B2B Email Marketing Guide - Part 1

I’m Jackie from Key Principles – MD here at Key Principles which I set up just over 18 years ago. I’ve been running email marketing campaigns for clients from as early as 2004 as well as courses in email marketing from as far back as 2008. In this series of articles, I’m aiming to help business owners who sell to other businesses to understand the value of email marketing, as well as explain how to use it to grow their business.

Email marketing for companies that sell products or services to other companies should be an important part of the marketing mix. Part 1 of the B2B email marketing guide will start to explain why email marketing is so important as well as explain the different types of email marketing and why in a B2B setting you can use cold email marketing and stay within the GDPR regulations.

In part 1 of the Email Marketing Guide, I will cover:

What is B2B email marketing?
The benefits of B2B email marketing
The disadvantages of B2B email marketing
Permission based B2B email marketing
Cold B2B email marketing

What is B2B email marketing?

Email marketing is a form of marketing that uses email to promote your business’s products or services. For it to be classified as B2B or Business to Business email marketing, the email address of both the sender of the email and the email recipient needs to be a business email address.

It can be an effective way of promoting your products or services to other businesses that could benefit from them. It can help businesses build relationships, generate leads and sales too.

B2B email marketing success relies on a carefully thought through plan and consistent execution. More on this later.

Before progressing to execution. Let’s delve a little deeper into the benefits of email marketing to your business.

The benefits of B2B email marketing

Why use email marketing for your business? What are the benefits of email marketing?

If done correctly, B2B email marketing can be one of the most profitable marketing channels for your business. It is a cost-effective way to reach your audience, generating leads, build relationships, and driving sales.

Benefits include:

High return on investment: the actual ROI will vary depending on numerous factors but in the UK can be as high as £35.41 for every £1 spent¹.
Increased sales: as you are promoting your products or services to your target audience and potentially to your customers and past customers.
Generates leads: which can be followed up with email automation campaigns and can be nurtured by sales.
Drives visitors to your website: increasing the likelihood of enquiries and therefore sales and enabling you to retarget them as well as provide further information and value.
Increases the likelihood of repeat purchases: as you are reminding past customers you are there for them.
Builds relationships with your potential clients: by offering value upfront, details about your business and the people within it.
Increases brand awareness: keeps you top of mind if you email on a regular basis.
Cost effective: with a great ROI compared to other marketing channels.
Targeted: by understanding who your current customers are, you can then target based on who your ideal customers are
Quick and easy: almost instantaneous when broadcasting
Measurable results: immediately trackable with real time reporting and highly measurable with options to split test subject lines, personalization, messaging, etc. You can see what works and what doesn’t to improve results.
Targeting, personalization and segmentation: you can target the right person in a business as well as develop campaigns that reflect recipient preferences and interests.
Recipients can share the emailer: increasing word of mouth and potential referrals for your business.
Scalable: adding more recipients by building your list as well as sending more emails to your database is easy and cost effective.
Integrates: easily integrates with your other marketing activities and can amplify the message.
You own it: unlike advertising which you buy. Although bought lists may require annual licence renewals. Building your own database is the key.
All pervasive: 86% of UK adults has at least one email address². It can safely be assumed that even more UK adults will have a business email address if they are in business.

If you are looking for a cost-effective and effective way to reach your target audience, B2B email marketing is certainly worth considering and testing.

It would be remiss of me not to highlight some of the disadvantages that may need to be overcome or considered.

The disadvantages of B2B email marketing

There are certainly some potential disadvantages which can be overcome with an effective strategy and plan. They are worth noting and bearing in mind as you progress with your email marketing.

Disadvantages include:

Avoiding Spam Filters With Email Marketing

Deliverability challenges: ensuring your email reaches the recipients inbox rather than being caught in spam filters. If your email ends up in junk and spam folders, your campaign effectiveness will be reduced. I cover how to reduce the likelihood of landing in the junk folder later.
Inbox competition: of course, we are all inundated with emails including marketing emails every day. Email marketing, just like other marketing channels, is competitive, so subject lines, email content and calls to action need to be well thought through.
Legal requirements: for the UK and Europe there is the GDPR regulations and for the US the CAN-SPAM Act. Compliance with GDPR is covered later and is quite straight forward.
Unsubscribes: with individuals getting so many emails, unsubscribes will happen. Where possible keeping unsubscribes low is important by offering value in your emails and not emailing your recipients too often.
Targeting accuracy: this may not always be perfect and depends on how up to date and the accuracy of your data. Keeping your data clean is important.
Reliance on email marketing: its important not to rely on this channel and ensure you are generating leads from ideally at least 3 marketing channels to ensure sustainability.

The above disadvantages from my perspective can be overcome and do not outweigh the significant number of advantages. Being mindful of the above will enable us to develop email marketing campaigns that are successful and remain within the legal requirements set.

One way to reduce a number of the disadvantages above is by using permission based B2B email marketing and this covered next.

Permission-Based Email Marketing

What is permission-based email marketing?

Permission-based email marketing is email marketing where the individual has consented to receive emails from you. It is often called opt-in email marketing as the person has effectively opted into your email communications – they’ve put their hand up and said yes please, I’m interested in what you have to say and what you offer.

It is worth considering how people can opt-in to your email marketing and how you build your list of recipients. You want to make the opt in process clear, quick and easy. You’ll need to decide between explicit opt-in, single opt-in and double opt-in.

The three opt-in options are:

Explicit opt-in: recipients explicitly indicate their consent to receive emails by checking a box or filling out a form.
Single opt-in: recipients subscribe to your email list with one action like filling out a subscription form. No additional confirmation is required.
Double opt-in: often called confirmed opt-in, requires recipients to confirm their email address and desire to subscribe through a confirmation email or link. This provides an additional consent verification layer.

Why permission-based email marketing?

Legal compliance: you can ensure you are using email marketing whilst remaining compliant with the law and therefore reducing the risk of legal issues. This is particularly important for UK business to consumer email marketing where you need to remain within the GDPR regulations. That being said in the UK, B2B email marketers have the ‘luxury’ of “legitimate interests for marketing activities”³.
Level of annoyance reduced: by respecting recipients’ privacy, you are less likely to annoy people. Of course, you have to respect any person’s decision to opt out too.
Improved response rates: as individuals have opted-in to your emailings, you’ll likely see higher engagement, improved open rates and higher conversion rates and therefore improved ROI.
Improved deliverability rates: as individuals have opted-in, your emails are more likely to be delivered to their inbox.
Building your email list: the list is yours and is of value. Building it overtime provides you with a valuable business asset.

Clearly permission-based email marketing makes sense and should be implemented by all B2B companies.

Cold Email Marketing

What is cold email marketing?

Cold email marketing involves sending unsolicited emails to recipients who may have no relationship with your business and who have not consented to receiving emails from you.

The use of cold email marketing is allowed under the GDPR regulations within the UK for business-to-business communications only, based on the “legitimate interest” and can be used with caution and as long as clear compliance is ensured with the option to unsubscribe being offered clearly on all email marketing communications. More on this as we progress as there are email software tools available specifically for cold email marketing.

There are disadvantages to cold email marketing that need to be considered and these include:

Lower open and response rates: unsolicited emails are often considered spam and ignored or deleted by recipients. Of course, unsubscribe rates will also be higher.
Legal compliance: in the B2B arena in the UK, you can send cold emails under the GDPR regulations. However, you need to ensure there is a “legitimate interest” so making sure you have accurate data, and that the people you are emailing could be interested in what you have to offer, is crucial, as well as ensuring any unsubscribes are honoured.
Damage to reputation: unsolicited emails can lead to reputational damage and as such it is crucial that the sending business follows best practice, provides value first and follows the guidelines set by the cold email marketing software companies.
Ethical considerations: you will be sending emails to people that have not opted into your emails and this may be seen as unethical and invasive and may not align with your business values.

However, for those businesses that wish to grow faster or those that have no database, the use of cold email marketing could be an option. Whether you decide to use cold email marketing will be down to the individual business owner to decide if the use of this type of email marketing is appropriate for them.

Conclusion

I hope the above gives you a good understanding of B2B email marketing and the various types of B2B email marketing options. I also hope that you are starting to realise the opportunity that email marketing can provide your company in generating leads, nurturing leads and keeping in touch with clients.

In Part 2 we will be covering some or all of the below so keep an eye out for Part 2.

Your business and marketing strategy
Your email marketing strategy
Your email list and building it
Email software – the options and checklist
Email set up
Improving ROI

In the meantime, if you’ve decided that you want to start B2B email marketing or take your B2B email marketing to the next level then Key Principles, there’s initial information on our email marketing service here. You can also request a free email marketing consultation.