The world of digital marketing and lead generation is littered with various touchpoints — yet, email marketing remains one of the most effective and direct strategies when it comes to B2B lead generation. For business leaders and c-suite executives, email is much more than a tool used for communication; it’s a way to push leads through the sales and marketing funnel and generate conversions.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how to optimise your email marketing strategy to generate qualified leads and deliver measurable return on investment (ROI).
Why Email Marketing is Crucial in B2B
In an increasingly online and reactive work, social media and paid marketing have their place within lead generation strategies. However, email marketing offers some unique advantages, especially within B2B organisations. These include:
- Direct access to decision makers: Emails can be sent directly to your most valuable prospects for them to look over and respond to.
- High ROI: According to research, email marketing generates $36 for every $1 spent by marketers.
- Scalable: Through automation and segmentation platforms, you’re able to send out tailored emails to hundreds of recipients at the click of a button.
When it comes to B2B marketing, strategies need to be altered to stay ahead of the curve. Here are some aspects to consider in your next marketing strategy.
1. Build a high-quality list
It might be tempting to buy your database of leads. However, the success of your campaign depends on the quality of your database and who you reach out to. Prioritise list-building activities to attract leads who actually want to hear from you.
If you want to build out your own quality list of leads, you could try:
Lead magnets
These are high-value resources, such as whitepapers, industry reports, or exclusive webinars, in exchange for email addresses and contact information.
Gating content
Any high-value content on your website could be gated behind simple opt-in forms in order to capture leads.
Integrating LinkedIn
Use LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms to gather contact information directly from the platform, through the seamless auto-fill forms via your ads.
2. Keep communication relevant
Business leaders and c-suite executives — AKA your target audience — expect relevant emails to land in their inbox. This means that a one-size-fits-all campaign is redundant and simply won’t give you the results a strategic approach would.
Consider segmenting your list into audience types, such as industry, job role, or even buyer stage.
Some of the more common audience verticals are:
- Industry (e.g., tech, financial services)
- Job function (e.g., Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Information Officer)
- Buyer stage (e.g., awareness, consideration, decision making)
- Lead status (e.g., cold lead, warm lead, hot lead)
For each vertical, you’ll want to customise your communication to keep it as relevant as possible to that audience. For example, a CEO is more likely to respond to ROI-related emails, while an Operations Officer would prioritise integration or scalability subject lines.
3. Choose the right subject line
Your subject line is your first impression to your audience. Especially when it comes to senior executives and leaders, you need to have a strong subject line.
Data-driven, clear, and relevant subject lines are ideal for these audiences.
4. Focus on value over sales
You want your emails to build up trust between you and your recipients. To do this, you want to avoid being pushy with your sales and, instead, provide the value your product or service can offer.
As this article advises: “Instead of steering conversations towards your product or service, focus on their needs.” Your emails should educate, inspire, or solve a problem that the recipient is possibly facing, then lead them to a resource that you’re providing.
High-performing B2B email content could be:
- Benchmarking reports that are specific to their sector or industry.
- Case studies that highlight transformation within similar organizations.
- Invitations to exclusive webinars, roundtables, or events.
Remember, you want to help them, not sell to them.
5. Humanise the sales journey
As you’re focused on adding value to your target audience, remember to humanise the journey as much as possible. Take the time to build a relationship with your prospective leads, and treat them as your peers rather than part of the sales funnel.
There are a few behavioural workflows you can use to help automate and humanise the lead generation process.
- Set up drip campaigns: These are emails that are sent incrementally to your potential leads. The ‘drip’ sending of emails aim to nurture your leads over time, keeping you in regular contact in order to convert prospects.
- Trigger-based emails: These are sent once a specific action has been made, which then ‘triggers’ an email to be sent. This could be anything from a whitepaper download to subscribing to a newsletter.
- Re-engagement sequencing: These are for prospects that may have started to go cold. Maybe they’ve not engaged with an email for a period of time, in which case an email could be sent across to bring their attention back.
Regardless of which workflow you choose, remember to keep it as human as possible — as if it was written specifically for them.
6. Track the right metrics
The success of your email marketing campaign isn’t solely based on things like open rates and leads. While this may be the main purpose of your campaign, there are other key metrics that you should be tracking, which can help with other aspects of your business, such as brand awareness.
For example, you could look at click-through rates to see if your recipients are engaging with your content. If yes, look at which elements of your email they’re engaging with and which types of content are encouraging them to click through.
You could also track data acceleration to see if specific email campaigns and strategies are encouraging your contacts to move faster through the marketing funnel.
You should also consider A/B testing your emails to see if specific subject lines, hooks, or email styles capture the attention of your audience quicker than others. We recommend always A/B testing your emails so you can stay ahead of the curve and continuously optimise and improve your email campaigns.
Generate Leads With Email Marketing Today
Your brand’s email campaigns are a direct reflection of your value proposition and industry authority. When done right, email marketing helps to cultivate trust, start a conversion, and ultimately convert prospective leads into loyal partners.
Make every email with every campaign you push out. Our team is well versed in lead generation tactics, especially through email marketing. Get in touch to see how we can kickstart your campaigns.