Email marketing is a solid strategy for B2B companies. But if your clients just start sending emails without a plan behind them, they’ll waste a lot of time and effort. Plus, they might alienate prospects if they’re only sending emails when they have something to sell. All of which is a problem for a sales cycle that already takes a long time and involves input from multiple people.
Yet email is still the #2 content type that 87% of them use in B2B marketing. Companies know it’s a good way to maintain relationships with prospects and customers, yet many only scratch the surface of what email can do for them. If you write emails for your B2B clients, offering to help them develop an email marketing strategy can be another way you can help them.
Here’s a quick checklist you can use to help your B2B clients develop an effective email strategy.
1. Define a clear email marketing goal
It starts by defining a clear goal for the email marketing strategy. Even a simple goal like “increase online sales” or “test new email formats” is a starting point. A clear goal gives a purpose to the emails that guide everything else surrounding it. You’ll know how to measure how well the emails are performing, discover what to change, and what to do next. The goal determines everything about the structure of your emails, from the topic and format to how frequently you send them.
2. Decide how to get subscribers
Next, you must decide how to get subscribers to the email list. If the client already has a list, you can skip this step for now, but it’s always a good idea to review how they’re adding people to the list. Figure out why people want to hear from you and give them something that demonstrates you’re worth their time. For example, offer something of value in return for their email address, like a downloadable checklist or report.
Other ideas your clients can try are:
- Adding sign-up forms everywhere on the company website: in the footer, sidebar, and anywhere that’s appropriate.
- Customize the call-to-action (CTA) for each form to encourage people to subscribe and show that you understand what they’re looking for.
- Encourage staff members to add subscription links to their email signatures. This is especially useful for those who send many emails, like sales and customer support teams.
3. Remember to nurture relationships
Many B2B companies will jump right into the sales part of the email strategy at this point, but instead, remind them that email is about nurturing relationships. You don’t want clients to only send emails when they want to sell something. Email marketing is about building relationships, and the stronger the relationship is, the more subscribers will trust the company.
The emails should be filled with valuable information for prospects and customers. Encourage them to care about the people behind the email address and not just the account. Create different email sequences for the different reasons you speak to people: a welcome sequence when they first subscribe, one for when they purchase, one for when they sign up to a live event, and so on. Segmenting the audience into smaller groups allows your B2B clients to get more personal with subscribers and develop that relationship even more.
4. Learn how to measure effectiveness
Your B2B clients won’t know how their email marketing is doing if they don’t measure it. Help them decide on the metrics to measure, define what success looks like, uncover the bottlenecks and obstacles to their process, and optimize the entire process to make them run more smoothly going forward.
At a basic level, your clients should be measuring: opt-in rates, delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and unsubscribe rates. They may want to track other metrics, so discuss that with them up front and set up the tools to track it.
No matter how you set it up or implement it, email marketing is all about the audience. When you care about them, you can set up the right email marketing campaign for them, and they’ll open, read, and click every single message. If you genuinely care about the audience and are invested in helping them achieve their goals, email marketing can be very powerful.
Use this four-point checklist to create a winning email strategy for your B2B clients so they can enjoy all the benefits of it too.
