B2B Email Marketing: How to Design, Deliver, and Drive Results

Unlock the Full Potential of Your B2B Email Strategy

What is Effective B2B Email Marketing?  

Email marketing isn’t just about reaching inboxes, it’s about sending the right message that drives real impact and action, which ultimately drives sales. This requires proper segmentation, clear messaging, and performance tracking.  

When email marketing is done effectively, it becomes a critical part of your business's direct line of communication between business and consumer.  

Why Is Effective Email Marketing Important for B2B Companies? 

1. Direct line to your audience: Unlike social media or paid ads, email lands straight in your prospect’s inbox, giving you full control over the message and timing. 
2. Nurtures Complex Sales Cycles: B2B buyers often require multiple touchpoints before making a decision. Email helps maintain consistent communication. 
3. Builds Trust and Authority: By offering relevant insights, industry news, and solutions, you position your brand as a trusted partner. 

Ignoring email marketing means a potential loss of sales for new and current customers, as well as a missed opportunity to strengthen relationships. 

Key Elements of Effective B2B Email Marketing 

1. Track and Measure Results 

The first step for effective Email Marketing is understanding what works and what doesn’t. Tracking email performance is crucial in understanding the effectiveness of emails and improving strategy. Most popular Email Marketing platforms, such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and HubSpot, offer analytic reports. Here are the key metrics to review regularly:  

1. Open Rate: Are your subject lines and sender names compelling enough to get opened? 
2. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Is your content engaging enough to encourage readers to take action? 
3. Unsubscribe Rate: Are you providing value, or are people opting out because the content isn’t relevant? 
4. Bounce Rate: Is your email list clean and up to date, or are you sending to invalid addresses? 

Metrics are a great place to start to see how your content is performing and if your messaging is resonating with your audience. It’s important to review this information and adjust the strategy when needed. 

2. Know Your Audience: Targeting & Segmentation 

One size fits all doesn’t work with B2B email marketing. Segmentation is key to crafting messaging that is tailored to target the right people. Here are some ways you may segment your email campaigns:  

1. Customer Status: Prospects vs. current customers vs. past customers. Each group requires different messaging. 
2. Purchase History: Target based on past purchases or services they've used.  
3. Location/Region: Segment based on geography for region-specific offers, regulations, or events. 

Engagement Frequency: Segment your emails based on how often readers engage, meaning highly engaged subscribers should be receiving different emails than readers who haven’t engaged in a while.  

Email Quality not Quantity: Aligning email subject lines and content to specific segments helps increase open rates, click-through rates, and reduce spam reports. Improve your domain and test score to ensure mail servers aren’t automatically guiding your emails into spam or junk folders. Tools like Mail-Tester.com check newsletters to see how “spammy” your domain is according to your Sender Provider Framework score and highlight areas for improvement.  

Keep Your Email Lists Clean: A great rule of thumb is to scrub your newsletter subscriber list every six months, or ideally, every three months. If you have incentives linked to newsletter signups, it may be a good idea to scrub your list even more frequently, as people could use bogus emails in order to receive the incentive. If you operate in the B2B sphere and the majority of email subscribers are business emails, be sure to scrub your list in order to remove email addresses that are no longer valid due to company personnel turnover. Tools like Zero-Bounce can help make sure that the email addresses in your CRM are valid and have low bounce rates.  

Real World Case Study 

Recently, Briteskies performed an Email Marketing audit for a client that sells items to both B2B and B2C customers. The company’s CRM included just under 200,000 email addresses.  After a quick run through ZeroBounce, our team found that more than 50% of the email addresses were invalid.  

Using the information provided by ZeroBounce, we were able to remove spam trap emails, invalid emails, and hard bounces. We segmented the remaining emails into email deliverability buckets. In the subsequent email, the spam rate decreased by 55%, and the Spam Complaint Rate dropped from 0.14% to 0.01%.  

Another great habit is to utilize buyer personas, as they are crucial in keeping your audience engaged. Tailoring your campaigns to different customer segments keeps the information you send out relevant and interesting to the reader, ultimately driving engagement and leads.  

3. Craft Valuable Content 

Content, and specifically clear messaging, is crucial to your B2B email marketing campaigns.

Ask yourself: What’s the goal of this newsletter - is it to Educate, Promote, or Nurture? What action do I want readers to take? What are my readers interested in reading about? Chances are, if your email is bringing value to your recipients, you will see a high open and click-through rate. 

Digital Marketing Content Creation Example

Briteskies has a client that sells commodity-traded items. Due to the controlled pricing of the items, our client knew the pricing of their item was about to increase by 7%. We sent out an email to all customers who had purchased items in this category within the past six month and may be interested in ordering more.

Using a subject line that highlighted the timeliness of the price increase, and targeting customer segments that were interested in the item, the client had an extremely successful email marketing campaign that resulted in an open rate of over 70%, a click-thru rate of 5.3%, and an average order value of over $250 per cart.  

Valuable content comes in many shapes and sizes and doesn't always have to be related to flash promotions. Some good examples of valuable content includes: 

1. Educational articles or blog posts 
2. Case studies or success stories 
3. Product updates or offers 
4. Invitations to webinars or events 

4. Design for Engagement 

Designing your email to be easily scannable, simple, and mobile-optimized will set your B2B campaigns up for success.

Layout Tips for Creating an Engaging Email Design:  

Simple: Keep content short and sweet and stick to headings, bullet points, and white space.  

Scannable: Keep your content well-organized and include images together with text to ensure ease of reading.  

Mobile-Friendly: Most people are on their phones and often open emails using mobile apps, therefore, it is important to always have mobile-optimized campaigns.  

Having simple, readable, and mobile-optimized content will allow your audience to understand your message with ease.  

Digital Marketing Case Study

Briteskies had a client that was strategically sending emails, but used very few images, and the CTAs were always at the bottom of the emails. While the emails obtained a healthy open rate, very few viewers clicked or purchased. Working together with the client, we moved the CTA to the top fold of the email and included product images and highlight banners underneath the email header. These changes generated an increase in clicks and conversions as the reader no longer had to scroll to the bottom to click through to the client site and conversions could be made higher in the email.  

Always include a clear CTA (Call-to-Action), whether it’s to “Click Here,” “Book a Consultation,” or “Shop Now.” 

Tips for Taking Your B2B Email Strategy Further 

The world of B2B Email Strategy is wide and vast and we're just hitting the tip of the iceburg here, but here are a few more tips to set your B2B email marketing up for continued success:  

1. Set clear goals for every email, whether it’s educating, promoting, or nurturing. 
2. Test and refine A/B test subject lines, CTAs, and content formats. 
3. Automate workflows and trigger emails based on user actions (e.g., clicking a link) can nurture leads more effectively. 
4. Stay compliant by always honoring opt-outs and comply with GDPR or CAN-SPAM regulations. 
5. Leverage insights and use performance data to continually refine targeting and messaging.

Your B2B email strategy doesn’t need to be complicated. With these tips and tricks, your company’s email marketing will be set for optimization and ease. By focusing on your audience, crafting valuable content, and refining your strategy based on data, your email marketing can be a powerful tool for fostering lasting relationships and driving engagement to your site. Contact Briteskies today to get started on your Digital Marketing Success!