B2B Email Marketing

Part #5.6

Introduction

B2B email marketing is one of the most effective channels you can utilise within your broader B2B marketing strategy as it commonly acts as a direct conduit between your company/brand and both your prospective customer and current customers.

In essence, the email channel is key in helping you reach your audiences and placing your content and campaigns in front of them. It’s a truly universal channel in that it supports many of the other channels and contains holistic value across your entire marketing strategy.

B2B Email Marketing Strategy

Objectives: Defining what you want your B2B email marketing strategy to deliver and what is important to your organisation.
List Building: Refers to the tactics you will employ to build your email audience list.
Segmentation: Methods for how you should categorise and group your email audience list.
Email Content: The key types of email format you can send to your email audience list and the scenarios where each should be used.
Logistics: Refers to the tools, methods and processes you can use to enable and maximise the performance of your email marketing.
Measurement: Identifying objective success, general performance and opportunity.

1. Objectives

Refer back to the ‘Level 3 – Marketing Team Objectives’ (Part #1: B2B Marketing Objectives) you set and build your specific B2B email marketing objectives around these (along with general best-practice/secondary objectives).

2. List Building

The first step to your B2B email marketing strategy is building and continually growing your email list. This goal is to capture a list of email addresses of both your current and prospective customers that will be ideally stored within a dedicated email tool or CRM platform.

Before you begin formulating how you will achieve this, it’s wise to understand the underlying ‘value exchange’ that must occur between the party requesting the email property and the opposing party who is providing it. Ultimately, there are only a few reasons why an individual will provide their email address – so you need to craft your list building strategy around these.

2.1 – Email Value Exchange Scenarios

Access: An email address is provided as it unlocks accessibility to something deemed valuable.
Privilege: An email address is provided as it enables an individual to ‘be first in queue’ or ‘first to know’ about something related to the activities of your company.
Knowledge: An email address is provided as it enables the individual to enhance their knowledge and education surrounding a particular topic/theme.
Interest: An email address is provided as an individual holds curiosity within your company/brand, products, services and/or industry.
Enquiry: An email address is provided as the individual desires to open a direct line of communication with your organisation that could evolve into a relationship.
Purchase: An email address is provided as its required during the process of becoming a customer.

2.2 – Maximising Exchanges

Short Forms: The key here is balance and try to align the number of fields with the value being offered. Further to this, try and keep the number of fields to a minimum to reduce this relatively large point of friction.
Unambiguous: Your email capture forms need to be complemented by clear messaging regarding the value that is being exchanged and what the individual is receiving in return.
Strong CTA’s: You need to ensure strong CTA statements and buttons to explain what happens next, immediately after clicking the submission button.

2.3 – List Building Mechanisms

With the email address ‘value exchange’ scenarios covered above – this section will cover the key mechanisms for building your email list.

Website: From sign-up modules, pop-up widgets, contact forms, live-chat modules and both product/service and gated content pages.
Social Media: Popular social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter enable the usage of in-feed lead-generation (email capture) functionality.
Content Marketing: Your content marketing strategy should consider ‘premium’ content assets that are deemed highly valuable by your target personas.
Physical/Digital Event: You should task your sales team with capturing contact details including email addresses at every event you attend.
Sales Team: Whether through the event/expo channel or through general prospecting, your sales team should be able to capture email and contact information from prospective customers who are already engaged.
Industry Partners: This in many cases could involve one partner sharing prospective/target customer data with another.
External Agencies: Prospective/target customer data can be bought from agencies who specialise in this area. The key to buying data is first having an idea of the industry and segments you would like to target, then seek the agency who can best provide the data you need.

3. Segmentation

Before you send email communications to your growing contact list, you need to segment this captured audience to enable the creation of highly relevant and personalised emails. Regardless of your list size, you cannot simply send the same message (and email) to every single contact – they are largely all different in terms of what they care about, what their needs are and their position in the buying journey. But these are just a few examples of how to segment as there are literally hundreds of ways of slicing your contact list.

3.1 – Firmographic

These relate to the attributes of the organization that the key contact is associated with.

Segmentation criteria include: Industry/Sector, Geography, Company Size (by Revenue) & Company Size (by Number of Employees).

3.2 – Professional Profile

These relate to the attributes of a key contact within the context of their professional role and occupation within an organisation.

Segmentation criteria include: Job Title, Business Area/Function, Buying Journey Stage, Days at Journey Stage Level, Level of Responsibility, Buying Influence/DMU Role, Original Email Capture Method, Key Interests/Needs, Key Challenge(s) & Key Goals(s).

3.3 – Behaviour

These relate to the level of engagement shown by a key contact within the context of your own organisation’s marketing channels and content.

Segmentation criteria include: Channel Engagement Level, Hard Conversions (Sales Enquiry etc), Soft Conversions (Content Download), Previous Email Opens, Previous Email Clicks/Engagement, Previous Session Attributes (Via Email), Days Since Last Engagement & Lead Score.

4.4 – Customer Profile

These relate to the level of commercial intent and engagement shown by a key contact within the context of your products, services, and sales process.

Segmentation criteria include: Current or Prospective Customer, Products Interested In, Services Interested In, Past Products Purchased/Amount Spent, Past Services Purchased/Amount Spent, Days Since Last Purchase, Days Since Last Product/Service Usage, Purchase Signals, Engagement with Sales, & In-Product/Service Behaviour.

4. Email Content

Now that you can segment your email list – you can begin developing ideas for B2B email marketing campaigns and communications. Like segmentation, there are multiple options at your disposal in terms of email type, focus and approach.

4.1 – Email Types

Welcome: These can usually be referred to as ‘Thank You’ or ‘Get Started’ emails as they quite literally follow user action and act as an immediate initiation or follow-up mechanism.
Catalyst: These emails are used to reengage currently dormant contacts and strive to encourage user action.
Newsletter: These emails are used to distribute news and updates to contacts that could be company specific (created, industry specific (curated) or both.
Informational: These emails are used as way of generally informing and notifying contacts related to a wide range of areas such as your company, brand, content, or product/service.
Promotional: These emails are similar to informational emails but are generally reserved for contacts in the late-consideration and/or decision stage of the buying journey and are primarily focussed on your product/service – so contain a more commercially-leaning tone.
Retention: These emails are generally reserved for contacts in the usage stage of the buying journey and are primarily focussed on both maximising and sustaining the customer experience post-sale.
Announcement: These emails are used to focus on major news and updates that will generally be related to your company and brand.
Sales-Based: These emails are used by your sales team from the prospecting stage, all the way to contract close and beyond.
Campaign: These emails are used when part of a broader B2B marketing campaign – so contain a very specific segment focus, key message, and call-to-action.

4.2 – Email Focus

Company/Brand: Emails that contain focus on areas directly related to your company or brand – related email types include Newsletters, Announcements and Informational.
Industry: Emails that contain focus on areas directly related to your core industry or target markets – related email type includes Newsletters.
Content/Topic: Emails that contain focus on a content marketing asset designed to satisfy the needs and answer questions that a contact has – related email types include Campaign, Informational and Catalyst.
Product/Service: Emails that contain focus on areas related to your products and services – related email types include Promotional, Welcome and Retention.

4.3 – Email Components

Although the actual components and modules used within your email will depend on the type you select, there are common elements that will be universally used and best practice that should be followed.

Subject Line: Most contacts will read the subject line before clicking to consume the email – so its importance is obvious. The subject line not only needs to relay the general topic and purpose of the email, it also needs to be compelling.
Title: Like any good title, it should instantly inform the reader as to what the email relates to and you can use a sub-title to further qualify the intent and purpose behind the content.
Body (Primary): The exact modules and text used within the body will heavily vary among email types – but it’s wise to split the email in several modules, with the first (primary) module focusing on the key area/topic of the email along with a core CTA.
Body (Secondary): To support the primary module several secondary modules offer additional information and secondary CTA’s.
Retrieval: This will be the final module before the footer and is designed to act as the ‘last ditch’ attempt to drive soft conversion (click) from the contact.
Footer: This usually contains standard information such as small value proposition statement, social media icons and disclaimers along with an unsubscribe link which is particularly important in the GDPR-age.
Visual/Creative: You can embed images and video among other media elements – just ensure your visual creative supports your email’s core message and CTA’s as opposed to detracting from them.

4.4 – Email Approach

Single: The first approach to sending your email can be viewed as a ‘one-off’ event in that the email doesn’t contain any trigger rules or supporting emails.
Series: The second approach to sending your email can be viewed as series consisting of multiple emails that are pre-planned and pre-created that trigger depending on the engagement of the recipient or through a time-based rule.

5. Logistics

With the above detailing how you build an email list, how you segment your audience and how you craft the actual email content to reach, engage and convert your contacts – this section will introduce key elements to managing this channel.

5.1 – Email Marketing Management

Gone are the days where you need multiple platforms to perform separate functions related to your email marketing strategy – as many of the leading platforms offer an all-in-once solution that covers the CRM, client and automation components in a single tool.

That said, these platforms vary widely in their pricing and feature list. The key here is aligning the needs of your business, your email marketing strategy, and the tool you need to execute.

CRM System: A hub where you can store all your contacts along with their email addresses and other key information. The CRM section of the tool will also provide ability to segment and filter based on engagement characteristics and pre-set attributes.
Email Client: This relates to the email and template builder that includes sending options such as scheduling and split testing.
Email Automation: This relates to the ‘series’ approach detailed above where you can assign engagement and time-based rules to automatically control the flow of your email campaigns.

5.2 – Email Sending Options

When developing and executing your email campaigns, there are several options to keep in mind.

Day of Week: You will need to research the best days to send email within your target market/niche as they tend to vary depending on the industry.
Time of Day: Similar to the above, you will need to identify the best time of day to send your email within your target market/niche.
Frequency: This refers to the frequency in which a single contact receives email communications from your business – too many emails in a short space of time will lead to unsubscribes and could trigger spam filters built into your email tool.
A/B Split Testing: Allows you to literally ‘test’ different options with similar segmented lists, enabling you to ascertain the success of different email configurations.
Scheduling: With your days/times researched, it’s always best to schedule your email communications as opposed to sending manually to boost efficiency.

6. Measurement

A combination of hard and soft metrics should be used to allow measurement of your primary and secondary objectives in relation to the email marketing channel. Jump to Part #8: B2B Marketing Measurement for ideas on what metrics and KPI’s you can utilise as part of your strategy.