12 best practice tips for B2B email marketing

Email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses (Campaign Monitor, 2019). So it’s no wonder it’s a popular choice for B2B data and tech businesses!

We’ve created a list of a dozen best-practice email techniques that we’ve learned over the last two decades to help your B2B email marketing excel 🚀

Before we get into this, let’s talk about the first and biggest priority: data.

Data: The first, fundamental step

This can make or break your B2B email marketing campaigns. Your data needs to include your target audience - sounds obvious but is often overlooked - and it needs to be clean. By clean, we mean to have columns for the first name, last name, email address, GDPR flag and such all mapped correctly for each row of data.

First names are crucial for getting through SPAM filters so make sure these are in the data, are spelt correctly, have capital letters… and are genuine people rather than generic email addresses or random letters hit on a keyboard.

12 best practice B2B email marketing tactics

Create a human touch - This human touch helps your target audience to relate to you and helps encourage engagement. Consider sending your email from a senior spokesperson and include a link to their LinkedIn profile, contact details, and a headshot. You can even send this email from them and make sure the tone of the email follows their way of speaking and is less formal.

Keywords to avoid - Avoid keywords like pandemic, covid - these can get blocked by spam filters.

Positivity beats scare-mongering - Focus on positive language and messages. There’s been enough negativity over the last two years! People want uplifting messages.

The first line is the most important - Lead with stats/key bits of information - there’s only a small area to use content so use the biggest hooks and focus on key buzzwords and outcomes (i.e. they will get this insight/outcome from a piece of content).

This often means you can’t lift content straight from blogs as it’s just a little too long and doesn’t fit this formula. But you can edit the copy to make it more concise.

Reuse popular content - Reuse the most popular pieces of content (max two pieces) in the next newsletter - with c.15% opening the emails, it's unlikely the audience will see all the content the first time around. I place these at the end of the newsletter.

Resend to non-openers - We should be doing a resend to non-opens, replicating the newsletter but changing the subject line (checking to see which content was most popular in the first send so you can lead with this). When doing a resend to non-opens, change the subject line to increase engagements - we look for the most popular piece of content in the first, main send, and create a subject using this.

Proofreading - Always do a test send and get someone else to check it - it’s very easy to miss a broken link or a typo when you are so used to seeing it.

Team updates - Sharing a marketing alert for the email is best practice - it ensures everyone internally knows what communications are going out to clients (in case they get in touch - it’s best to all be on the same page).

Times to avoid sending emails - Be mindful of holiday seasons as this will impact engagements - sometimes we send an email earlier or later in the month to avoid these times.

Email frequency - As a rule of thumb, 1 email a week is our limit (however, your resend to non-opens tends to go 2-5 days after the first send, depending on when the weekend falls).

Ungate content - Always include PDFs in an email and don't send the audience somewhere to fill in a form for a guide you are promoting - the form is to capture insight on who is reading it. You don't need this for an email as you get the click data - a form just disrupts the customer journey and significantly reduces the likelihood of them viewing the PDF guide.

Reporting/measuring - Monitor the success of subject lines and pieces of content on a KPI spreadsheet to help improve emails month on month to see which topics, content types and subject line styles pique interest.

Top tip: Ultimate best practice email marketing

People love to receive more content on topics related to those they've shown a recent interest in. If you can run a tailored campaign on one topic to a set audience, this will boost engagements and help nurture contacts towards a sale.

Helpful resources

Hubspot creates a wealth of handy tools on what not to say and what you should do. Their blog content is top quality so worth a read (like this one).

B2B email marketing tools

We’ve tried and tested a few tools over our time. Free tools like Mailchimp allow you to do basic email management with one address book. Tools like Hubspot are better at managing multiple address books and enable you to sync up multiple other tools - as it has built-in landing pages and a CRM system.

💡Top tip: It’s worth paying a little each month to upgrade tools like Hubspot so that you can get access to features like A/B testing on subject lines. If the email gets through, it can spark an opportunity and so the ROI is huge.

If you are wanting a more sophisticated approach to email marketing, you can look at tools like Dotmailer (very user friendly), Marketo and Eloqua - the latter are much more technical and we recommend using an email automation specialist.

For more guidance on B2B email marketing, get in touch: becca@rooandeve.com.