We are all looking for ways to enhance our inbound visitor identification processes, but have you looked at your supporting B2B email marketing campaigns? Email marketing campaigns are often an underused power tool for B2B sales that can be used to attract, develop, and retain customers. We are going to discuss four of the most popular B2B email marketing campaigns and how your business can grow by using them.

B2B Email Marketing Campaigns

What is Email Marketing?

A B2B email marketing campaign is a process of communicating with an audience digitally via email. These emails are mainly used to educate and inform the recipient – with the underlying purpose of generating sales or maintaining a customer base.

Before you get started, you and your team should sit down and develop a B2B email marketing campaign strategy. This strategy should clearly define the goals you plan to achieve for each stage; who is your audience, what are you looking for them to do, and what is the plan to achieve this? Without doing this before implementing your campaigns, you will not have the ability to determine if it’s working.

So, what are the B2B email campaigns most used for this?

Welcome Email Campaigns

This email campaign is usually the first impression that your business will make with its customers or prospects. These campaigns have a much higher open rate – usually about 4x higher than others – and will generate about 300+% more revenue on a per email basis than other email campaigns. That said, a welcome email campaign should be just that, a welcome message for new customers or new prospects that will encourage them to interact with your product or service.

Some things to keep in mind when monitoring your welcome email campaign, click rates and opens do not always measure the success of your campaign as they do for others. Some quick stats: the average open rate for a welcome campaign is about 50%, around 70% of your subscribers will expect to receive a welcome email immediately after signing up, users who get a welcome email on average are about 30% more engaged than those who do not.

Newsletter Email Campaigns

Newsletters have always been a very popular and easy-to-understand email marketing campaign. This type of email marketing campaign is popular for businesses to inform and impart knowledge about their area of expertise to their customers; past, present, and future. What often gets overlooked though, is for this to generate brand loyalty and trigger new sales, it must be done right.

If your Email Newsletter is not adding value to your subscribers’ inboxes, it is not working. You must always remember that your newsletters include engaging content, announcements about your product and product market, sales, upcoming conference events and tradeshows your team will be attending, and other appealing items.

In order to measure the effectiveness of your campaign, stop and ask yourself if the content that you are including within the newsletter will help build a better relationship with you and your product or service, or if you are just sending it out to send it out. A well-thought-out newsletter will increase engagement and retention, strengthen customer loyalty, and potentially help increase your sales.

Promotional Emails Campaigns

Promotional emails are primarily used to inform potential customers and current customers about your product or service. When used in a B2B Email Marketing Campaign, they will focus on the knowledge but also can include coupons or discounts, access to exclusive content, or an invitation-only event that is geared for conversion. This form of campaign is a great way to increase your sales and get those abandoned prospects to signup for another chance to convert.

Retention Email Campaigns

This email campaign is often overlooked by B2Bs but should not be. A retention email campaign is very useful as a campaign strategy to help build customer loyalty and keep your converted customers. Customers cost more to acquire than they do to retain, so without a solid retention plan, you will find your business constantly looking for new customers that could have been more affordably retained with the proper plan in place. By sending these emails, you have an opportunity to interact with customers who might not need to communicate with your team regularly.

Which customers should be placed in your Retention Email Campaign? This campaign should include customers who appear to be in limbo, haven’t logged in for a while, abandoned their free trial, or just haven’t engaged. Whatever the reason, they are currently not benefitting from your product or service and might move forward with a personalized and engaging email.

Re-Engagement Email Campaigns

Those abandoned free trials and lost prospects can be frustrating. We’ve all had them and are all looking for ways to re-engage them. First you must understand that quite often, those inactive subscribers are either too busy or no longer interested. Either way, you and your team and easily set up a re-engagement email campaign and target those inactive subscribers.

An effective way of setting up your re-engagement campaign is by using a drip email method. This can be broken down into a series of 4 will timed emails:

1. Friendly Reminder. This email is just a friendly reminder, you wanted to check in and make sure that they don’t have any questions and to let them know that you are here to help.
2. Entice. Give them a little something to add an incentive. Download a free white paper, automatically subscribe them to your upcoming webinar, anything to persuade your prospect to stay on board and use your product or service.
3. Generate Urgency. Let them know that their free service will be ending soon and they will lose that value that your product is providing.
4. Good-bye. Keep it positive and classy. Include your information in a CTA to enable them to resubscribe at a later date. Also good to note, if they make it past this email, they should automatically be moved to the email campaign that you have set to re-engage abandoned or canceled customers.

Conclusion

A properly set up strategy for your B2B Email Marketing Campaign can be a powerful tool for your organization to nurture and direct your prospects through all stages of your sales cycle. When done successfully, your business can benefit from increased sales, increased customer loyalty, and happier customers. The more helpful and appealing your campaign is to your target market, the more likely they are to engage and share your company information with others.