How to use email to nurture and convert leads and build relationships with B2B customers.

B2B Email Marketing.

How can you use Email for B2B marketing?

Email marketing was one of the few channels companies could communicate to their audiences before the 2010s, and we're still considering it 13 years later, even with the arrival of more direct channels and social media platforms. 

Why? 

Short answer: Because it's one of the most effective ways to build and maintain a relationship with your customers. 

Read this complete guide on traditional marketing vs digital marketing.

Now, if you want to see the large answer, you came to the right blog, as in this post, Codedesign will share the most efficient ways to use email marketing to convert leads and create meaningful relationships with your audience.

Keep scrolling!

CodeDesign is a leading digital marketing agency ranked #1 in Lisbon, Portugal.

What is a Lead Nurturing Email?

A lead nurturing email is the best icebreaker when a lead shows interest but hasn't taken action.

The idea with this strategy is that you start building a relationship with this lead to keep them engaged with your brand until they finally decide to hire your services or make a purchase. Your emails must remind them of the business problem you can solve for them and offer educational information to gain their trust and persuade them to convert.

Email campaigns are still helpful for businesses, as  99% of users check their inboxes daily. With the help of this strategy, you can get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts and the best companies in this strategy. Besides, it's a cost-effective tactic; for every $1 spent, you get $40 in revenue. Companies that are experts in this email strategy produce 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost per lead.

These campaigns start when a lead signs up for your website or blog. With this, you create your email list and send content based on their interactions within your platforms. Have a proper digital marketing funnel in place.

Regardless, many leads stop clicking on your CTA or making a purchase, so you need other ways to engage with them, and so they can continue in the sales funnel to convert. The best solution for this is to create a lead-nurturing email sequence.

What is a Lead Nurturing Email Sequence?

A sequence is a trigger that sends emails automatically every time a lead takes specific actions. If a customer adds an item to their cart, an email sequence could send them a purchase reminder or a list of similar products. With automation, you can keep the lead engaged on any funnel stage without too much work. If you want to learn more about automation, click on this article.

From this point, you know some basics about a lead-nurturing email campaign, but what are the best practices for B2B marketing.

Let's study them.

Email Marketing.

How to use email to nurture and convert leads?

This lead nurturing process can take some time, as it's building a strong and consistent relationship with them. To make this process more doable, we'll give you some steps and strategies to get the most out of your email campaign. Read this guide on what’s a good CPC.

Define Your Leads 

Your leads don't have the same needs or aren't even going through the same moments during the customer journey. That's why you must study their characteristics and needs at each step so that your lead nurturing strategy can serve them at the right time and according to their needs. Doing this allows you to create a customer profile to find out what content they'll connect with most; thus, the interaction between customer and brand is more fruitful. Among the types of leads you can have we have:

• Information qualified leads (IQL)
• Marketing qualified leads (MQL)
• Sales ready/accepted leads (SRL)
• Warm vs cold leads 
• Sales qualified leads (SQL)
• Member service request leads (MSR)

Check this article on how e-commerce influences supply chain management.

Deliver valuable content with expert insights.

Now comes the content of the email, that slice of knowledge or information about your business that will make them open the email.

As an expert in your niche, the ideal is that you share information about your area of expertise to a depth that allows them to be sufficiently interested in your services and thus generate the urgency to hire you. Here is a complete guide for you on developing a business development strategy.

This content strategy will go hand in hand with personalization, giving each group of leads the information they need.

The content options are endless, from a short video to a blog or inviting them to a webinar.

Choose one relevant topic per email.

Stick to one topic, don't make a blurry email with misguiding information.

This is important as you must understand that you are one of many businesses looking for your customer's attention. With this bombardment of information, you must be concise and straightforward with them.

Please keep your email message tied to the problem they want answers for. 

Keep it short.

Customers are full of emails, so there's no time to be fancy and extensive with them.

Your leads must codify the value your email provides at first glance or within seconds. You shouldn't overload your emails, as this is one of the main reasons people unsubscribe from your email list. Define what you want to talk about or the action you want them to take to go right to the point. 

The only important thing is that the message gets crystal clear for them, and while data suggests that emails should be between 50 and 125 words, it can be a little bit more if you need more details.

B2B Companies.

Make sure your emails lead to the next step in the sales funnel.

Emails should be the guide to the next step in the customer journey. For example, after the first conversion, your following email could be educational to add more to the experience. Subsequent ones should add more valuable information so customers can get the most out of their experience with your brand and allow them to convert for the second time. 

Then, if you want to build your reputation while fomenting customer relationships, you can send them a review request to talk about their experiences. Read this complete guide on Amazon Listing Optimization.

Test your emails and track key metrics.

First emails won't be the best ones, but rather than taking it as a failure, it's better to define it as a learning process. So, as you test your emails, evaluate your metrics to see what's working. Among the metrics to focus on are the following:

• Click-through rate is the percentage of leads who clicked on your email.
• Unsubscribed rate

A good marketing campaign could have a 5% unsubscribe rate, so if it's higher than this, replan your methods.

Develop Remarketing Campaigns

Finally, some users made interaction with your brand but don't accomplish anything else. This doesn't mean you should abandon them and move forward; instead, you can try a remarketing strategy. 

Some users abandon their journey because they forget, are busy, or even need more money to pay. It doesn't mean that they aren't interested.

To recover their attention, you can send them emails with information about the service they are looking for or even present new offers that could revive their interest.

How to create B2B emails that sell?

Now, let's build a good-looking email that can cause further interaction with your brand or convert your leads.

Create an attractive subject line.

We need a subject line that separates your email from all the spammy ones. Many users could have their emails with thousands of unopened emails, and the reason behind this is that taglines need to be more interesting. 

Nevertheless, there are ways to create interest in users, for example:

Create urgency: This is one of the most common marketing strategies, and it works because customers don't want to miss out on important stuff. Better call as fear of missing out (FOMO), the idea with this tagline is to create the need to take immediate action on an event or an offer your company is making. You may have a free webinar with only five guests left, creating the need to open it. This strategy is good, although we recommend using it sparingly.

Evoke curiosity: What if we told you an AI wrote this article? Would you believe us? Whatever the case, if you click on it, we evoke curiosity, which is valuable to augment your email open rates. The idea is to generate a big question about your services and their direct importance for customer well-being. After this, they'll find the answer by reading your email, which could lead to further interaction if the topic is interesting enough.

Don't sell. Instead, talk about your brand.

Rather than selling right out of the box, give users more information about who your brand is and why it's so valuable.

Email spam is full of salesy emails - representing most of them - so rather than putting a huge offer or how much your services cost, welcome new subscribers with a brand presentation.

This is especially good for new subscribers as they can get familiar with your brand, and as everybody has a different story and motives to do what they do, they'll get attached to your brand story. To learn how to create your brand's storytelling, click right here.

B2B Marketing.

Use a CTA.

Every email should have an end goal that leads customers to the next step, and it can be subscribing to your social media platforms, scheduling a call or any other you like. At the end of the email, put a CTA that invites them to the next step or to convert.

Include an unsubscribe button.

As a brand, you have to have enough self-esteem to let go of those leads that aren't interested in your brand. Because of this, you have to leave the door open for them to unsubscribe and don't waste their potential of them.

Even though some customers unsubscribe to your email list because they don't like their emails so full, they still keep following you on other channels like your social media platforms.

Ultimately, you have to give them a chance to return.  

Follow up.

After you send an email, track what happens with them. Check information if they click the CTA or continue their interactions with the company. This is the data you'll use to measure your email's campaign success and define the most successful type of email.

Here are 5 tips from our Hubspot CRM Team 

We've asked around in our Hubspot Team about tips we could give you about B2B email marketing. Here are some of the them. 

1. Use if possible HubSpot’s Automation Tools – HubSpot provides powerful automation tools to create, manage, and optimize automated email campaigns. Automating your email campaigns will save time and improve the performance of your campaigns. 

2. Leverage Segmentation – Segmentation is a powerful tool in any email marketing campaign. By segmenting your B2B contacts based on their behavior and preferences, you can tailor your emails to be more relevant to each of your contacts, leading to higher engagement and better results.

3. Personalize Your Messages – Personalization is a powerful way to make your emails stand out. HubSpot makes it easy to personalize your emails with dynamic content, so you can ensure each of your contacts receives a message tailored to their interests and needs.

4. Monitor Performance – HubSpot allows you to monitor the performance of your emails in real-time, so you can make any necessary changes to improve your campaigns. This will help you increase engagement and ROI.

5. Track Your Progress – Tracking your B2B email campaigns is essential for understanding how well your campaigns are performing. HubSpot provides detailed analytics so you can easily monitor your campaigns and make any necessary changes.

Where can you learn more about the details of Email Marketing? 

If you are looking for a B2B email marketing agency that can help you reach your target audience and grow your business? Search no more. Our agency specializes in creating and executing effective email campaigns that get results. We have a team of experienced professionals who understand the unique needs of B2B email marketing. We can craft campaigns to help you build relationships with existing customers, acquire new leads, and increase sales. From strategy to delivery, our team can help you achieve your goals. Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your business with B2B email marketing.

But if your path is different and you want to learn on your own, let us give you some tips to youtube channels where this people update their things about Email Marketing all the time:

Flowium - eCommerce Email Marketing

Chase Dimond | Email Marketing

SendMails | Email Marketing & Automation Platform 

HubSpot Marketing

How does Codedesign does this?

Email marketing automation has become an essential tool for businesses of all sizes in today’s digital world. By leveraging the power of automation tools, businesses can engage their customers more effectively and increase sales and ROI. Based on hundreds of hours of tests and validations we came up with our own methodology that we implement in our B2B clients. 

Being email marketing of the most powerful tools for automation when integrated with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. A CRM allows businesses to collect, store, and analyze customer data to understand their customers’ needs and interests better. This data can then be used to create targeted email campaigns tailored to the customer’s needs and preferences. But that changes along the funnel and our methodology incorporated that change (see picture above).

Remarketing is another powerful tool for email marketing automation. Remarketing allows businesses to target customers who have previously interacted with their brand in some way, such as by visiting their website or making a purchase. By sending targeted emails to customers who have interacted with the brand, businesses can increase their chances of converting customers into loyal customers. 

By combining CRM with remarketing, businesses can create highly effective email campaigns tailored to their customers’ needs and interests. Not only does this help increase sales and ROI and helps businesses build better relationships with their customers by providing them with relevant, personalized content. 

Email marketing automation tools are essential for businesses of all sizes in the modern digital world. By leveraging the power of automation tools such as CRM and remarketing, companies can engage their customers more effectively and increase sales and ROI. 

Final thoughts.

Despite its longevity as a digital communication tool, emails have lost none of their relevance to B2B marketing. Instead, it allows us to achieve what we discuss in this article.

To recap, as brands, we must maintain a relationship with our clients so that they continue to prefer us over the competition and that we can also strengthen business ties between the two. Fortunately, email allows us to continue to nurture these interactions. With new additions like personalization and automation, it becomes even easier for us to manage and build relationships with all those leads so that they eventually convert.

If you need more support to manage your business's digital marketing, count on Codedesign to give you a team of professionals who will create a strategy adapted to your particular needs. Contact us now!

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