4 Proven Email Marketing Best Practices for B2B Startups

Email marketing is an impactful tool that all B2B organizations use for a variety of reasons. Nearly 84% of B2B companies have email marketing implemented in their marketing strategy with 29% rating it as their most effective marketing channel. For B2B startups, email marketing is the perfect tactic to reach a broad audience and distribute important content and information directly into the inboxes of your audience. The competition is high for the attention of customers, so it is essential to keep up with what is trending to meet new expectations. We’ve compiled a few B2B email marketing best practices that your B2B startup should focus on.

1. The Power of Simplicity

You have probably heard the saying, “the more, the merrier” but in the case of B2B email marketing, it is not always true. As a startup, it is critical to get your messaging, content and product offerings in front of your audience. Email marketing is becoming more and more oversaturated, so teams have to work harder to keep readers engaged, while not overdoing it. People want more concise emails that are easy to consume and understand. Here are a few tips to simplify your emails while achieving a high level of impact:

• Use one call-to-action (CTA)
• Use bullet points or small sections to break up content
• Stay on brand
• Use different types of emails to highlight different parts of your company (e.g., a newsletter can include new content or news)

2. The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has become a highly utilized tool by organizations in all industries, especially marketing. These tools have a vast number of capabilities that are making huge differences. For B2B startups that want to utilize AI, there are several opportunities including:

• Managing large chunks of data to understand what your audience preferences are and how to target them
• List segmentation, which allows you to create smaller groups based on specific characteristics for your B2B audience that can be targeted for advertising or emails
• Drafting email copy based on specific topics, trends or ideas saves your team time
• Crafting engaging subject lines to boost open and engagement rates

3. Beyond Basic Personalization Tactics

While personalization has been a hot topic in the B2B marketing world for a while, there is now a push to take it a step further. Going beyond basic personalization tactics such as a contact’s first name or company name is becoming crucial for higher engagement and your content making an impact on the audience. You want them to feel as if this message was crafted just for them. This is where your buyer personas come into play. Having clear buyer personas ensures the audience is being targeted with the most relevant information based on their characteristics. Plus, this helps guide your content creation efforts because you know what topics are important to them, such as the general problems within a certain industry, new trends to be on the lookout for or questions people may be having about a product. With this understanding, you can then craft your message to make sure you are speaking your customer’s language.

4. Focus on Mobile Optimization

If you are not already making sure your emails are optimized for mobile devices, now is the time. 50% of B2B inquiries are made through smartphones compared to a desktop, making it more important than ever to create a user experience conducive to the mobile user. As other devices like tablets increase their usage, optimizing for mobile is non-negotiable. Don’t think responsive email design matters? Email templates that are responsive to various devices can boost clicks by up to 15%. Not only do email templates need to be optimized for other devices but so should the content flow. Keep the content easy to consume the more you scroll and ensure images and other content blocks stack correctly so the mobile user can view all the information with minimal work. While some B2B startups might focus more on email design for desktops, it is critical to make responsiveness a priority for all device types. Most email marketing platforms have a setting for responsiveness, so familiarize yourself with your platform to ensure you have this enabled.

With the constant changes in email marketing, you want to stay ahead of your competition and remain at the forefront of the latest trends so you can adjust your emails as needed. By considering some of the B2B email marketing best practices above, your startup will ensure your email marketing practices are up to par and are keeping your audience engaged.

Does your B2B startup need guidance or assistance with your email marketing? Contact us today or request a free marketing consultation.