B2B Email Marketing: Best Practices & Proven Strategies

Understanding B2B Email Marketing

Any form of email marketing which involves promotion of services and products to a business-to-business client is categorized as B2B email marketing. The essential outcome of such a campaign is to build a long-term nurturing relationship with your prospect, leverage brand profile and drive revenue generation through sales.

Some of the standard forms of B2B email marketing consists of promotional offers, product high lights, free demos and offers, content distribution in the form of newsletters; all this is defined by understanding your target audience’s preferences and pain points.

When B2B email campaigns are implemented effectively, you are influencing your prospective clients to turn into paying customers.

Focused B2B Strategies for B2B Emails

Regular email marketing techniques are a waste of time in relevance to B2B campaigns because the buyer type is entirely different to your regular B2C personas. What are the areas where we tend to fail when strategizing for B2B email campaigns? Here’s some of them to work on.





Targeting audiences through emails – B2C emails are focused on individuals and B2B emails are focused on companies or a group of individuals who are in the decision-making spectrum. Your strategy needs to take this simple difference into consideration while email targeting.

Email campaign frequency – A B2C campaign frequency may be faster, based on the fact that re purchases by an individual of a product or service might be faster as the decision is a single customer based. Whereas, a B2B purchase is a company focused buying process, which will need multiple departments and heads to approve the purchase. So, the length of your B2B email campaigns will certainly be longer.

Messaging Format And Tone

B2C clients, are receptive of sales pitches in the emails, product promotions, discounts and special offers are common and acknowledged in B2C email campaigns, on the contrary B2B clients might not appreciate such an approach.

B2B email campaigns should be designed on the basis of giving information, addressing pain points and alleviate the challenges the business is facing. So, content formats, messaging tone changes based on these.

Key Strategies For Successful B2B Email Campaigns

Build Client Personas and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP)

A B2B company comprises of a decision-making center, and this will be responsible for the buying decision. So, you will have to target this entire core. Targeting this will be essential in influencing the business to make a favorable choice. The profiles that need to be targeted are; Initiators- the first level of personnel who need to influenced in your product or service, followed by Users- these are the people who will actually use your product or service; Procurers – these are people who control buying budgets and supply chain; Decision makers- people who will eventually sign off on the purchase; Sentries – these are gatekeepers who influence the flow of communication.

Focus On the Customer

Never make the mistake of putting your perspectives ahead of your clients. Once you have your personas ready, work on understanding what kind of emails will address each individual profile in the matrix. Customize them to your client’s actual needs and they will perform better. So, align content and run campaigns based on the level of the target individual on the buyer spectrum.

Implement Email Breakdowns

Obviously, it will be difficult to identify individual personas while sending emails and doing this manually. So, use email segmentation tools which are readily available on most email marketing platforms. This will help you to segment the opt in lists according to a defined set of parameters you have outlined based on their roles. This will help you send out content which is customized to reach relevant individuals based on their needs and interests.

Run Campaigns In Phases

Adhere to a B2B campaign cycle to run across the entire buying journey of the B2B customer. Plan your campaign to focus on these Phases of the customer journey – Awareness, to build brand awareness and learning; Interest generation, to engage interested targets which more information; Decision making, engage with a prospective buyer who wants to buy the product or service by running special offers, discounts etc.; Retaining, keep your customer happy and keep them loyal by sharing knowledge focused content, freebies, etc.

Implement Email Prototypes

Email templates simplifying the B2B email marketing cycle. Keep the templates distinct and customized based on the type of campaign you are running. Some of the common templates you can have ready are: Welcome emails; Thank you emails; Curated content emails; Surveys; Information & education emails; Reports & downloads; Events; Opt out emails.

Use Automation

Using email automation is a game changer and will help you circumvent tedious tasks and manual interference in running email campaigns. With email automation you can define cycles, demographics, A/B testing and assorted filters to add value across the buyer’s journey. All these tasks will be running in the background, while you can focus on strategic business decisions to complement growth.

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices for 2023

• Personalization: Always incorporate the human touch, get the recipient’s name right, use information that is not generalized and the content should talk to the reader on a personal level.

• Write impactful subject lines: B2B prospects are a busy lot, so your subject lines will matter. Your subject line should be able to define the value or intention clearly.

• Emphasize on communication: The email’s tone should be conversational. Don’t forget that your focus audience are human, so connect with them

• Keep emails concise and easily consumable: The emails that you send out should be easily scannable and brief. Get them to see CTAs better and understand what is expected.

Understanding Key B2B Email Marketing Examples

Emails which aren’t opened are of no use and this applied to B2B emails too and here are some examples of B2B email marketing campaigns which work and influence better open rates.

New Customer Email Example

Design your email to focus on the buyer persona and stage of the journey.

New clients should receive emails which are positioned to add value and are worth looking into. Use clear big images, minimal text to define resourceful content. Use clear titles, sub titles and attractive subject relevant images.

Update Email Example

Focus on user demographic, which is more on the influencer status and stage of the journey is further awareness and retaining the client.

Use bits which directly help the customer, keep the design focused on the update, product update or feature update and emphasize and platform engagement. The email should encourage the reader to stay focused.

Download Email Example

Buyer persona to be focused on in the interest generator and user, with the stage being of awareness and consideration

The topic of the email should be persistent, the content should be only what is needed. Design needs to be clear and concise with a focus on the report or downloadable CTA, messaging should be based on the mindset of the persona you are trying to communicate with.

Event Invite Email Example

Event invite emails are positioned to reach a diversified set of customer profiles, from users, decision makers to influencers.

The stage of the customer’s journey can be diversified too and focused on brand awareness, consideration, decision making and learning.

The email should be designed as decluttered, Explain the event and why some one should participate. Keep it light and efficient with actionable information.

Newsletter Email Example

Subscribers can be from varied personas, they might be sentries, users, decision makers and interest generators. The journey stage will remain consideration and retention.

Newsletter emails should be well written, designed to focus on exclusive topics of interest. Keep links at minimum and keep your headlines bold.