B2B marketing refers to the commercial exchange of products or services between companies. B2B buying cycles tend to be longer, which impacts the frequency and type of content that’s relevant to this particular audience. And the B2B audience a brand serves with its products can vary greatly in its composition — its customers’ industries and business needs can be completely different yet they can all find value in the products they purchase from the brand. To be clear, B2B does not mean that your interlocutor is not a person. We often tend to depersonalize this market which, despite having its own specificity and peculiarity, certainly presents relational dynamics common to B2C.
How to get online with B2B EMail Marketing ?
1. Trust the process of the campaign in the onboarding and testing phases
EMail Marketing does not work as soon as the mail reaches a recipient. It means that an Email Marketing strategy cannot consist of a single campaign, but is necessarily made of a series of emails, inserted in an organized, reasoned and structured delivery plan.Through this you can build an A/B testing strategy and test out various Emails and understand what works best for you. Tools like Klaviyo provide you free trials to check how you can use this strategy. In this first phase of the relationship, email plays a decisive role.
2. Designing emails that generate responses
In Email marketing it is very essential that your design hits the sweet spot at the right moment as everyone receives around hundreds of mails everyday and you have to make sure how your mail would make the right impact. Just because you operate B2B doesn’t mean you don’t have to deal with email design. B2B recipients are just as sensitive to image and graphic design as your B2C recipients. So avoid going overboard with the style and pay attention and care to defining the design. There are two essential requirements:
Functional and impressive design that invites you to read more.
B2B does not mean sending textual emails that look like employment contracts or details of service invoices. The power of email is to deliver an effective, incisive and impactful invitation, which urges the recipient to delve into the content of another page (your site or a landing page).
Optimizing emails for mobile devices
These marketing tools provide ample options to customize your emails and ensure that the emails are mobile responsive. Statistics say, “35% of business professionals check email on a mobile device.” Therefore, it becomes essential to fine-tune your emails at all possible touch-points. Therefore, one in three opens the mail from smartphones and tablets. Obviously it is essential to optimize emails so that they can be viewed perfectly from smartphones and tablets.
Instead of working for hours making a design or template you can use existing email templates being used in the industry and developed by professionals giving you an idea of what works best for you.
3.The content fires the sale
An analysis by the B2B email marketing agency, showed that in 90% of cases, more information gains compared to call to action.This data tells us that in B2B the role of content, information and updating is Real-time Customer Engagement most cases, recipients want to be informed, learn and learn from helpful content, or have references in the form of case studies, before buying.We must not simply sell, but know how to convince and persuade first.
In this context, blogs, white papers, webinars and case studies are the most effective weapons: It offers learning paths that illustrate the potential of a tool or service for a given business, better than any other. It includes the advantage of producing content for the prospective company, which can be learned and trained, while for the selling company it is an effective and persuasive tool. That said, email is a key tool for delivering all content news directly to the recipient’s inbox . But here we come to the next point.
4. Create a direct RSS Feed
Email is the best channel for content transmission. We suggest that brands that have a Content Marketing plan, create an RSS feed that triggers the sending of an email when new content is published. There are two functional innovations that allow you to:
Create the content feed
Configure automatic mail
Klaviyo helps you to configure this directly. A custom web feed allows you to dynamically populate a feed of data from an external URL within a Klaviyo email. Before sending an email, Klaviyo makes an HTTP request to the URL and fetches the data. The content of the web feed is then available for use in your email.
The power of web feeds is that they allow you to use a single template and pull in content dynamically, where you only need to keep the feed up-to-date and Klaviyo will ensure fresh content from your feed gets populated into every send.
Nothing could be easier than delivering your recipients (however you want and when you want) site or blog updates.
5. Focus on the DMU
In the B2B process, buying decisions are not made by one person. A group of individuals, who form the so-called decision-making unit (DMU), are those involved in making purchasing decisions. Addressing the email only to the profile of the person you believe is responsible for specific activities related to your product, or the person at the top of the company, is a fairly widespread mistake. Remember: purchases are never made by one person. Each member of the DMU will examine their campaigns from their point of view. Therefore, it is essential to adapt the message accordingly. All marketers say they would like to segment more (either more frequently or more deeply), but in B2B this happens even more rarely than in B2C. Each professional profile has different pressure points, points to which they are sensitive: in fact, a CFO will have different needs and concerns than a technical director or a marketing director. The emails that best withstand the various pressure points will produce better returns, in terms of clicks, engagement and conversions.
6. Increase the relevance of emails with proper integration
It is very essential to integrate your system with the tools so if you’re using Mailchimp and sending out a single monthly newsletter to the entire list of customers. Migrate the Mailchimp list over to Klaviyo, segmented it into six different industries, and set up flows for our welcome series, abandoned cart emails, winbacks, etc., that are tailored to the B2B frequency. You will now have a platform to create and track conversations with our diverse customers including transactional emails. Klaviyo is more than just an email platform. You will get insights into your business and the performance of your emails.
Conclusion
The dynamics between the brand and the client in the B2B world have aspects common to the B2C market and peculiar aspects. But B2B is made up of a wide variety of sectors, within which each company must adapt its strategy according to its objectives and strategies.
Building customer relationships means consistent, relevant communication with your customers about what’s new and important to them. Campaigns are great for those one-time announcements like special promotions or weekly newsletters. Quick to create, simple to test, and easily versioned to target multiple customer groups, building and sending campaigns in Klaviyo is a true money-maker.
About Ziel Lab
Ziel is a boutique marketing lab, based in Bangalore, India, and we build laser focussed campaigns for your inbound and outbound marketing.
While our experience spans a wide variety of projects and disciplines, our clients all share one common thread: They are all serious professionals who excel at what they do, and understand thevalue of great campaigns. If that sounds like you, send us a message and let’s talk.
References
- The Definitive Guide to B2B Email Marketing — Vital Design.https://vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/email-marketing/b2b-email-marketing-guide/.
- B2B Ecommerce Marketing Strategy | Union Jack’s … — Klaviyo. 19 Nov. 2019, https://www.klaviyo.com/blog/b2b-ecommerce-marketing-strategy.
- A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Email Marketing — Neil Patel. https://neilpatel.com/blog/beginners-guide-email-marketing/.
