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An Expert Guide to B2B Email Marketing

Learn everything you need to know about B2B email marketing and start improving your brand’s ROI with this guide from Jarrang. 

October 18 - 2024

Article 5 min read

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A Guide to B2B Email Marketing: Best Practice, Benchmarks and Finding Success

The power of email marketing continues to grow, and B2B brands are well positioned to benefit – but only if you know how. 

In the world of B2B marketing, the value of email campaigns is hard to deny. 77% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted by email over any other channel, and 59% of B2B marketers say that email marketing is more than twice as effective as paid advertising. 

Email marketing for a B2B business is very different to a B2C brand. Rather than sending campaigns to individual users, often with a clear call to action to make a purchase or enquiry, B2B campaigns must be more nuanced and multi-layered – often requiring multiple lead nurturing steps before a decision is made. 

With all of that in mind, B2B marketers must approach email with an alternative perspective. In this guide, we’ll explore the ins and outs of B2B email marketing and help you build a successful strategy.

What makes B2B email marketing different?

With B2B marketing, you are targeting a business audience with unique needs and buying behaviours. Though your ultimate ‘goal’ may be similar to B2C in that you want to sell a product/service, the process is not the same. Here are four key differences: 

  1. Longer lead times: B2B audiences have a far longer and more complex sales journey, which means your campaigns need to take that into account. B2B marketers, therefore, need to build multi-stage campaigns that progress users through a sales funnel. 
  2. More steps to reach decision makers: Audiences in B2C campaigns are all relevant targets that are just as likely to purchase a product/service. In B2B marketing, you may not reach decision makers at first, so you will need to build an acquisition strategy that helps get your campaign noticed by the right people. 
  3. Value-driven approach: The tone and approach of B2B emails must be more focused on adding value rather than chasing a sale. Providing useful information in the form of reports, guides and webinars is more likely to resonate well with your intended audience. 
  4. GDPR and data privacy: While GDPR is still a consideration for B2B marketers, there are some differences. For example, B2B emails can be sent with an opt-out approach as long as your email is commercially relevant to the recipient. As a result, B2B marketers may benefit from bought or rented email lists and remain compliant, whereas B2C marketers cannot. See this guide for more information. 

Setting B2B email marketing benchmarks

Due to the nature of B2B marketing and slow sales funnels, it can be hard to define ‘success’. Before you start any campaign, you need to set realistic goals. Setting the right KPIs to track is a key part of this, so read our guide to measuring and reporting on email campaign success. 

The good news is that you don’t need to start ‘in the dark’. There are lots of online resources sharing B2B email marketing KPI benchmarks that you can use as a baseline for comparison. 

These figures vary considerably, but looking at the top 10 results for each metric in Google returns the following ranges: 

  • Open rate:15% - 25%, with 20% often cited as a solid goal. 
  • Click-through rate (CTR): 2% - 5%, with most sources highlighting 2.5-3% as a good standard. 
  • Unsubscribe rates: Less than 1%, with most industries achieving as little as 0.3-0.5%

Bear in mind that these stats are always taken from large-scale data analysis and are not specific to your brand. They should only be used as a general benchmark for comparison rather than a goal. 

How to do effective B2B email marketing

So, how do you make business customers excited about your email campaigns? The answer revolves around a strategy that accounts for understanding your audience, building content that appeals to them and utilising the right tools and technology to get noticed. 

Here are the most important steps to help you get started… 

1. Choose the right B2B email marketing software

Effective email marketing requires lots of effort in the strategising, designing and monitoring of campaigns. There are too many elements at play for any one person to succeed alone, which is why there are countless email marketing software tools available to help you. 

Before you start trying to build a better B2B email marketing approach, you should choose a core email marketing platform to help you design, send and analyse your campaigns. Ideally, you should use one that is designed for business use, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud or HubSpot.

When choosing potential B2B email marketing software, make sure your solution can support:

  • List segmentation: This allows you to create tailored lists (segments) based on demographics, behaviour, and interaction history.
  • Automation: Ways to trigger automated campaign activity based on specific events (i.e. audience sign-up). 
  • Personalisation: This lets you create unique content based on personalisation factors such as audience names using dynamic content. 
  • Analytics: This offers data-driven insight into campaign performance, allowing you to track opens, clicks and other vital metrics. 

2. Segment your audience 

Whether you’re brand new to email marketing and need to build up your subscriber list, or you’ve already got one, you need to practice audience management if you want to succeed. You can’t just send a general email to your entire list and expect it to perform – especially in the context of B2B buying journeys, where audiences may be at different stages of the sales funnel. 

Try to implement email segmentation where you split lists based on audience factors such as job title, industry and past interactions with your brand. Even this minimal level of added detail can help you tailor content more effectively – such as tweaking the subject line of a webinar to better address a specific segment’s industry.

In the B2B sector, your ideal ‘targets’ are people who are involved in the buying decision – but you shouldn’t exclude less valuable targets either, as they may contribute to the eventual decision. For example, if you get new subscribers from a conference or event and many of them are non-decision makers in a company, you could create a segment and tailor a campaign that shows them the value your product/service could bring to their working lives and encourage them to show your brand to their managers/buying team. 

If you’re struggling to find information about contacts to create segments, consider using your general list as a surveying tool. Design and send a series of emails asking your subscribers about their interests or needs and use the results to create new groups. 

3. Nail the right tone

When writing and designing content for B2B campaigns, always keep your audience in mind and write in a way that appeals to their needs. 

Businesses tend to have strong tone of voice guidelines that limit how playful or experimental you can be, but don’t be afraid to push the boundaries a little so that you differentiate yourself from competitors. 

Thanks to the segmentation you’ve hopefully put into place, you can trial different tones and content styles with different audience types and monitor results. If a certain approach is leading to poor ROI, you can abandon it in favour of something new. 

4. Plan campaigns around B2B buying journeys

The content and design of a B2B campaign should be built around the B2B buying journey. You need emails that meet user needs at each stage of the funnel, rather than relying solely on the big ‘sell’ at the end. To do this, you will need campaigns that cater for:

  • Awareness: this stage is when a company becomes aware of your business and products/services. They have no real intent to purchase or engage, so your campaigns must be focused on providing value beyond just selling products. This is where you should explore webinars, guides, stat reports, and other interesting content meant to attract users.
  • Consideration: Your audience is now interested in your product/service, but they won’t commit to purchasing it until they’ve done more research. This is where you need to demonstrate the value of your offer via reviews, product comparisons, deep dives into features, etc. 
  • Purchase: The decision makers at the business are ready to purchase and often need a final ‘push’ to complete the sale. Campaign content for this stage will focus on product offers, discounts and deals, cost comparisons and potentially even direct communication to arrange demos or trials. 
  • Retention: The vast majority of businesses rely on retention to operate successfully. You need to account for past customers by designing campaigns specifically for them, whether that’s to re-engage them with a new product/service or even ask for reviews or feedback. 

5. Implement personalisation wherever possible

Personalisation is one of the most effective ways to increase the ROI of emails in both B2B and B2C environments. Even the most basic personalisations, such as including a subscriber’s name in the subject line of your email, can have a significant impact on open rates and, subsequently, conversions. 

6. Use templates and automation to save time and energy

As you can already likely tell, B2B businesses have a lot more variability in who they send to and what their campaigns may contain. When you’re trying to juggle sending awareness emails to new subscribers whilst also producing campaigns meant to convert decision makers, the burden in terms of time and resources can become insurmountable. 

To alleviate this pressure and engage more effectively, B2B brands must build automated campaigns that cater to the most common scenarios for each type of user. Though this can vary considerably based on your brand and needs, the following fundamentals can help you get started:

  • Welcome emails: build a template campaign that welcomes new subscribers and potentially takes them on a journey through your offering.
  • Webinar/event wrap-up campaigns: create a generic template for any follow-up emails after an event or webinar. At a minimum, you will want to send an email that contains a means for an audience to watch the event – but why stop there? Key takeaways, event summaries and interviews are all good ways to engage users. 
  • Case studies, guides & reports: If you want to succeed with B2B marketing, you will likely need to produce informational content to add value to your audience’s working lives. Create a template for this style of email so you can drag and drop new topics whenever you need to. 

Other potential templates include product feature promotions, cold emails and product/service offers. You will need to consider the bulk of your messaging and use that to guide your template design process. 

Automation, on the other hand, describes setting up a ‘trigger’ event that automatically sends campaigns to clients. Most email marketing platforms allow you to set up automations with relatively little technical know-how. These should align with your templates – for example, when a user first signs up to your list, you can automatically send a welcome campaign. 

7. Test campaigns before you hit send

Audiences in the B2B market have a low tolerance for errors, issues and frustrations caused by email campaigns. Even mild typos in subject lines may cause your campaign to be ignored and your unsubscribe rate to climb. 

Put a robust testing system in place for your email team, assigning responsibilities such as proofreading all of the written content or testing links within the campaign. Only once a campaign has final approval should it be sent to users. 

You can also experiment with A/B testing to help refine results. Try sending different subject lines or email copy to your audiences and monitor which performs best, then use that to further improve your segments and future campaigns. 

8. Monitor results and adjust for the future

The beauty of email marketing is that it’s not a ‘one and done’ affair. Once you send your first email, you will begin gathering data that can be used to inform future campaigns. If you’re worried about subpar results, read our guide to improving email performance. 

Each metric offers its own opportunity for insight-driven exploration. A poor open rate, for example, may mean you need to work on your subject lines or even email deliverability. A poor click-through rate, by comparison, may be more indicative of issues in the content of your campaign. 

Jarrang can help you achieve better B2B results

B2B email marketing may be one of the most effective ways to engage with customers, but it can be a considerable drain on time and resources. 

Partner with Jarrang to unlock a more effective approach – we’ll use our expert team to help you build a better B2B campaign that increases your brand awareness, improves critical success metrics and achieves lasting ROI. 

Click here to get in touch. 

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