6 Innovative B2B Email Marketing Examples For 2021

Email marketing continues to prove itself as an effective strategy for B2B (business to business) marketers. In this post, we’ll:

• Explain what makes email marketing effective (hint: it’s personalization)
• Define a healthy email send list (and explore email list management best practices)
• Give examples of impressive personalized content (and tips for creating your own)
• Share 3 great email marketing case studies from this last year.

Clean data can 6x results from B2B email marketing. Want to see how we can clean yours?  Request a demo today.

1. When asked how important each marketing channel was to their organization’s overall B2B content marketing success, 91% of B2B marketers said email. [graphic]

2. Email automation is underused in B2B email marketing. According to emfluence’s report, 17.8% of automated emails sent out were B2B campaigns, whereas 82.2% were B2C campaigns

2. Video in email marketing can increase open rates by 19% and click rates by 65% while reducing unsubscribe rates by 26%.

3. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get $43 in return.

4. On average, B2B companies send out 1 email marketing campaign every 25 days

5. 89% of all B2B email marketing campaigns were sent from a company name, not an individual’s name

B2B email marketing basics: Keeping your email list clean

If your email marketing lists are outdated and full of unwanted contacts, you risk:

• Negatively affecting your sender reputation by racking up bounced emails

• Reporting unimpressive stats on your email marketing campaigns

• Losing the ability to effectively segment or personalize lists

Data cleaning can be done in-house, or you may want to outsource, depending on the list size.  

We’ve calculated that a single contact point takes an average of 3 minutes to clean, so if you can’t spare that time, use a data cleaning tool, like tye.

Related Post: 10 Essential Email Hygiene Best Practices For 2021

How to do B2B email marketing the right way: Define your ideal customer profile

If you are lacking focus and direction with your email campaigns, or seeing lackluster results, try defining an ideal customer profile (ICP). 

By having a clear idea in mind of who your ICP is, you will be able to more effectively:

• personalize your email marketing campaigns
• segment your lists for more effective call-to-actions
• write emails that are highly relevant and tap into key pain points and challenges

Here’s how to do it:

1. Talk to your best customers

Your best customers are those that are engaged, and are a perfect fit for your solution. 

2. Identify their pain points

Talk to them about their goals and challenges, and find out what the biggest obstacles are and how you can help them break them down. 

3. Map out their buying process

Aim to better understand who the decision-makers are, how they make decisions, what their blockers are, and how they go about doing research. Find out what channels they use, and how they approach looking for a new product or service. 

Once you have this information from a group of different customers, put together the information, and use it to shape your email content. It can guide whether your approach is relevant, and highlight common pain points to respond to.

B2B email marketing campaign: Segment your email list

Marketers have reported a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns, making it a crucial element to add to your B2B email marketing campaigns.

Segmenting your email list means that you drill down into subsections of your list, so can send more relevant emails. Check out our post on how to segment an email list, best practices and what you need to get started.

For example, your list is made up of marketers. Some work in tech, some work in retail, others are based in the financial services. Each of these industries have nuanced challenges. Being able to tap into that will make your content even more engaging and compelling.

To do this, your Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) and your marketing email platform (like Hubspot or Mailchimp) play a huge role. Use them to collect information about your contacts that will help you segment, so that you can send automated, personalized emails to different categories of contacts.

Our guide to customer segmentation in CRM gives insight into best practices for CRM segmentation and tips that you can put into immediate marketing use.

Personalized B2B email marketing campaigns

Effective B2B email marketing requires a personal approach. Once you’ve established your segments, use what you’ve learned about your ICP to tailor your email messages.

It’s not just about the body of your email. Think of your email message holistically. Every part should respond to a typical pain point for each segment. 

Consider what kind of subject line might appeal best to each segment, and what kind of CTA (call-to-action) is more likely to get a click. Hubspot says personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions.

Here’s the best example of a B2B email marketing campaign:

Changing the world of B2B email marketing: video.

Raise your game with personalized video emails. In 2021, this is going to be the best B2B email marketing campaign strategy.

Instead of a cold-email, many sales and marketing teams are using a ‘cold-video’ approach. This is where a salesperson records a message and emails it to their contacts, to make an introduction. 

There are tools out there like Hippovideo and Nutshell that are designed to capture exactly this.

However, success lies in personalization, and this can be a time-consuming task. 

Not all personalized video email marketing has to be created one by one. Here’s a great example of a B2B email marketing campaign that’s simple and can be scaled up:

What works in B2B email marketing

Frequency of emails

There’s no winning formula, but we can tell you what’s recommended based on the data.

SmartrMail reveals that less is more. When a company sends fewer than 4 bulk emails to any contact per month, they are 2% more likely to get a sale, than those that send more than 17.

Email marketing statistics by industry

In emfluence’s 2019 Email Marketing Benchmarks Report, they revealed B2B specific metrics across a range of industries. You can see the data in the table below:

Things to be considerate of

• When collecting email addresses, always explain upfront what a subscriber should expect from your email marketing. Give an idea of topics and frequency.

• Always provide an opt-out, don’t risk being reported for spam 

• Ensure you comply with local data protection rules, such as CAN-spam or GDPR.

Check out our other post here for tips on avoiding ending up in spam folders and how to stay GDPR compliant when cold calling.

Successful B2B email marketing campaigns: examples of B2B email marketing

 What are other brands doing?

Here are some case studies from businesses we think have impressive B2B email marketing strategies.

1. Industrial B2B email marketing: Flevy

Here’s a snapshot of their email marketing:

• They have around 150k email subscribers across all of their mailing lists
• They collect most contacts through free downloadable content (such as whitepapers or templates)
• They segment their lists based on activity (e.g. a contact’s download activity)
• They often use their Founder David Tang’s email address as a ‘sender email’
• Most of their email sends are through a newsletter, sent every 2-3 weeks. Other emails are autoresponders.

Here’s something they did really well:

At the start of the COVID-19, they pivoted their email marketing quickly. They considered the new challenges and fears facing their audience and started an email campaign to respond to it.

This was made up of regular emails, during the first few months of COVID-19, which were later evolved to be articles on Founder David Tang’s Linkedin Pulse page.

They started to notice a higher interest in related topics, such as Business Continuity Planning (BCP), Supply Chain Resilience, Digital Transformation and Cash Flow Management. So, they began putting more priority on promoting these topics.

They created a new section on their website, tracking COVID-19 patient case trend data (see the Coronavirus Dashboard here). Alongside this, they published reports and updates via email and Linkedin reporting on trends around the world. They were ahead of the game with this, starting when lockdown measures were in early measures.

The feedback

Anecdotally, they got great feedback from their contacts. They received personal emails responding to the content which was not typical for them.

They saw an up tick in sales for certain topics, as mentioned above, which they feel strongly was COVID-19 related. As they shifted their email content strategy (from sales emails to educational content), their open rates went from 15% to 40%.

Why this worked:

• It was reactionary. They released content from the very start of the crisis. This made it relevant to their entire audience as all businesses were facing the same challenges.
• They established themselves as knowledgeable, or ‘experts’ in the area. They had already built credibility within their email list as business best practice experts.
• They provided value by sending information or educational content rather than pure marketing emails. David said “I think the reader appreciates the content when it’s information based, it’s more likely to be read and shared.”

We asked David what his top tips were, reflecting on the success of their email marketing:

• “I strongly recommend sending informational emails that provide insights and opinions, preferably on a topic relevant to current events (e.g. COVID-19). It keeps brand top of mind without the need for aggressive marketing.”
• “I also like to send emails from my personal email address. It builds rapport, a feeling of trust and credibility. It’s also more appreciated as it feels personal.”
• Check out David’s Linkedin Pulse posts here.

2.  Targeted B2B email marketing: ClientBAM

We spoke to Michael Oakley from ClientBAM about his thoughts on the state of email marketing in 2021. He talked to us about the 2 crucial things email marketers should be thinking about.

1. Personalization is key

For him, ‘psychology beats technology’, which means your message and your approach comes first. The challenge then is writing personal messages at scale. To combat this, he recommends taking the time to add as many custom variables as possible within the email. 

2. Careful list management

“It can be easy to go to spam! We struggled with email deliverability a lot.

After investing so much in servers and people’s promises everything failed for us, we still ended up in spam. We eventually found a tool called AlwaysArrive which works super well.”

Reflecting on email marketing so far in 2021, what key things have you noticed?

“COVID-19 at this point is an over-labored topic. I think people approached email marketing a bit too hastily. COVID-19 and other hot topics may help you grab a bit of attention but at the end of the day sending super personalized and high quality emails are going to make the major difference for people, not the latest buzzword.”

We asked Micheal for a final tip, considering the future of email marketing:

“Something we’ve found to be great is the use of video. It adds a really personal touch, and makes the recipient feel as though you’ve created something just for them. It’s difficult to scale, but worth it. We create a screenshare style video, which can be personalized. This means when the contact opens the email, they see their own site in the thumbnail.”

A lot has changed but a lot hasn’t. At the end of the day, it’s about one to one authentic communication between people. Marketing is just about scaling these conversations.

3. Effective B2B email marketing: Zero to Marketing

Andrea Bosoni, the founder of Zero to Marketing shared their email marketing story on Indie Hackers.

He revealed that a recent newsletter had a 60% open rate (which is a really fantastic metric). He admitted it wasn’t easy and took some trial and error. Here are the tactics that worked for him:

1. “Create a reading habit”

He sent out the newsletter at the same time and day, with the same subject. Consistency and familiarity builds a feeling of communication between you and your audience.

2. “Avoid spam”

To circumvent this, Andrea asks for replies to his emails. He creates a conversation with his contacts and alerts Gmail that his emails are important in the process.

3. “Keep a clean list”

They clean data every 3 months, to remove any inactive subscribers and bad emails.

4. “Watch out for tracking blockers when cleaning your list”

In today’s world, you can’t just up and remove anybody from your list if they haven’t engaged with you. Many people use tracking blockers, meaning you won’t be able to track their engagement with your emails. To avoid removing hidden but otherwise active subscribers, send a re-engagement campaign.

Sending an email with the message “Do you want to stay subscribed? Let me know or I’ll remove you from the list” gives contacts an opportunity to stay. 

5. “Use a custom preview text”

Andrea writes interesting preview copy, so that his contacts don’t just see ‘click here to view this email in a web browser’ in their inbox. It’s an opportunity to engage your contacts.

Andrea’s final piece of advice? “I’m not interested in having a giant list… what I really want is a bunch of people who are genuinely interested in hearing what I have to say about marketing.”