5 Tips to Improve Your B2B Email Marketing Efforts

Email is one of the best tools to reach your audience when it comes to B2B marketing. According to B2B marketers, email campaigns are the most effective way to generate leads for your business, with a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for every $1 spent—an impressive 4,200% ROI!

While email marketing can help generate more leads and sales for your business, a random approach will not bring positive results alone. With 361 billion emails expected to be sent every day by 2024, you will need to create a strategic, well-thought-out plan that utilizes effective marketing strategies to stand out from the clutter in a customer’s inbox.

Below are five useful B2B email marketing tips to help you make the most of your email campaigns:

1. Optimize Your Emails for Mobile Devices

With everyone walking around with a personal computer in their pockets every day, it should come as no surprise that the average person checks emails several times a day on his or her smartphone. This reality increases the importance for you to ensure that your emails are compatible with being viewed on a mobile device.

If you do not properly optimize your emails for mobile devices, images contained in the email may not properly load and appear distorted. The text size may also vary, making it hard to read the email on smaller screens. According to a recent study of mobile users, 52% reported that a poor mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with a company.

One of the easiest ways for you to ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly is to use mobile- responsive templates through popular email marketing platforms such as Constant Contact and MailChimp.

2. Segment Your Email List

Segmenting your email list when sending out an email marketing campaign allows you to deliver relevant content to users, which can help with your email open rate and ultimately increase your ROI. In fact, an email that has been segmented has 50% more link clicks within the email. Also, according to HubSpot, email campaigns that use segmented lists see as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

There are many ways to segment an email based on the intended target audience, but here are some options to consider:

• Demographics: You can use your CRM to target an audience based on their location.
• Engagement: You may want to target subscribers who did not open the original email, by resending the email, or by sending out a slightly different email.
• Stage of a Customer’s Journey: You can target your emails to regularly interact with prospective customers who are at the top of the sales funnel, versus existing customers who have already made a purchase.
• Source: You can segment your email to isolate customers based on which form they filled out on your website.

3. Identify the Ideal Time to Send Your Email

Timing plays a crucial role in the success of your B2B email marketing campaign. When considering when to schedule your next email, here are some tips to consider:

• Daytime vs. Nighttime: When planning an email campaign, it is usually best to send out emails during the day, when most people are awake and more likely to see your email.
• Distribute Your Emails on Tuesdays & Thursdays: Traditionally, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday have been most often chosen by email marketers when sending out email campaigns, in order to avoid the weekend anticipation that Friday brings and the hectic catch-up that often happens on Monday. According to MailChimp, Tuesday and Thursdays are the best days to send out email newsletters.
• Best Timing for Optimal Open Rates: To increase an email’s open rate and help ensure it catches the attention of your target audience, it’s best to distribute your email campaign midweek between 12 – 4 p.m., with 2 p.m. being the most optimal time for emails according to MailChimp data.

However, while these are best practices for email distribution, they may not be true for your particular business. To find the optimal time for sending your emails, it’s always best to analyze your data. Analytics can help identify the ideal distribution day and time for your business.

4. Include a Call to Action

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 87% of B2B marketers in North America use email marketing as a primary way to generate leads. While emails are a crucial part of maintaining an ongoing conversation with your target audience, you need to do more than just remind customers that you exist.

Adding a clear call to action is a great way to compel customers to take a certain action based on the specific objectives of your email campaign. Examples can include subscribing to a newsletter, visiting your website or signing up for a webinar.

Your call to action should be placed in a way that makes it hard to miss by the audience, such as using a brightly colored button with a clear and compelling statement like “Visit Our Website.” In order to generate more leads and conversions, it is also recommended that you link your call to action to an engaging landing page on your website.

5. Personalize Your Email Message

The one-size-fits-all, mass email approach does not work anymore when it comes to B2B email marketing campaigns. According to an Experian Marketing Services study, using the recipient’s first name in the email subject line can increase an email open rate by 29.3% on average. Since emails are a personal channel to be reached by colleagues, friends and family, receiving an email that is clearly written for hundreds or thousands of individuals can give the impression that an email is spam, so personalization is key for any B2B email marketing campaign.

In addition, taking a wild guess of who your target audience is and what they are looking for will not generate positive results. There are a wide array of tools available for email marketing and customer data to help you personalize messages to target a specific audience, which will increase your open rates and ROI. Your existing customers can provide data that you need to better identify the characteristics of your ideal customer, which is known as a buyer persona.

A buyer persona can include information such as a person’s title, industry, demographic, psychographic and geographic information. Depending on your business, you may have one or multiple buyer personas.