Why Email Marketing is Still a Top Choice for B2B Marketers

Is email the most seductive form of marketing? Maybe not at first glance. Email doesn’t immediately excite in terms of creative potential. It hasn’t got the slick moves of TikTok or the community building potential of a platform like LinkedIn. Even if the word “email” conjures images of corporate inboxes and stale coffee on Monday mornings.

As a result, B2B marketers may be tempted to divert more of their resources toward newer communication channels. However, email marketing is still popular for a reason. It is one of the most effective tools you have as a professional services business to meet your audience where they spend a good deal of time.

Email is what you make of it. You can, if you choose, blast out blanket campaigns to all of your subscribers. But marketing automation technology has raised the bar. Your audience has experience of email being used in increasingly sophisticated ways to create B2B email marketing campaigns that are anything but boring. They expect visually beautiful, targeted and personalised campaigns that drip feed them information and build relationships.

When you approach email marketing like this, it shows you value your audience’s attention and sets you apart from the competition. It has the power to position your company as the industry partner people need. 

It’s this potential, often left untapped, that is the reason B2B firms need to invest more in their email strategies. In this article we’ll not only look at how email continues to provide clear business value but also how you can use it to create an incredible customer experience.

Where Email Marketing Excels 

So, what is email marketing’s role in the marketing mix? With statistics like a 35:1 ROI, we know email is important to sales. But it is more than that. Email can build relationships and provide the quality interactions and insights that lead to partnership.

This makes it a great channel to maximise the effectiveness of your communications in several areas throughout the customer journey. The following are a few aspects you can consider when looking to improve your email marketing efforts.

Lead Generation 

Email marketing provides a way for businesses to reach potential customers and clients that are a perfect fit for their services. 

You can build an audience that is predisposed to be highly engaged with your business by exchanging valuable gated content for people’s opt-in and email addresses. And when you begin the customer relationship by providing value and service, you start off on the right foot.

However, a subscriber isn’t the same thing as a high-quality lead. Luckily, email gives you multiple opportunities to engage in conversation and build the relationship. Done right, subscribers can become leads, leads can be qualified, and eventually that can help you win a client and a lasting partnership.

Brand Building 

Email is a versatile medium that provides a level of flexibility similar to that you enjoy on your website. It has relatively few restrictions on content or formatting.

In addition, how you use it isn’t bound by an audience’s expectations in the same way you are on social networks. For example, on LinkedIn you’re expected to be more professional, whereas on Instagram you can be more informal. On email, your brand can be whatever it needs to be. 

Email can also provide a bridge, linking up the different facets of your marketing strategy to provide a unified experience. You can use it to tell people where your social audience is finding you and what your brand is using different channels for. When used as a connection element like this, email can broaden your reach, pulling people who may have entered from one section of your online platform into other channels. 

Working in harmony in this way, you can also leverage every outlet to its full potential while making sense of your brand story. Email, like your website, creates a point of consistency that can tell the complete story. This broadens your customer’s perspective, making it easier for them to connect with your brand and see all the ways you can help them.

Content Distribution 

Email is one of the best ways to make sure the right people see your content. You can use it to keep your audience informed by announcing and linking new industry articles from your content marketing efforts, building your audience’s perception of your authority and expertise.

Making sure the blog posts, webinars, or social media event invites you send apply to the people receiving them is the best way to ensure higher rates of engagement and participation. The more relevant and useful your emails are to your readers, the more engaged they become. So, if your content matches your prospect’s interests, it can be an incredibly powerful tool to build relationships and position your brand as the most knowledgeable organisation on the block. 

Data on click throughs provides that intelligence, letting you know what your prospect is interested in. Automation can then segment your audience and set the conditions to personalise your emails based on what you know about each of your leads. 

Relationship Building 

As soon as a contact joins your email list, you can start building a relationship. Welcome emails have an average open rate of 82% giving you the perfect chance to make a stellar first impression. 

From there, you have multiple opportunities to market to them. However, email affords you a fairly intimate level of access so you have a responsibility to treat their inbox and attention with respect. These people have not only chosen to sign up to your list, they open your emails and browse the content.

You can personalise your emails and use their inbox to refer your readers to content you’ll know they’ll find useful. You can also deliver little touches that people value. Ask for feedback, remind them about an event they’ve signed up for or follow up afterwards with a download and other useful information. You can also find many other ways to celebrate your subscribers - perhaps a happy birthday message and a targeted discount code, if they’ve given that info.

Customer Retention 

Of course, emails are the perfect tool for moving your prospects through the customer journey. But what about when they’ve already converted once or more? Email marketing might be the bridge that helps your audience along on the buyers’ journey, but you don't stop giving value if they've purchased your services. Email is also the perfect way to keep providing value and nurture a vibrant relationship with valued customers. 

Thanking them for their custom is a good way to start. Client onboarding is another key point in the customer experience that can be improved using email. Drip email sequences can nurture a new client along, educating them on working with you. At every step of the way, try to provide value — this goes a long way in creating trust.

Email marketing can keep customers interested long after they’ve made a purchase. You can send out renewal offers, as well as design campaigns to introduce other products or services you offer. Email also gives you a chance to win back lost customers and re-engage leads that have gone off the boil. You can run reengagement campaigns. 

Customer Advocacy 

You can use email to move people to act on your behalf and champion your cause. Focus on making your email marketing content more shareable to encourage your email subscribers to become brand advocates. 

Create emails from a customer first mentality and provide valuable content based on what will be most helpful to your audience.

What are they interested in finding out about? What problems do they need to solve or jobs do they have to do? Who do they need to convince in their company on the merits of your service, and what information do they need to do that? Share links to your knowledge base and content on your site to meet their requirements. 

Creating email content that is utterly interesting, shareable, and relevant to them (by using your email intelligence) will provide an even higher ROI when your audience carries your name on to others. However, getting organic shares is difficult, so don’t forget to ask your audience to share and make it easy for them to do so.

Sales Effectiveness 

Email marketing moves your leads from a lukewarm opt-in to a boiling hot lead. You can automate or schedule large portions of the buyers’ journey, nurturing leads through triggered workflows, until the point when your prospect’s lead score shows they would welcome personal outreach.

Email is so effective because you can use it to gather so much information about your prospects along the way. If a lead has opened every email and clicked through to your site multiple times, including your services or pricing page, it may be the perfect opportunity to ask what you can do for them personally before they seek services from a competitor.

Email also allows you to make clients aware of your other products and services, creating opportunities to broaden the relationship and upsell based on your knowledge of their browsing habits. Abandoned cart follow-ups and related product recommendations can also prompt a purchase, for example, if you sell reports or courses.  

Customer Service 

Email marketing is all about building a cohesive and engaged dialogue with with your audience. Ask your subscribers what they want to receive from you. You can also provide granular opt outs that allow your audience to stop receiving specific emails. This ensures that only engaged subscribers who are interested receive your campaigns. 

Email is ideally two-way. Some email platforms make it hard to allow people to reply to a real person. In the context of B2B marketing and professional services, we think that’s a mistake. The marketing automation platform that we use sends email messages that comes from a genuine business email account that people can reply to and can, optionally, send email from the relationship manager for each customer. Blasting mass-mailings from a no-reply account or from a weird looking email service provider address should be a thing of the past if you’re sincere about wanting to build customer relationships.

This is a better approach to keeping people on your list than all or nothing. The beauty of an automation platform is you can see when people engage so you can give them the option to opt out when their engagement is low. For example, a lead might be interested in receiving your newsletter and blog post reminders, but not in promotional launches. It’s a nice touch to offer them an opt out on promotions so you can maintain the relationship. 

Data, Automation & Personalisation Are Key To Optimising Your Emails

How do we make the best decisions for our businesses? Instincts? Gut feelings? Sometimes, maybe. But the best way to make decisions is by having access to actionable insights and intelligence.

The key to customer relationships is understanding their needs and effectively communicating all the ways you can solve their problems. Every person in your audience is different however, email campaigns provide us with an array of data so we can get to know them better. 

You can measure open rates, click-through rates, gauge what topics they’re interested in, which subject lines and calls to action work best and more. That data helps us know what problems they need solved and when, and helps us to implement improvements in areas such as audience segmentation, personalisation, content ideation and creation. It also provides the best opportunity to jump in and close the sale with personalised details.  

With marketing automation, you can use data to build a sophisticated customer experience and personalised buyers’ journeys at scale. It can provide the tools to simplify customer engagement and provide perfectly timed, highly relevant content to your subscribers.

In short, we think the opportunities are so compelling that every company should consider how they can extract and deliver more value via email. If you’d like to find out how you can use your B2B email strategy to understand your customers and build better relationships, get in touch for a demo.