- 28.11.23
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- Email Marketing
The best B2B email marketing examples
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Article by
Amie Whale
Learn from the best. Discover some of the best B2B email marketing examples to inspire your next campaign.
Email marketing is one of the most common B2B marketing techniques and is used by over 80% of marketers in the B2B sphere. However, just because it’s widely used, it doesn’t mean its potential is easy to harness.
B2B email marketing is a technique that requires deep thought, strategy, and commitment.
To shed some light on this, we’ve assembled some of the finest B2B email marketing examples and explain how you can use them to enhance your campaigns and multiply leads.
Gain insights from top performers. Explore exceptional B2B email marketing instances to ignite creativity for your upcoming email campaign.
B2B email marketing best practices you’d be bananas to ignore
Before we look at our examples, let’s uncover the secrets of the best B2B marketing emails.
There are numerous types of email marketing strategies, each with a different purpose and target audience. It can help to think about the types of marketing emails as a funnel which has different strategies for the various stages of your customer’s journey.
The results of email marketing take time to generate, and splitting the process into five stages can make it easier for you to develop cogent B2B email marketing campaigns.
The five stages can be defined as follows:
This is where you initiate your relationship with your customers. Think of this as the Email marketing B2B lead generation stage. You want to send emails that give businesses insight into your company, and in return, you can generate leads by capturing their data.
Some of the best practices for these types of emails include:
- Share a downloadable free e-guide that offers your recipients a solution, for which they will need to share a few details of their own.
- Don’t get too specific. Share just enough information to entice the reader, without scaring them away with the nitty gritty details of products or services.
- Use an attention-grabbing subject line that hooks the reader and prompts them to read the rest of your email.
Now you’ve caught their attention, you need to keep your prospects interested and remind them that you’re there to help. The emails you send during this stage should be building trust with your prospects and compelling them to engage more with your services and brand.
Some of the best ways to achieve these goals include:
- Getting personal. Personalisation is one of the most effective email marketing strategies, and by now, you should have some of their data, such as their name and age. Tailor your content to each prospect by addressing them by name and using the direct pronoun ‘you’ whenever you can.
- Send them more relevant educational materials that teach them more about your brand’s success and purpose, like case studies and blogs.
- Where relevant, include positive feedback or reviews from past clients who are in a similar realm of business as your prospects.
It’s time to convert your leads into real customers. Prospects at this stage of the journey will need to be won over by your products or services. They need to believe that they have no choice but to invest in your business.
To do this:
- Give them an offer they can’t refuse. Whether it’s a one-time discount code, a joining offer, or a bundle deal, try to give your prospects something they will struggle to decline.
- Keep it personal and empathetic. You need to convince business owners that you feel their struggles and understand how they feel. It will help them to trust in your solutions.
- Create a sense of urgency. Amp up the pressure by writing copy that compels them to act on your offer. However, you need to refrain from coming across as pushy. Most email marketers don’t think of themselves as pushy, but 50% of prospects would beg to differ.
Now that you have customers’ business, you need to retain it. At this point, customers know your company and have already invested in it, and you need to convince them that there’s still more to gain from your relationship.
Some of the best practices for retaining customers include:
- Rewarding your customers. For example, each time your customers purchase something, send them a discount code for their next purchase.
- Add value to your emails. It’s not all about the exchange of money for goods. Show them that you are the whole package by continuing to send them helpful information between purchases, like company newsletters and updates.
- Send friendly reminders. If it’s been a while since a business customer has engaged with your company, send them a ‘We miss you’ email or a product recommendation that you know they’ll be interested in.
Further your mutually beneficial relationships with loyal customers by converting them into advocates for your brand. You can make them feel valued by requesting their opinions and in return, you get great reviews and can continue to entice new prospects.
To achieve this step of the process:
- Offer incentives to advocate for your company. For example, you could offer a 10% discount code to any loyal customer who leaves a review.
- Create a referral campaign that enables existing customers to refer friends and colleagues to your services. Referral campaigns usually give both the referee and referrer a one-time discount code or voucher.
- Don’t drop the ball. Maintain your relationship with loyal customers by staying in touch frequently and showing your appreciation for their business. The more you give, the more you get.
B2B email marketing examples to swipe and deploy
Now that we’ve covered some of the B2B email marketing best practices, it’s time to see them in action. Here are some of the best B2B email marketing examples at each stage of the funnel:
1. Awareness / Lead Generation Email – Webflow
This email from Webflow showcases some of the best practices of B2B email marketing.
Here’s what makes this a great example of a B2B awareness email:
- It gets personal straight away by using the personal pronoun, ‘you’.
- The company has established that its target audience is ‘small businesses’ and has shown empathy by displaying awareness that they need support.
- The tone of the copy is supportive and friendly, which instantly establishes a sense of trust for the reader.
- Webflow is offering the recipient free resources, including three free website templates and valuable tips.
- They don’t go into too much detail, so the prospect can remain intrigued.
- Their CTA is clear and in the form of a bold button, making it eye-catching and accessible.
- The design is simple and effective. Webflow has utilised negative space to highlight the important bits, like the headline and CTA.
Overall, this email is a great demonstration of how you should be communicating with your prospects who are in the first stage of the bio journey.
2. Consideration – Freelancer
This email from Freelancer is a great example of the kind of message you should send to prospects once you’ve introduced yourself and retrieved some of their data.
It works well because:
- It addresses the prospect by name, which is a proven conversion technique.
- It makes it all about the ‘you’. Not only does the copy in this email consistently use the pronoun ‘you’ to personalise the reader’s experience, but it also adopts the position of the reader in its graphics, too!
- It gives the reader everything they want to know, without scaring them away with the finer details.
- The services are listed clearly with complementary graphics.
- There’s a story within the email. Notice how the figure at the top of the email looks disconcerted and the Ven diagram is in disarray – it has contrasting colours and excess writing. By the end of the email, the figure is shown to be smiling, and the diagram is now neat and monochromatic. This emphasises Freelancer’s message that they have a solution specifically for their reader.
- The CTA is placed in a button for clarity and purpose and has a deeper colour to draw the prospect’s gaze to it.
If you’re struggling to keep prospects interested after your initial interactions, take some inspiration from this email!
3. Conversion – Semrush
Now that your leads are warm, you need to find a way to convert them into customers.
This simple email from Semrush demonstrates some of the best practices of conversion emails, and here’s why:
- It creates intrigue by using a buzzword in a question-focused subject line – “How SEO-friendly is your site?”
- It’s short and punchy. Incorporating bullet points is a brilliant way to highlight key points and make the content more digestible.
- They’re not trying to sell everything. Semrush could have gone in hard with the sale of their subscription. Instead, they’re providing a free audit as a part of their 7-day trial to get their foot in the door. While you might want to sell your most expensive product, start small and build trust first.
- It uses the active voice to compel the reader to act upon the messages in the email. For example, Semrush uses words like ‘Start’. Without being pushy, this email is telling the reader how to progress.
- It oozes simplicity with the use of “just one click away” and positivity via the “To healthy days ahead” sign-off.
- The instructions included are clear and accessible.
- It utilises white spaces to highlight the important info and draw attention to the CTAs at the bottom.
- The colour scheme is simple but effective.
If a lead was already considering investing in Semrush’s services, an email like this has many of the techniques that could seal the deal.
4. Loyalty – Eighty3 Creative
This is exactly the sort of email you should be sending to existing customers to promote loyalty and solidify your brand’s relationship with them.
This email is a great example of B2B email marketing because:
- It has an intriguing subject line that will entice the readers to click on the email.
- It’s full of value. It’s not merely related to sales – it’s genuinely giving the reader something of value. This shows the customer that they are valued themselves, and not just seen as a source of profit.
- It’s personal. This email addresses the customer directly throughout the copy. We might sound like a broken record, but personalisation really is key.
- It tells a story, which is something that not many marketing emails can do.
- At the end of the email, the customer is offered more free resources in the form of their recently published blogs, which will draw the customer back to the website.
To retain existing customers, you need to send them emails that give them value and make them feel valued themselves. Exploring B2B email newsletter examples could inspire you to create emails that do exactly that.
5. Advocacy – Airbnb
As we’ve discovered, the final stage of the email marketing journey is advocacy.
This stage is all about making your loyal customers feel appreciated and convincing them to promote your business further.
This referral email from Airbnb ticks all the boxes because:
- The headline is bold and eye-catching and it establishes the contents of the email straight away. It summarises the instructions and highlights the $600 reward straight off the bat. This is guaranteed to pique the customers’ interest.
- It utilises the referral technique, which is one of the best ways to establish advocacy.
- It has bold, positive imagery. Notice how all the people in the images below the headline are smiling? This will help convince customers that they, too, will be smiling if they follow the email’s instructions!
- The instructions are clear. In three simple steps, the email tells the customer everything they need to do to complete the process and earn an easy $600.
- The utilisation of white spaces highlights the important bits like the headline, instructions, images, and CTA.
- The CTA is cleverly placed in a brightly coloured button to draw the reader to it instantly.
If you’re struggling to convince customers to advocate for your brand, take a leaf out of Airbnb’s book.
Need some help with your B2B email marketing campaigns?
Email marketing is far from simple, but with the right strategy and funnel, there’s no reason why you can’t make it work for you.
Take note of some of the best companies in the biz and strengthen your email marketing strategy with the best practices we have explored. So, no matter where your customers are on their journey, you are equipped to lead them to the next level.
To find out more about how to elevate your B2B marketing strategy, take a look at some of our other blogs or reach out to the Eighty3 Creative team today.
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