Office workers receive hundreds of emails per day. To ensure your emails get opened and read, you’ll want to stay up to date on the latest B2B email marketing tactics – and we’re here to help.
People are busy. To capture and keep their attention, use the most up-to-date best email practices. By incorporating the following seven tactics, you’ll ensure your emails are creative, easy-to-read, attention-grabbing, and interesting. End result: Your customer opens and reads – and doesn’t automatically hit the delete button.
7 B2B Email Marketing Tactics for 2023
- Simplify the Look and Feel of Your Email
- Make Customers Think You Wrote the Email Just for Them
- Nurture Existing Clients and Prospects
- Put Mobile First
- Offer Interactive Content
- Write for Your Top Customers
- Make it Easy for People to Opt Out
#1. Simplify the Look and Feel of Your Email
Many companies think they need to “go big or go home” when it comes to email design. They assume the customer will become captivated by vivid and complex colors and graphics.
In reality, those design tactics risk a few things:
- The email recipient getting overwhelmed, lost or confused
- Design elements not even loading in the email client
- Customers immediately perceiving it as an ad and “not a real email”
When people are busy and want to get through their inbox as quickly as possible, what do they generally do with ads? Often, they hit the delete button.
That’s why a simple approach works best.
Use lots of plain text – and keep your message as short and skimmable as possible.
#2. Make Customers Think You Wrote the Email Just for Them
People want to find solutions to problems that address THEIR issues – and not issues in general.
So, how can you make someone feel as if an email was crafted especially for them – without painstakingly writing a separate email for each sales prospect?
Use these ideas:
- Based on demographics or sales info, create several versions of the same email, targeted to your top customer personas
- Mention how your product will solve their specific pain point
- Take account their stage in the sales funnel and ask relevant questions
- Create a custom call to action
#3. Nurture Existing Clients and Prospects
Some companies only use email to make the sale. That’s often because they make the mistake of thinking of their customer as an entity (a business) rather than a person. Yes, B2B is technically business to business, but behind those businesses are people.
And it’s the people who make the buying decisions. To ensure you remain at the front of their minds, consider keeping them updated on:
- Ways your company is living its values
- Product updates
- Hints and tricks that allow them to get even more out of your solution or service
(Related: B2B Email Marketing Essentials for 2023)
#4. Put Mobile First
The vast majority of your buyers will read your emails on a mobile device – and not on their desktop. For this reason, you’ll want to optimize your email campaigns for mobile. To do so, use this advice:
- Keep your subject line to 25-30 characters or fewer. Anything longer won’t show up on a mobile screen.
- On the email itself, provide lots of white space, with short paragraphs and lots of bullets.
- Make your Call To Action (CTA) clear. Usually short, imperative verbs work best, such as “buy now,” “learn more,” “contact us,” and “claim your offer.”
#5. Offer Interactive Content
Imagine yourself in the room with a salesperson who spends minute after painful minute talking to you about their product – and never once asking you a question. There’s not even a “how are you?”
It’d be a fairly dreadful experience, right?
That’s pretty much what happens when your email lacks anything interactive.
You’re talking to the customer – and not with the customer.
Interactive features make readers feel as if they are a part of the experience rather than a passive participant who’s just trying to get to the end of their inbox. That’s probably why interactive features boost the click-to-open rates by a whopping 73 percent.
Here are a few interactive features to consider:
- Polls
- Gifs
- Videos
#6. Write for Your Top Customers
To target your messaging to the people and businesses most likely to buy what you’re selling, consider setting up “buyer personas.” These fictional representations describe your ideal customer or business in ways that make them easy to imagine.
For example, a buyer persona goes like this…
“Dale is a 43-year-old executive who works in operations for a midsize manufacturing company on the East Coast. He’s looking for ways to get more productivity from his employees, reduce overall costs, and make his company stand out.”
By creating these very specific, very memorable personas, you’re better able to come up with examples, descriptions, and analogies that will get their attention.
When dreaming up your persona, think about…
- Location
- Business size
- The person’s role in the company
- Budget
- Problems
- Needs
- Goals
- Pain points
- Products they’re already using
Once you’ve got your personas in place, take time to create an email campaign strategy that’s targeted for their needs.
#7. Make it Easy for People to Opt Out
Absolutely no one likes receiving emails they didn’t sign up for.
So why waste your time? It’s better to have a smaller list with readers who showed interest and engagement than a large list with no clicks.
Include an opt-out on every email you send. It’s scary to see your list numbers shrink. Trust us. This will pay off later with increased open rates.
Then to get more qualified people to opt in to your emails, offer sign up form or popup on your site.
Conclusion: Tactics That Get Your Buyers to Engage
These email tactics are more than what’s in vogue. They’re effective.
By using them to create your email marketing strategy for the new year, you’ll increase engagement with folks in your funnel – and hopefully eventually convert them to buy.
