Converting Leads into Sales with B2B Email Marketing
Even though email has been a tried-and-true form of B2B marketing for decades, you might be surprised to find how powerful it is today.
Businesses continue to use B2B email marketing, despite that it's a 50-year-old technology, to engage audiences with news, promotions, information, and exclusive deals, interact with followers, and convert leads into customers.
One of the most crucial things to keep in mind when using email marketing to expand your company is that it enables you to connect with website visitors who did not convert. This implies that you can email qualified prospects to increase your chances of conversion.
But it's crucial to personalize and tailor your messaging if you want to nurture a lead like this. In order to have a significant impact, you must send the appropriate emails at the appropriate times and strategically manage your interactions to prevent overwhelming prospects that haven't yet been completely nurtured.
Here, look at how you can use B2B email marketing to connect with worthwhile prospects, turn them into sales consistently, and speed up your company growth.
What is B2B Email Marketing?
Instead of sending emails to individual clients, B2B or business-to-business email marketing targets professionals or business owners. You create B2B leads for the sales team, nurture them with email campaigns, and turn them into Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
If you offer email services, for instance, your target market can include marketers, startups, and influencers who want to use your services to send emails to their consumers.
When contacting the B2B market, you should:
Recognize the issues they face.
Inform the customer how your goods or services can benefit them.
Support your argument with case studies, client testimonials, and data.
Continue adding additional features and capabilities to them.
Your marketing and sales teams are involved in B2B email marketing. The sales team converts qualified leads into paying customers while the marketing team creates email campaigns to generate MQL.
How to Create Powerful B2B Email Campaigns
To establish an efficient email marketing campaign for B2B leads, follow the steps listed below:
1. Set measurable goals and the right KPIs
Setting goals or objectives for your email marketing campaigns is the first step in the process. These objectives serve as the framework for developing and carrying out your B2B strategy. Your B2B objectives can be to increase overall signups and demo bookings, produce MQL for the sales teams, target new personas, etc.
Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the measures you use to track your progress toward your goals. KPIs include open rates, click-through rates, and the proportion of MQL to SQL conversions.
2. Build empathy and experience map
Finding your target audience is a useful strategy for growing your email list. The empathy and experience map comes into play here.
Depending on your sector and aims, an empathy map includes questions you should respond to assist you to develop your target person. Try to provide answers to the following queries:
What are the characteristics of your audience: Gender, age group, profession, size of the organization, ethnicity, etc.
Values and beliefs that they follow or feel deeply about.
What their problems are, and how your brand may help.
An experience map is similar to diving deep into your customer's journey and really comprehending it. Here are some of the queries you ought to respond to:
How did the potential customer find you? What comes first in contact? Do they start it, or do you?
What information is provided to the prospect to educate them (articles, webinars, whitepapers, reports)? Does this article address the concerns of your potential customers? How does this information interest and benefit them?
What tidbits do you offer to entice potential customers to join your email list?
These inquiries will help you identify your target personas, who you can then contact through a variety of acquisition tactics and add to your email list.
3. Select a reliable ESP
You must look for the best Email Service Providers (ESPs) to handle your email campaigns once you have your email list and objectives. Your email campaigns will be created, carried out, and tracked by ESPs, who will also provide useful information for future campaign optimization.
Before you approve any ESP, confirm that it satisfies the following requirements:
Suits your budget.
Have a thorough analytics tracking system.
enabling the sending of customized campaigns.
Provide integrations.
provide automation.
4. Create relevant email campaigns
This is the point at which your marketing team can start taking concrete action, helped along by your target personas.
Sending relevant material via email can benefit from the experience map you created to determine your target audience. Try to respond to these inquiries in that regard:
Which of your contents will increase their awareness and familiarity with your offerings?
How could you promote your USP while building trust with potential leads?
What does the prospect need to know to make an informed decision to convert?
What do they need to believe and experience for them to be happy to become a client or customer?
You can get ideas for writing your email's subject line and the body by responding to these questions.
Keep in mind that the other business owner you are emailing is likely to notice when you sound overly salesy. So, concentrate on engaging with the first few emails, and then see how the prospect responds to them. If they show signs of interest, prod them with content that illustrates how you could help their problems.
5. Automation is your friend
This is because email automation can significantly lessen your workload while improving the effectiveness of your campaign. However, you must carefully arrange your email cadence if you want to benefit from automation. Studying your prospect's behaviour and journey is necessary for effective automation. You should also set up a trigger email sequence that is sent in response to a certain action.
For instance, a prospect visited your e-book landing page after clicking a link in an email. They got the ebook downloaded. Afterwards, you may utilize this information to send the next email, which might contain additional relevant content to further educate them.
Define these parameters in accordance with the reader's needs to avoid overloading them:
Time: When the following email in the automated series should be sent.
Cadences: The amount of time between emails.
Frequency: Avoid bombarding the reader with emails too frequently. They'll simply be pushed in the direction of the unsubscribe link. So, stick to a frequency that looks ideal and keeps your audience interested.
Strategies to Increase CTR through Email Marketing
Would your email get a swipe to the right or left if it were a Tinder profile? Would people be interested in knowing more, or would they just go on to the next?
How long do you think consumers will take to evaluate your marketing email if they are quick to swipe away a potential life partner? Not a lot. If you get open rates of 25% and click-through rates of 4%, you're doing well above average for most industries, according to MailChimp.
Here are some strategies to consider in order to increase your B2B email marketing CTRs and make sure more prospects connect with your prospecting or promotional emails.
1. Engage readers with an attention-grabbing subject line
Getting subscribers to open your emails in the first place is obviously the first step to a higher click-through rate. People won't click on the links in your emails if they never open them.
It's quite okay to devote 10 to 25 percent of your writing effort to the headline, just like with a fantastic blog article. Create interest or a sense of urgency in it so that the reader is forced to click on it and read more.
2. Consistently provide high-quality content
No one likes clickbait articles or emails. Therefore, it won't take long for readers to stop clicking on your emails, send them straight to the trash, or even unsubscribe if you master the art of generating fantastic email subject lines but the email content falls short of its promises.
Most of us subscribe to a few newsletters that we read every day. We pause what we're doing as soon as they hit our inbox and pay them our full attention. Why? because these emails constantly provide value.
If you continuously surprise, impress, and give value to your subscribers with the information in your newsletters, you'll find a never-ending stream of readers who are ready to read your content and pay attention to the recommendations you offer.
3. Conclude your email with a cliffhanger.
Have you ever noticed how many television series finish in the middle of a dramatic scene, leaving us all eagerly anticipating the ending, resolution, or major reveal the following week?
The reason why writers do this is that they've found that it keeps viewers interested and raises the likelihood that they'll tune in frequently. If the plot is wrapped up quickly, viewers might tune in again the following week; but, if they miss the episode, it is less urgent.
Meanwhile, fans will be left wondering what will happen next if the drama doesn't end in one episode. Due to this lack of closure, frequent viewing is essential since it eventually cultivates a loyal fanbase.
You can use the same strategy in your emails. Offer just enough details to spark a reader's curiosity and keep them interested in order to persuade them to click over to your website, but don’t give everything away. Finish instead with a "read more..." link or button so that readers can continue reading the story. By doing so, you will keep your B2B prospects interested and develop a stronger brand relationship.
Bonus CTR-boosting tips:
To make your emails more engaging and provide your readers with more context, use high-quality pictures. Infographics, movies, inspiring quotations, graphical banners, memes, and header images are a few examples of effective imagery you can use in your B2B email marketing communications.
Make CTA buttons that are noticeable on the page and direct the reader to the appropriate action. The best results are typically obtained when your CTA is added to the bottom right of your emails.
To point readers to other deals, articles, or pieces of information that are relevant, include a postscript in your emails.
Source: NOW! Bali Magazine Header Email
Tips to Convert Leads into Sales through Email Marketing
Here are some additional approaches you can take to make your lead nurturing B2B email marketing efforts more efficient and effective.
Use autoresponders
The time-saving power of autoresponders, sometimes known as automatic email responses, can be utilized to better comprehend segmentation. You can offer them various types of information and services at various times of the week or month as you divide up the various groups you are contacting.
They work well for creating a sense of urgency when developing a launch sequence to market a course or other time-sensitive service. As the date approaches, you might even increase the frequency and highlight special offers. If they aren't used to hearing from you, be careful not to spam them too much.
Segmentation can also be supported by autoresponders. Simply said, you are segmenting your traffic into different groups according to their tastes and actions. As a result, you may create several sets of messages based on the people who have subscribed to weekly, monthly, and product updates.
Use data
Regardless of your sector or context, email is a fantastic tool to not only segment your traffic but also to keep an eye on your statistics to get a feel of client behaviour. The majority of email service providers give consumers the option to collect metrics at various levels.
The three key indicators that you should pay close attention to are CTR, open rate, and unsubscribes. The number of people (and categories) who unsubscribe can provide you with a wealth of information on how to optimize your campaign.
Split test to select the best
Before sending your email campaign to your complete database, you can test your subject lines and content with a sample of your subscribers, which is one of the best things about email marketing.
You can enter two subject lines or variations of a certain email and have a user test done on your behalf by any reputable email service provider, such as MailChimp. You should send the email to all relevant prospects with the subject line that receives the most clicks and the greatest interaction.
You may optimize all of your future communications for the highest possibility of lead nurturing B2B success by split testing. Split testing allows you to acquire intelligence (based on copy, content, images, design, colour schemes, and layout).
Amazing B2B Email Marketing Examples
Here are our top three choices for B2B emails that meet all the requirements:
1. Filevine
Subject line: 👻 Summon Your FREE AirPods Today!
What makes it a good B2B email?
The subject line is interesting, clear, and creative, also words like “summon your free iPods” are making people curious, so it hits right to the point.
There is adequate space which makes graphics and CTA stand out.
Each section highlights the objectives of the campaign.
Interesting and creative copy.
One clear call to action.
2. Harvest
Subject line: Want to boost team productivity and retention? Here’s how.
What makes it a good B2B email?
The email's subject line summarizes what to expect inside.
The headline addresses the recipient's concerns, which are that they could have ideas but lack the knowledge to put them into action.
Legibility is improved through the use of points.
Clearly stated call to action.
Ending an email with a similar call to action - in case the recipients didn’t click on the first CTA, Harvest elaborates on benefits further in the email.
3. Calendly
Subject line: Want to hit your pipeline goal? Read this...
Source: Really Good Emails
Clear and persuasive subject line
The email copy highlights the reasons and benefits of using Calendly for the team with an actionable CTA in those sections.
One email is consisting of some objectives with some actionable CTAs - if the recipients didn’t give their interest in hitting their pipeline goals, Calendly has the possibility to make their recipients interested in others like clicking free templates and replaying free webinars.
Clear CTA based on the copy objectives
