How To Use Email Marketing For B2B Sales

Email is to sales what fertilizer is to plants. Just as fertilising your plants increases your chance of a decent harvest, email marketing improves your chance of making sales. So it goes without saying that email marketing for B2B is a must-have.

If you’re looking to bring in more sales in 2020, then email absolutely must be a core part of your marketing mix, and beyond that – you have to use the right tools, and the best techniques in your email marketing efforts.

You might know that investment in marketing efforts is imperative for sales success, but you might not yet be aware how important and successful email is as a marketing channel, especially in the B2B sector.

Email marketing has a whopping ROI rate of 4400%. For every $1 spent on email marketing – $44 is made.

And the good news for those in B2B is that in this sector, email marketing tends to reap strong results. 79% of B2B marketers credit email as the most effective distribution channel for demand gen efforts. (Content Marketing Institute, 2018)

Email marketing for B2B is bound to improve upon your bottom line. 

But how do you make sure you’re rolling out email marketing campaigns that will garner the best sales results?

Here are 7 proven techniques for email marketing for B2B which bring in more sales.

This is foundational. If your B2B company wants a high ROI on its email marketing efforts, then you’re going to have to employ a high quality marketing automation software.

There is no way you will be able to compete with the 121 other emails your average contact receives in a day if you’re not leveraging automation tools.

Carrying out your email marketing efforts via a Marketing Automation platform opens the door for your strategy in myriad ways. 

You’ll be able to easily segment data, target specific contacts with content relevant to them, build fully automated emailing sequences, measure engagement, and better understand each of your contacts – both collectively, and individually.

B2B marketers reported average increase of 760% in revenue from relevant, segmented and targeted email campaigns. (CampaignMonitor, 2017)

If you’re not using marketing automation to give your email campaigns that necessary edge, then you’ll not reap the full potential of email as a sales tool.

Your contacts won’t convert (and make a purchase) unless your call to action is obvious, easy, and accessible.

Text links buried in paragraphs of copy isn’t going to cut it. These are easily overlooked, and require hard work (reading) to discover.

Make your CTAs obvious by using brightly coloured, visual graphic buttons.

Don’t be shy – make sure your buttons are displayed with plenty of padding around them; don’t bury them amongst the text, give them their own centre stage between paragraphs.

Also, you don’t need to just ask once – litter your email with CTAs, and make it less obvious that you’re repeating yourself by ensuring the button text is different each time.

When it comes to email marketing for B2B – it’s not enough to be visible online anymore, you also have to create unique content that’s worth consumption.

This means you’re going to have to allocate quite a bit of resources and time into content creation. Plagiarising puts your brand in a bad light, and only sharing content from other brands will lead potential customers easily astray. The key is to frequently create content unique to your brand.

In order to bag that sale, your content is going to have to deliver value that’s relevant to your target audience. Delivering high value content to your contacts helps to increase your open rates, and thus gives you a higher conversion rate.

Using a marketing automation platform, you’ll have access to tools which help you boost content relevancy. You’ll be able to segment contacts based on their data and behaviour, and target them with the content most relevant to them.

Your promotional email campaigns can’t be promotional alone. They have to deliver content that’s relevant and useful to your contacts. Get creative with automation tools and send the right email at the right time in order to bring in those sales.

As mentioned above, sending the right email at the right time to the right contact increases your chances of making a sale.

If your email marketing team has been doing its homework – that is, viewing and analysing previous campaign publication reports – then it should be clear what type behaviour often precludes a contact becoming a customer.

Use that insight to create email campaigns with strong calls to action which trigger based on those identified behaviours and data tip offs.

For example, if you’ve noticed that contacts who have attended one or more of your company’s events are 3 times more likely to make a purchase, then create an email campaign which capitalises on this fact. 

Your email campaign could showcase content relevancy by harking back to something related to the event the contact attended, and then capture their interest with a call to action. This email campaign would be pre-set-up, and would ‘trigger’ (send automatically) a few days after a contact attends one of your events.

Trigger based email campaigns tick all the boxes for boosting sales numbers because they’re timely, relevant, and can be specifically targeted towards warmed up leads.

Your email marketing for B2B  efforts aren’t going to bring in sales if your emails are not arriving in your target audience’s inbox.

Having a low deliverability rate is the epitome of waste when it comes to email marketing. Simple solutions can be employed to ensure a high deliverability rate, and if you’re looking to boost recipient engagement as well as bring in more sales – then working with your IT team on email deliverability is a must.

There’s a number of components you can set up in order to boost and strengthen your deliverability rates. Here are a few:

• Custom subdomains
• DomainKeys (DKIM)
• DMARC Protocols
• SPF Records
• Custom Return Paths

It also matters what email service provider you use, and if you’re using a marketing automation platform – you want to make sure that, as an email service provider, they have a good reputation. Using a marketing automation platform also takes the pain out of implementing the above components, as the platform’s technology should help you leverage them with ease.

If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the tech-related talk, why not check out Swift Digital’s handy email deliverability page for clarity?

Improving your email deliverability rates naturally improves your conversion (sales) rates, so working on email deliverability should be a top priority.

Here’s a surefire way to ruin your email marketing ROI: letting new subscribers go cold.

New subscribers are a hotbed of sales potential, as they’ve exhibited interest in your brand by making a commitment to receiving promotional content from you.

New subscribers have willingly identified themselves as open to your products and services, and as such require immediate nurturing to help them warm up further.

If you want to bring in the sales with your email marketing strategy, then make sure your strategy involves a strong welcome wagon email campaign – and even better – an onboarding journey for all new subscribers.

Set up an automated email campaign sequence which starts upon subscription, and slowly warms up new subscribers, readying them for promotional content with strong CTAs.

Don’t let leads fall through the cracks due to lack of communication, make sure you have automated welcome emails set up, and start warming them up right away in order to make the most of your email’s sales potential.

Here’s a surefire way to ruin your email marketing ROI: letting new subscribers go cold.

New subscribers are a hotbed of sales potential, as they’ve exhibited interest in your brand by making a commitment to receiving promotional content from you.

New subscribers have willingly identified themselves as open to your products and services, and as such require immediate nurturing to help them warm up further.

If you want to bring in the sales with your email marketing strategy, then make sure your strategy involves a strong welcome wagon email campaign – and even better – an onboarding journey for all new subscribers.

Set up an automated email campaign sequence which starts upon subscription, and slowly warms up new subscribers, readying them for promotional content with strong CTAs.

Don’t let leads fall through the cracks due to lack of communication, make sure you have automated welcome emails set up, and start warming them up right away in order to make the most of your email’s sales potential.

When it comes to the best email marketing software in Australia, your business needs to weigh up your needs and balance them against your country’s data security laws.

It’s one thing to commit to a piece of software that has all the functionality and features you desire, but it’s another thing completely to find software that stores your data legally and securely.

Is your business currently using email as part of your marketing strategy? Do you need help with the creation and automation of your emails, or would like to increase engagement of them?

Here at Swift Digital, we can help you with your email marketing by providing tips on email marketing best practices to make your email campaign a success!

Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning emails and events communications using our drag-and-drop email and event builder.

You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, polls, article feedback, and emojis and schedule messages to send at the right time.

Government departments’ unique marketing requirements are covered with Swift Digital, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.

Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software and event management working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.

Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.

To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.

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