important for brands to reflect diversity in their values and worldviews. This sentiment has become an increasingly significant factor in marketing strategies, best captured through the diverse voices of customers.

Consumer Trend 3: People Prefer Social Media to Engage with Brands

Consumers are nearly 3 times more likely to engage with a brand’s social media content than any other type of media they create. As marketers, this is our big blinking neon sign telling us that social media should be our focus.

With user-generated content, like UGC and EGC, social media does not have to deplete your resources or consume the entire day of your staff. You may produce a content pipeline from the many voices of your audience by strategically repurposing UGC and EGC across marketing channels. But what if you’re finding it difficult to even attain engagement, UGC, and EGC? In that case, it might be time to get proactive with some tried-and-true marketing strategies like contests. Studies have shown that contests and social media work well together in terms of benefitting the brand; things like increased engagement, ROI, and UGC (with maybe some EGC mixed in there too).

The Right Strategy Will Boost Both of Your Top KPIs

If you’re like most marketers and want to know how to improve engagement and ROI in 2022, then you need the correct strategy. And we believe that the right strategy is understanding consumer trends. The most influential marketing strategies come from knowing what your audience wants, and this year we are lucky enough to have very transparent suggestions:

  1. Customers are key, so it is essential to always reply to them in a way that will maintain and improve the relationship between your company and its customers.
  2. Showcase your customers’ voices to demonstrate diversity, inclusion, and equity through all of your marketing channels. Your customers are more interested in the thoughts and opinions of other consumers and employees than they are in content created by your brand.
  3. Engage your customers with your content by incentivizing original contributions that spark a first encounter with your brand, develop UGC, and market your items.

Consumers want real, original, and trustworthy information. They will not only participate if you give them what they want; they will also convert. They won’t simply convert; they’ll become brand evangelists.

5 Ways To Improve ROI From Google Ads

Optimize Google Ads By Bids Not Budget:

Changing your bids is usually a far more successful technique for achieving more conversions than changing the budget of an ineffective PPC campaign. Target-based strategies like return on ad spend (ROAS) and cost per acquisition (CPA) use automated bidding to manage your spending by varying your bids as required. This has been shown to be more successful than adjusting your budget to match these patterns.

If you are meeting your target CPA (cost-per-acquisition), Google will reduce the bids for you. However, if you are using Target ROAS (return on ad spend), increase your number of conversions and your spending rate will adjust automatically. The Google Ads algorithm will reach an average for your Target ROAS eventually, allowing you to save money by capping the number of conversions in your campaign.

Automate High Performing Ads:

Automating advertisements with high conversion rates not only saves time, but it may also improve your conversion rates. This method is dependent on keyword traffic volume and may vary depending on certain seasonal factors.

Automating your bidding process is much simpler when your target keyword already has a fair amount of performance data because the algorithm can make more accurate predictions. If, however, your chosen keyword doesn’t have very much data to go on, Google’s system will take things slow by examining factors such as group conversion rates and campaigns.

Use Quality Score To Guide Ad Relevance:

Quality score is not only essential for the cost efficiency of search campaigns, but also aids in determining ad rank. Advertisers receive a 0-10 number score, with multiple factors influencing the final outcome.

The following factors, as determined by Google, are considered in QS: expected click-through rate (CTR), landing page quality and relevance, relevance of keywords to ad groups they belong to, ad relevance, and past Google Ads account performance. Because relevance is the primary QS measure, start there.

Organise your keywords into specific groups, and create individual ad campaigns for each group. Within these groups, make sure that your keywords are consistent with the content on your landing page. Update your keywords regularly based on actual search terms. Add negative keywords to avoid wasting money on ads that will never be clicked on. Finally, write ad text that is cohesive with your keywords, so that consumers have a relevant journey from searching to clicking to landing on your page.

Structure Keywords Together With Similar Conversion Rates:

Put similar keywords with conversion rates together when there is not enough data for one or more keywords. This type of structuring creates relevance as well, which gives a more all-encompassing metric to assess. By gathering keyword groups with related conversion rates, it’s easier to see each keyword’s performance.

Always structure your keywords in a way that makes the most sense for conversions and other data points, such as value or product lines. If Google sees a keyword without enough associated information, it will check campaign and ad group conversion rates for context automatically. Otherwise, the bid is based solely on the keyword’s individual data.

Make Targets More Aggressive During Seasons:

Automated bidding learns more about user behaviour over time, but it does not take into account specific seasonal events like Black Friday or Independence Day.

The algorithm used to determine account history prioritises conversions made recently over those happening further in the past. However, general seasonal conversion rate changes (like sales increases before holidays) do cause changes in the algorithm – just not on individual days.

If you want to target advertising for holiday-specific sales, you’ll need to use aggressive advertising in order to obtain a higher conversion rate on a certain date without increasing your bids on other days. For the one-day period during which your advertisements are expected to drive more traffic, you may temporarily change to CPA bidding.

While Google Ads is an excellent tool for online marketers, its features are not always easy to use. To get the most out of your marketing campaigns and see a better return on investment, implement these five strategies:

manually control bids on holidays and accommodate the inevitable spike in traffic.

Conclusion:

 In conclusion, email marketing is still a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. By using the methods we have discussed in this guide, you can increase engagement and ROI for your campaigns. Remember to focus on providing valuable content, personalising your messages, and testing different strategies. If you follow our advice, you will be well on your way to success!

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LAURA EGOCHEAGA

Before I became one of America’s top 5 growth hackers… I was included in Forbes’ 1000 to Watch List, I’ve spoken at the biggest tech conferences in the world including the CES and the Web Summit.

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