Email Marketing From Business To Business (B2B) : The decision-making process for the acquisition of a product or service in the business environment is not impulsive as in many cases in the private environment.
In the case of B2B, it usually implies more time for the purchase to mature, more decision makers, and usually a more rational analysis.
In any case, even if a company is buying from us, those who make the decisions are people; that are moved by emotions and interests, that is, they usually refer to levers that work in a different way than they do in their private environment. Thus, in many cases, managers in an organization look for guaranteed options or solutions that save them work, even if it is at the cost of a higher price.
These considerations must be reflected in a B2B Email Marketing strategy: an offer that we prepare in our Email Marketing campaigns and landing pages. Let’s try giving a personal gift for each order, setting up a survey to qualify our leads, or implementing a Lead Nurturing strategy.
The tactics to use are very diverse, but in any case, being successful in your B2B Email Marketing strategy is based on attending to the following 5 general principles :
Table of Contents
Focus On Its Benefits
Sure you sell a product or a service, but you have to focus on what your market wants to buy: a solution, a set of benefits for your reader. Each quality of your offer must be translated into a benefit for your customers, and this is important that you synthesize it from the subject of your Email.
Interactivity
You must understand that Email Marketing is not a loudspeaker but an interactive channel, that is, from several directions. A channel in which you need to give (a free whitepaper, a relevant piece of news for your reade) and then ask for small response actions on their part until you build a relationship of trust. If you commit your reader to make small answers, it will be easier for him to commit to the most difficult ones, such as hiring your services.
Time Management
Within that interactive process resulting from the two previous points, you should not approach your prospect to tell him how wonderful you are and that he has to buy from you now. As we mentioned before, B2B sales are not usually impulsive, and looking for a sale too soon is one of the most common mistakes. You have to work patiently for the sale to be hot.
That does not mean that time does not matter, it is crucial, in the business world it is usually worth more than money. If as soon as we receive a form or an Email with a request for a new lead, we answer it immediately, we will see how the conversion rates skyrocket. Response builds trust, silence builds uncertainty, and that’s fatal in B2B business. When the response to a completed form is answered in the next 5 minutes instead of 10 minutes, the conversion rate of the leads was 900% higher according to InsideSales. If it can’t be a call, at least establish automatic transactional emails that guide and inform the user and in which you can include cross-selling opportunities.
Multichannel
Your clients are not online or offline, sometimes they prefer to write you an Email and in other cases, you call them; and talk person to person. You must enable all customer contact channels. Likewise, the use of multi-channel efforts in your inbound strategy will multiply your results. For example, the response rate is multiplied when emailing to a business segment is followed by telemarketing to the part of the base that is known to have opened the offer.
Segmentation
The database is the most important element for the success of an Email Marketing campaign. Never be tempted to buy a list of company emails as is on the internet and include it in your sending base, as it is more than likely that apart from legal problems you will include spamtraps that will lead you to your domain and sending IPs being classified as spammers and from then on even your most loyal customers have to take you out of the junk mailbox.
If you are working on your own database, your registrants will also require different treatment and communication depending on their life cycle with you, potential, or size. Do not make the mistake of saying: that since it does not cost more to send to 100% of my base than to 5%, I always send 100%, even if I know that this specific communication is only of interest to one part. The database is our treasure and we cannot burn it.
Email Marketing gives us many opportunities to communicate with our professional market in a flexible and fast way. And all this in an economical way, but as I always say: doing Email Marketing is cheap, but doing it wrong is very expensive. If we don’t have anything interesting to communicate to a registrant, let’s not waste her time, and let’s use ours to think about what we can offer that is of interest to her.
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