The B2B sales cycles are infamously long. This means it sometimes requires more skills, patience, and strategies to increase B2B sales. When it comes to strategies for increasing B2B sales, emails still rule the roost. They are easy to work with, ubiquitous, and work very well to increase sales and revenue of businesses.
The average ROI of emails can go up to $42 for every $1spent.
Email marketing can be profitable and effective for lead generation if you know how to adapt your strategy to your audience.
In this article, we’ll help you get the full picture and understand how to use email marketing to skyrocket your B2B sales.
Why is Email the Mainstay of B2B Email Marketing Strategy?
Email marketing is hailed as a highly result-driven and powerful marketing channel that businesses can use. Here’s why-
- As per Statista, Email marketing is an undisputed winner for conversions later in the funnel.
- 30% of marketers consider it as a marketing channel with the highest ROI
- Close to 80% of businesses consider it one of the most powerful strategies for lead generation.
Going by the above stats, email marketing is a powerful tool for targeting B2B prospects and increasing sales. Here’s how you can utilize this medium effectively to shoot up your sales.
Tips To Boost Your Sales
1. Get a Clear Picture of Your Target Clients and What They Want.
Before proceeding with your email marketing campaigns, it’s important to learn what your prospect wants from your email messages and offerings. To ascertain this, you can take help of the following questions:
- What is your core offer, and who would benefit from it?
- What are your prospects’ pain points?
- What makes your solutions different from your competitors?
B2B buying journey is quite extensive with multiple decision-makers involved, you have to make multiple buyer personas. This will help you to design your email marketing strategies and messages accordingly. The following questions will help you construct detailed personas.
- How many decision-makers are involved?
- Who has the maximum influence on the decision-making?
- Do they prefer to communicate via Email?
- When are they most open to discussions?
Gaining deeper insights about your prospects will help you form the content and solutions they need.
2. Quantify Your goals – Be SMART
To succeed in your sales efforts, the very first thing you need to do is identify your goals and quantify them. But how to set your goals? Well, to achieve tangible success, it’s important to start with something that you can achieve much quicker, for example, “Increasing sales by 50% from email marketing by the end of the first quarter”. Your goals should be clear, realistic, and achievable.
The SMART framework will help you achieve this.
Source: Jetorbit
- S – Specific – Specific goals give your campaign a clear direction. For example: Reach more subscribers.
- M – Measurable – Measurable goals help you track your progress. For example: Increase open rates.
- A – Actionable – Your goals should be such that you can take clear and specific actions.
- R – Realistic – Be realistic about what’s possible to achieve.
- T – Time-bound – Your goals should have a start and end date. For example, We will have 20% more subscribers by the end of this month.
3. Segment Your Database
Your database is pivotal for your B2B marketing success. Besides containing the names of your potential clients, it has their requirements, preferences, and much more. But it can be enormous and often lead you nowhere if you don’t classify it.
Segmenting your database or dividing it into subgroups based on industry, location, company size, company size, performance, status, and other criteria can help you optimize the targeting of prospective clients and deliver a highly personalized experience to existing ones, thus boosting your sales.
FedEx experienced a 433% increase in its B2B sales after investing in segmentation strategies.
Segmenting your database can bring the following benefits:
- For focused marketing, you must analyze which leads are lucrative and require the attention of the highest priority. Segmentation will help you prioritize your leads.
- Segmentation will help you determine which channels, methods, and offers will optimize results. As a result, you will be able to utilize your budget with extreme efficiency.
- By segmenting your database, you can gain detailed knowledge of your target market, personalize your campaigns to target the right audience.
- You can deliver targeted, personalized, and relevant email marketing to them based on their interests, geographic location, buying patterns, etc.
A personalized approach is very important to boost your B2B sales as the ‘one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in all scenarios and for all types of clients.
4. Sell, But Don’t Just Focus on Selling.
Being a B2B business, it’s important to know that you are dealing with businesses run by people with in-depth knowledge about sales and marketing strategies. Converting them is not going to be a walk in the park.
So, instead of adopting a sales-centric approach, you should focus on providing prospects with relevant solutions. Once you are able to establish your product as the right solution for their problems, you will not have to put much effort into direct selling your products.
This is one of the best B2B sales techniques that can go a long way in growing your sales.
5. Provide Value at Each Step
Once you have your prospect’s attention, you should nurture them by sending a series of emails over a period of time. Remember that when you get to interact with your prospects, your content is of massive importance. You must approach your B2B buyers effectively during their journey. Any email that you send out to your prospect must be valuable.
You need to provide your prospects with content that offers answers to their problems. It should be a well-curated mix of informative content, offers, and product/service promotion.
These are some types of popular content that B2B customers are interested in:
Ebooks
If you plan on offering an eBook, focus it on strategies, outcomes, and statistics related to what you offer.
For example, if you are selling lead scoring software, consider sending out an eBook about lead generation like this example below.
Source: HubSpot
White Papers
Similarly, with white papers, you can describe some problems your target users may face in running their business and suggest solutions through your services.
Consider this whitepaper on B2B retail email marketing by Blue Mail Media.
Source: Blue Mail Media
Courses
Besides whitepapers and eBooks, courses are great to kickstart relationships with your prospects. When someone signs up for an email course, they’re aware that it entails receiving emails from you regularly. This leads to high CTR and conversions in the process.
6. Entice Customers With Optimized Landing Pages
When leads click on your emails, you want to take them to your product/service landing pages. Make sure your landing pages are compelling and optimized. While designing the landing pages, treat them as your only shot at converting the leads. Below are some essential elements of high-converting B2B landing pages:
Clear Header Message
B2B solutions are complex, so they must be explained as clearly as possible. Use powerful words that express the benefits and evoke emotions.
Insert an Explainer Video
Videos are more interesting and engaging when it comes to communicating your value proposition to your prospects.
Add Trust Elements
Incorporating industry certificate badges, customer testimonials, big clients’ logos are an excellent way to convince prospects that you’re trustworthy.
Add Clear CTA
Adding a clear CTA will tell your prospects what the next steps towards your solution are. Don’t forget to provide visual cues that will guide the users straight to the CTA and click.
Here’s what an optimized landing page will look like with a clear header message, an explainer video, and a clear CTA.
Source: Slack
Wrap Up
Increasing B2B sales via email marketing isn’t a quick or easy job. But by maintaining motivation and focus over a steady period of time will help you develop a system and strategies that you need to have an email marketing framework capable of producing sales results, all on its own.