5 Best B2B Email Marketing Strategies For 2023

[This post was originally published on 28th Jan 2021. It has been updated on 17th Oct 2022.]

Email marketing is one of the most strategic tools in a digital marketer’s arsenal. That said, enterprises need to know how to best use email marketing to achieve their goals.

2023 may come with new email marketing challenges, or it may make the job easier; you never know. There’s already a lot of uncertainty, but I’d wager on wanting all the help I could get.

This guide will help prepare you to crush your email marketing targets in 2023.

Let’s start with understanding why you need specific strategies for B2B email marketing.

Reasons B2B Email Marketing Needs Specific Strategies

The objectives of B2B email marketing are to engage businesses and not individuals. That’s the main reason why it needs distinct strategies to make it work.

If we talk about a B2C setup, an individual is the decision maker at every stage of the buyer’s journey. On the other hand, there are different decision makers at every stage in a B2B setup. You have to create emails that appeal to multiple people. So, in a way, you have several targets and touchpoints.

In a company, there are multiple departments involved in making a purchase decision. It implies that the sales cycle becomes a bit longer when compared to B2C. Hence, you need more elaborate lead nurturing email campaigns to close these deals.

While B2C and ecommerce email marketing strategy is a lot about promotional emails with discounts and sale announcements, B2B emails should be more educational in nature. They should strive to provide more information to the readers. It is a good idea to share content resources, if needed.

With that said, let’s move on to the 5 effective B2B email marketing best practices and strategies.

5 Effective Email Marketing Strategies You Need in 2023

Let’s look at the five best ways to make the most of your email marketing plan next year.

1. Use reliable and comprehensive B2B data

B2B data is the fuel for your email marketing engine. Whether you need to build active lists, increase email relevancy, or segment target audiences, having access to accurate and all-inclusive B2B data is essential. 

Profiling your B2B leads is of paramount importance if you want to create a powerful email marketing campaign strategy. Use behavioral, psychographic, demographic, and firmographic data to gain a deeper understanding of your intended audience and accordingly tailor your email messages. This will help you better connect with prospects and customers while improving your email marketing ROI.

Don’t forget to maintain data hygiene as it’s key to improving your email marketing performance and achieving a high conversion rate. Close to 27% of marketers say that bad data leads to a revenue loss of 10% or more annually.

There are six main roles in the buying center for B2B model.

1. Initiators: People who become aware of your product and get interested in it
2. Users: People who will be most likely to use the product
3. Buyers: The team members who will be involved in the logistics, budgeting, and administrative factors that go with the purchase
4. Deciders: The decision makers who approve of the purchase
5. Gatekeepers: The people who guide the information transfer between the team members
6. Influencers: Anyone in the company who makes an impact on the buying process; it includes everyone at the company

2. Employ intelligent email marketing automation

Automation is no longer the future of marketing. It’s the present. Use email marketing automation to send targeted and timely messages to customers during each stage of their buying cycle. You can also leverage automation to increase prospect engagement, transactions, and email marketing efficiency.

Furthermore, automate your email marketing campaigns to effectively trigger responses from your target audiences. Promptly and automatically connect to your audiences every time you launch a new promotional campaign, they show interest in your products, or they abandon a cart.

That said, automating email campaigns is not a silver bullet. For better email marketing results, use automation that’s based on data-driven insights and human intelligence. Data-driven email automation helps you connect to advocates and power users early and with the right message, customized campaigns, reduced churn risk, and upselling at the right time.

3. Hyper-personalize your email marketing content

Create dynamic content based on factors that will help you hyper-personalize your email marketing messages. These factors may include your audience’s buying intent, interests, preferences, loyalty program status, purchase history, location, etc.

Build buyer personas, segment your email list, include data-based product recommendations, and use website visitor intelligence to add a stronger layer of hyper-personalization to your email marketing campaigns.

4. Use email retargeting to re-engage inactive customers

Individuals targeted using remarketing are 70% more likely to convert on average. Email retargeting is not only used to re-engage inactive buyers and subscribers who haven’t purchased from you, but it’s also a powerful email marketing strategy to push regular customers to buy more.

Use re-engagement emails to bring back inactive B2B customers by reminding them why they should stay with your brand. Send inventory replenishment emails to inform consumers that their favorite products are available again. Represent products in abandoned carts in an attractive way without sounding sales-y. Product or service renewal reminder emails are also an effective B2B email marketing strategy to re-engage the users.

5. Write subject lines that boost the email open rate

Perfectly crafted email subject lines can really make a difference in your email marketing plan. After all, it’s the very first thing that the recipients see. Therefore, it’s very important to ensure your subject line is on point. Based on the subject line alone, about 69% of people will report an email as spam. Further, approximately 33% of recipients open emails because of catchy subject lines.

Personalized subject lines are quite effective in grabbing the attention of recipients, which is a good way to improve your open rate. You can use emojis, facts and figures, shoutouts, discount or free stuff announcements, or words that tap into the recipient’s buyer intent to create irresistible subject lines. Another way of creating subject lines that increase email opens is to build a sense of urgency or curiosity in your recipients.

Here are some examples of subject lines that can persuade recipients to open the emails.

• Congratulations! You added 100 loyalty points. Redeem them before they expire
• The brand you love welcomes you. ? We’ve got some freebies to start our relationship
• Breaking news: XYZ company shuts down ABC department because…
• You won’t believe what we just launched! We’re going to customize it for our first customers
• Products in your abandoned cart are now available at a 10% discounted price.
  
  
  

Final Thought

With the implementation of these modern and result-oriented strategies, you’ll be well-positioned to reach your 2023 B2B email marketing goals. Be sure to test, analyze, and measure your email marketing strategies to select the most effective ones and further improve them.