In 2023, over 4 billion people used email! Email marketing is a very powerful tool for B2B businesses to connect with clients and prospects.
The good news is that, with the right tools, it can be super simple to put together targeted, segmented contact lists and create visually appealing emails to communicate with your customers and prospects alike.
Here’s a simple overview of why B2B email marketing matters and how you can get started quickly.
First, What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is simply the effort of communicating your business’s value to your customers and prospects through email. Email marketing is typically opt-in, meaning people have signed up to receive your communications through a website, a digital subscription service, or at your office or store.
Types of B2B Email Marketing Campaigns
- Automated drips: Have a list you want to move through your sales funnel? Create value-driven, engaging automated drip emails to target your most valuable leads and convert them into paying clients.
- Nurture campaigns: Looking to keep some leads from going cold? Create a nurture campaign that keeps your brand front-of-mind of prospects who might not be ready to convert just yet.
- Newsletters: Want to keep current clients in the loop and maybe upsell them too? Create monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual newsletters that remind customers what else you have to offer.
- Sales outreach: Marketing might bring in the leads, but it’s a team effort. Sales direct emails add the necessary personalized touch to your outreach to get interested leads and stubborn prospects to take the next step in your sales funnel.
Why are Email Marketing Campaigns So Powerful?
The opt-in nature of email marketing is what makes it so powerful. Your audience has chosen to hear from you so you know they are engaged prospects.
The second reason it works so beautifully is how easy it is to share email once received. Over 361 billion emails are forecasted to be sent and received each day in 2024. It’s super easy to take an email you received and forward it to a colleague who is also interested in the offer, creating the viral nature of email communications. Does your email connect with a pressing need of the business you are contacting? It is easy to share the good news with decision makers at the business and strengthen brand awareness among the decision influencers.
An email marketing campaign lets you quietly remind your clients and prospects that you are out there and that you offer a service or a product that they like, need, or value. This makes it a great vehicle for upselling current clients or reengaging cold leads—without having to pay for advertising or manually reach out to individuals.
How Do You Do Email Marketing?
To start an email marketing campaign, you first need to have a list to target with your emails. Every email marketing campaign should have an objective and a target, so knowing who you want to target is your first task.
We always recommend segmenting your contact lists. HubSpot defines customer segmentation as “Customer segmentation is the tagging and grouping of customers with shared characteristics like age, industry, gender, etc.”
Your segmented lists can include your current customers, prospects who have downloaded content or filled out the contact form on your site, and even lists from tradeshows and conferences you’ve attended. By segmenting your audience, you are better able to create compelling content that drives users to take action in your email campaigns.
We then recommend using a tool like HubSpot for managing email marketing campaigns. HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing solution for B2B business owners to manage all their marketing projects in one convenient, user-friendly place.
HubSpot makes it easy to manage contact lists, create automated and one-off emails, and build complex workflows to keep users engaged with targeted, timely email blasts.
HubSpot also offers in-depth, user-friendly reporting so you know exactly how your email marketing campaigns are performing and what impact they are having on your business goals.
How Do You Create an Email in HubSpot?
We love HubSpot’s email tool because it makes it quick and easy to make branded, personalized emails with their drag-and-drop editor.
- In your HubSpot account, navigate to Marketing, Email, then click Create email.
- Select the type of email you want to send:
- Regular: a one-off, scheduled email
- Automated: a personalized email that you can configure to send to certain contacts when they meet the enrollment criteria for a workflow
- Blog/RSS: an email that will be sent out to your blog or RSS subscribers automatically when you publish new content
- Choose a template based on the type of email you want to create. HubSpot offers tons of highly-customizable templates to fit your every need.
- Use the drag-and-drop editor to quickly and easily customize your email
- Add personalization tokens to your email to add an extra flair and connect on a deeper level with your audience
- Schedule the email to go out at a certain time to your contact list, or add it to a workflow
Start Your Own B2B Email Marketing Campaign Today
Email marketing for your business may just be the missing link in your marketing strategy. Fifty-five percent of consumers say email is their preferred channel for business communications.
Establishing your first email can be a bit of an investment in time—between gathering and segmenting contact lists, writing email copy and creating content to share—but the process moves a lot faster if you have a tool like HubSpot to help the process run smoothly. Email is worth the investment, with an average ROI of 3,600%!
Email marketing can grow your business, engage your audience, and boost your marketing strategy to help you reach your business goals.
Please contact us if you have questions about implementing an email marketing campaign for your business.
