Email Marketing Excellence for B2B Success: Smartcore's Email Best Practices

What is B2B Email Marketing?

B2B email marketing is the art and science of using email to connect with other businesses and promote your relevant products, services, and solutions to them. It can take on various forms, from ongoing newsletters to announcements of new launches and running nurturing marketing campaigns. If planned properly, your B2B email marketing can offer you several benefits, including brand awareness and audience building, lead generation and nurturing, and customer engagement. Email is rated the most reliable channel for driving leads, with 86% of those surveyed saying email prospecting delivers "good to excellent" ROI (return on investment).

How to Get Started with B2B Email Marketing?

1. Choose an email marketing platform: Selecting the right email marketing platform is important. Look for features such as strong automation capabilities, advanced segmentation options, and insightful analytics to power your campaigns. According to Forbes, these are the best email marketing software of 2024, with Mailchimp coming up on top.
2. Build an opt-in email list: Organic list building is key to building a high-quality email database. Encourage your prospects and clients to opt in to receive your emails through website sign-up forms, lead magnets, and social media channels. Opt-out lists are equally important to give recipients the opportunity to unsubscribe from your emails – in line with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance.
3. Craft engaging triggered emails: Your triggered emails – automated messages sent to subscribers when they take certain actions or meet certain conditions – ensure you reach your subscribers without delay, help build customer satisfaction and loyalty, and set the tone for your relationship with your subscribers. Therefore, try to create compelling, personalised emails that provide value and enhance the experience, whether for ‘welcome’, lead nurturing’, ‘reminder’, and ‘abandoned cart’ emails.

Masters in all things digital marketing, our invaluable data, including an extensive global network of over 400,000+ ingredients buyers, data-driven insights, and specialised digital content channels in the B2B food and nutrition industry are what set us apart from the rest. Discover Smartcore’s 2024 Digital Media Kit. 

Best Practices in B2B Email Marketing

Discover the essential dos to elevate your B2B email marketing game and maximise your campaign's impact:

• Personalisation: Personalise your emails for relevance and to establish genuine connections with your audience. Try their name or organisation name and consider including content based on past interactions or preferences. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing & Trends Report, around 75% of marketers believe a personalised experience increases sales and the likelihood of a contact becoming a repeat customer.
• Subject lines: A good opportunity for AB testing, your subject lines should be compelling, grab attention, and encourage recipients to open your emails. Include action words, ask questions, use urgency when needed, ensure clarity, and keep your subject lines concise – think four to seven words. By word count, a seven-word subject line offers a 46% open rate (the highest), followed by four, eight and five, six, nine and two, three, and lastly, one.
• Content strategy: Create beneficial and informative content tailored to your audience’s needs, that provides value, whether through educational resources, industry insights, or exclusive offers. Pair this with clear, convincing, and compelling CTAs (call to action) that guide recipients towards the desired action, whether it's visiting a web page, downloading a whitepaper, booking a demo, or making a purchase. Don’t shy away from testing out the effectiveness of words used and CTA placements.
• Audience segmentation: Segment your audience based on demographics, interests, behaviour, customer lifetime value, or engagement levels for targeted reach. This allows you to deliver highly relevant messaging, tailored content, and impactful offers that resonate with different audience segments.

Did you know you can calculate your estimated audience reach with us? Discover our FREE Audience Reach Calculator. This tool enables you to select your target audience from our database of over 400,000 ingredients buyers and segment them by product and industry interest, job function and level, and geographical location. You will receive the estimated audience number you can target with our smarter digital campaigns directly to your inbox.

• Timing strategy: Test different send times to find when your audience is most active and receptive to your emails. This will help ensure maximum engagement. Additionally, consider the nature of your email and the typical workday of your target audience — sending emails during peak productivity hours can increase open and engagement rates. Interestingly, despite being considered the least productive day, Friday emerged as the leading day of the week for B2B sales email outreach. You could also enlist the help of AI tools that offer Send Time Optimisations (STO), thus allowing you to send emails at the most ideal send time to each recipient based on historical data.
• Performance monitoring: Track and analyse results to gain insights into your campaigns and use this to inform future email strategies. Monitor key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns. Leverage data-driven insights to continuously refine and optimise your email marketing efforts.

Explore the most common don’ts to ensure your email campaigns are on the path to success:

• Purchasing email lists: Avoid the mistake of buying email lists. This will ultimately just result in poor results, low return on your investment and time, and the possibility of breaking data protection laws.
• Using misleading subject lines: Steer clear of subject lines that lack clarity or could appear gimmicky. These could result in low open rates, spam complaints, unsubscribes, or even hurt your reputation.
• Email fatigue: Resist the urge to overwhelm recipients with excessive emails. Email fatigue can lead to decreased engagement and even unsubscribes.
• Generic communication: Stay away from impersonalised or irrelevant messaging that does not resonate with your audience. You don’t want recipients to stop engaging with your emails, or worse, opt out.
• Neglecting mobile-friendliness: Don’t overlook mobile-friendly optimisations in your email campaigns. It could result in poor user experience and the loss of potential leads.
• Ignoring requests and regulations: Respect unsubscribe requests and follow data security and privacy compliance regulations.

Looking ahead, it's essential for businesses to future-proof their B2B email marketing strategy to continue effectively engaging audiences and driving results. A/B testing can help identify best send times tailored to your specific audience, as well as the most effective subject lines and CTAs to use. Maintain a consistent email sending schedule – it helps build engagement and ensures a reliable presence in your audience's inbox. Lastly, don’t be afraid to incorporate the use of AI to optimise your email marketing efforts. It presents unparalleled opportunities to unlock productivity, enhance innovation, optimise campaigns, drive ROI, and achieve new levels of success.

Are you ready to take your email marketing efforts to the next level? Our smarter email marketing campaigns are powered by our first-party data-driven insights, the latest and greatest marketing trends, and our marketing mastery, where we’re constantly evolving ourselves and our offerings to be your best-in-class partner.

We can also help you generate excellent-quality, GDPR-compliant leads in the food and nutrition industry. Think buyers who are incredibly interested in your ingredients, products, or services.

Partner with us in your next lead generation campaign and grow your list of leads through smarter solutions that deliver real results.

Explore some of our success stories to see how we’ve helped other businesses reach their buyers with smarter digital campaigns. Contact us today to learn more about the smarter solutions we offer and the challenges we can address for your brand. Get in touch with us here.