According to a B2B industry survey, 91% of marketers rated email as one of the most important marketing channels for their overall content marketing success.
Our goal for this post is to talk about the common B2B email marketing mistakes made by most B2B marketers, ways to avoid them and understand the essentials of a successful marketing strategy.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
B2B companies use emails to inform their customers about new products and services, brand awareness, and boost conversions. B2B email marketing efforts include sending customers emails about:
Email marketing allows businesses to target specific audiences with marketing messages. However, overdoing it and spamming customers can completely turn them off.
For most B2B companies, email marketing is an effective way to develop quality marketing campaigns. You can engage readers, build a following, and generate sales by using email marketing the right way.
But, many companies struggle to get results from email marketing due to a lack of creativity and a bad marketing strategy.
Here are the most common email marketing mistakes made by most B2B marketers:
Email list segmentation is simply the division of email lists into different groups or segments based on user interest groups, behavior, demographics, etc.
B2B marketers who do not segment their email list often send out impersonal emails that could lead to canceled subscriptions. Annoyed users even block emails that irritate them.
If you’re from marketing, you already know that it's a nightmare to get blocked by your subscribers, and even worse, get blacklisted by the email provider.
Segmenting your audience can help you avoid this and even improve your email marketing ROI.
If your B2B customers are active on LinkedIn and other social platforms, or if they have participated in trade shows, you can group them based on their interests. You can also group them based on the type of emails or ads they usually respond to.
Tracking your customers’ buying behavior such as most repeated orders, pricing range of the orders, and so on. You can also group them based on what items they have spent a good amount of time researching on your online store and group them accordingly.
A study by litmus found that 7% of all email opens happen between 10 am and 11 am, and 21% between 9 am and noon. You can then send emails at an ideal time when your customer is most likely to open your email.
Demographic information such as age, gender, company position, and income level provides you with insight into your audience's needs and interests. The more information that can be obtained about your audience during the signup process, the better your options are for demographic segmentation.
Customers are more inclined to make repeat purchases if your product is good the first time. They can then be segmented together and retargeted to purchase complementary products or upgrades from what they already own.
By grouping your new customers together, you can send them information about your brand and convince them to purchase from you. The list could include chatbot leads, people who have submitted feedback forms or survey forms, leads from Google Ads, banners on your website, social media ads, etc.
Existing customers can include ones that are in the middle of the sales funnel or ones who have already made a purchase. They could also be the ones who have initiated a chat on the chatbot or have submitted feedback and surveys.
People who have subscribed to your email list probably did so because they resonated with the content on your blog. By grouping them together, you can focus on sending them an informative email with interesting facts and blog links.
Analyzing the data about viewer purchases and searches, you can segment them into groups with similar interests. For instance, all the viewers who searched for outdoor LED lights can be grouped together and sent emails regarding the same. These mails are called content-specific emails.
High-paying customers need to be given special attention as compared to the latter. On the other hand, you can focus your marketing efforts to encourage low-spending customers to pay more via cross-selling and upselling.
It may be a good idea to send out a targeted email to subscribers who haven't been active in a while to see if they still want to hear from you or if they want to unsubscribe. If you have inactive subscribers for a very long time, you should remove them after a certain point and keep your email list updated.
If your email marketing doesn't provide a personal touch, it won't succeed. To avoid making this email marketing mistake, segment your email list to know your audience better. This will help you create more targeted email campaigns with more personalized subject lines and messages.
A study on segmented emails is more likely to be opened by 75% of recipients when they feel like the content has been tailored just for them. By targeting each segment strategically, you can maximize your marketing efforts.
One of the most common B2B email marketing mistakes is not creating an email subject line that is clear, concise, and direct.
- Semrush
Avoid using spam trigger words in your B2B emails. Trigger words in your subject lines can lead to spam traps and cause your email to bypass a recipient's inbox and go straight to spam.
Here’s how you can avoid creating spam emails:
Be sure to spend some time formulating the perfect subject line. The smallest mistake can result in your email landing in the spam folder instead of being converted into a sale.
82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through mail personalization. And yet, 70% of brands fail to use them!
Here are 6 B2B email personalization techniques you should consider using:
Segregate your customers based on the mix of actions they take or use their individual buyer personas to decide what factors to group them under. This process of email list segmentation will help you create unique email campaigns for each group of audience.
Use subject lines with customer names, or experiment with new variations. If you know what type of emails or subject lines bagged the most engagement for a segment group, you can use a similar email type in your next email.
Thanks to creating detailed buyer personas, you already know the pain points of your customer. Use it to personalize your email by highlighting the problem, stirring it up, and then offering a great solution!
Using email marketing tools and A/B testing, you can gather data that tells you when your customer opens emails. You can time your emails accordingly.
Even B2B businesses have now started establishing B2B lead generation using a technique where an email is sent from a person rather than a business.
Some businesses send emails from No-reply@ or DoNotReply@ email addresses, which can put off your B2B customer instantly. It will easily seem like an email that was sent to the masses, where the sender doesn't appreciate replies.
Look at this email I received from TRR on my mobile device recently. The company sends personalized emails to their potential B2B sellers, luring them with irresistible offers for selling on their platform.
Do you notice how there’s a photo of Andrea at the top and her name, designation, and contact number of her organization at the bottom?
This kind of personalization makes any business feel a lot more humanized even when I know it could possibly even be an automated email that’s probably sent to a bunch of people!
Ever wondered why you receive emails with subject lines like:
“Hey, we miss you.”, “
“Haven’t seen you in a while.” or
“There are items waiting in your cart, hurry!”
These are automated behavioral trigger emails that are sent when you show a certain behavior type or pattern. With that email sent by Andrea, you must have noticed that it was sent to me because I was a new subscriber who hasn’t used any product yet.
I’d like you to notice the second part of the same email where there’s a graphic image with a great offer.
The key takeaway here is that when it comes to email marketing for B2B customers, you don’t always have to sell something or bombard your email subscribers with offers all the time.
It’s important to leave a good first impression just like you would do when you attend an important business meeting. Introduce yourself first if you’re a small B2B company and ease into it.
If you have a B2B eCommerce business that wants more B2B sellers on your eCommerce platform, you can use a similar B2B email personalization technique in your email campaigns too.
A common B2B email marketing mistake made by most marketers is that they often use HTML coding instead of a drag-and-drop email builder. Hands-on coding takes time and is prone to errors. B2B marketers may not always have coding experience.
Using email builders, marketers don’t need to outsource to external email design firms.
Here’s how a drag‑and‑drop email builder can be beneficial to you:
A good email builder doesn’t require you to redesign an email that was initially designed for desktop users. The ready-to-use email template builder can redesign the email for mobile view in just a click! You can also hide select columns, images, and heavy text in your mobile version.
With built-in reporting, you can track the success of your B2B email campaign after it is sent. Your dashboard would provide detailed information on how and where your users engage with your content.
You can add visual content like images and videos in your email to make them more interesting.
Many drag-and-drop email builders offer innovative options to include dynamic content and content snippets. This allows content marketers to easily add, style, and structure content.
By using a drag-and-drop email builder, B2B marketers can easily avoid the mistakes that HTML coding would incur.
A common email marketing mistake made by companies is not moving their data to cloud-based systems. Unsynchronized data and files can hamper productivity. B2B companies can avoid physical risks, such as the loss of documents or damage to property that can be extremely costly to repair.
With cloud storage, employees can access data from anywhere, whether they are traveling or working at home.
There are three main types of cloud storage systems:
In IaaS, you are provided with on-demand access to computing resources such as storage, networking, and servers. In the infrastructure provided by the provider, you run your own platforms and applications.
In PaaS, the provider gives you access to a cloud environment for evaluating, managing, and hosting applications. You can use the platform to test and develop applications. Backups, security, and operating systems are the responsibilities of the provider.
With the SaaS model of cloud computing, you get access to the provider's cloud-based software. An API or the web allows you to access the software application instead of installing it locally.
Cloud computing and storage are constantly expanding, so businesses of any size and budget can take advantage of their cost-saving potential. CRM software can also be integrated with sales and marketing tools.
There are 269 billion emails sent every day. This means that every day, 72 emails are sent out to the 3.7 billion people who use email. To receive so many emails is just too much.
A common mistake made by B2B marketers is spamming potential customers with irrelevant emails. If your customers do not open your emails, you're probably sending them too many, which will result in a low click-through rate (CTR).
A CTR tells you how many people clicked on at least one link in the message. The CTR of an email is calculated as follows:
For example, if you sent 500 emails and 250 of them were opened, your CTR is: (250/500) x 100 = 50%
When someone joins your list, makes a purchase, or opens one of your messages, ask them how many promotional emails they'd like to receive.
Based on the response to your survey, you can choose to communicate with some customers weekly, while others only occasionally.
Here are a few more interesting ways to improve your email click-through rate.
To track the B2B email marketing mistakes you're making and also to avoid them in the future, you must track all your email marketing campaigns.
The Key Point Indicators (KPIs) of your B2B email marketing campaign can be a great way to understand how well a campaign is performing. Email analytics also lets you know what type of emails your subscribers like or interact with the most.
Some important KPIs that you should track include:
When it comes to B2B email marketing, two things are important:
Analytics helps you put these into action by providing data to support your decisions.
With the help of email analytics, you can determine which subscribers are most likely to interact with your emails and take action. You can determine which content resonated with your subscribers, and which content influenced their actions.
Here are the average KPIs across all industries worldwide for these metrics, broken down by industry.
What are your own email reports like compared to industry averages?
All email marketing tools allow you to monitor dozens of metrics. But if their importance is overemphasized, the focus may shift to less precise elements.
So if you blindly follow the metrics, you may get inaccurate results. And tracking the wrong numbers is a commonly made marketing mistake by many marketers. Ensure that you are tracking the right numbers by choosing and following the right metrics and key point indicators (KPIs).
A conversion path is a guided path that a customer takes from start to finish on your website. This helps brands to attract visitors and convert them into prospects. When done right, it can help marketers get quality leads, convert them to customers, and increase sales.
Identifying the best conversion path is the first step to converting visitors into leads. There are several components to this path, including:
When prospects enter the sales funnel,
One of the most common B2B email marketing mistakes is failing to define a clear path to conversion. There are times when you have high clickthrough rates but low conversion rates.
This could be because your CTA on the website or ad looks captivating at first, but then when the customer reaches the landing page, they're disappointed.
It may also be that your landing page looks great, but your form ends up being too long and the customers do not want to spend the time filling it out, so they leave.
In such scenarios, it is extremely important to reevaluate each and every part of your conversion path by tracking the right metrics using marketing automation. With the right conversion path, it is possible to convert more website visitors into paying customers.
Personalized messages can be sent to prospects and customers at defined intervals or based on specific conditions.
For instance,
Email marketing automation allows marketers to send triggered or timed promotions to subscribers on mailing lists at specific intervals.
But email automation is not foolproof, and businesses implementing it without thorough testing or running it too long without regular maintenance can suffer disastrous consequences.
Testing your email is essential because it allows you to thoroughly review it before you launch it, from the subject line to the call-to-action buttons. You can also ensure that all the links function properly.
By making sure you only send emails that are required, you can prevent email overload. Imagine you are in the viewers' place and send only the amount of emails you would want to receive.
Be sure that your email content has a distinct personality and that your list is well segmented so all emails you send out will be relevant and valuable to your recipients.
Using AI will allow you to restructure your email campaigns into multiple sub-campaigns, clean up list data, personalize email bodies, and write highly targeted email subject lines.
If your email platform is integrated with CRM and eCommerce platforms, you will be able to create robust profiles that will help you deliver highly personalized emails.
This enables you to leverage information like a user's name, demographics, purchase history, etc., allowing you to tailor your emails and make them much more relevant and engaging.
Adjust the preferences center to reflect the types of emails you are adding to your email automation program. Make sure that recipients can opt out of certain emails if that is what they want. Give your subscribers the choice of choosing the frequency at which they receive your emails.
It is common for automated marketing campaigns to make mistakes, but they don't always require a response. In many cases, the mistake can be corrected without attracting attention. Minor mistakes, such as spelling errors, can generally be overlooked.
By offering an effective apology, you can run your campaign as if everything had gone smoothly from the beginning. In fact, resolving an error in your campaign requires even more creativity than the original campaign.
Create a few "audible-ready" templates for various scenarios, so you can send an "oops" message in case there is a time-sensitive campaign.
Automation is a steady process that needs to be reviewed, revisited, and changed regularly based on your metrics.
Typically, visitors who come to your website, browse your products, and leave without taking any actions are considered a bounce.
An email retargeting strategy gives you the chance to reach out to this visitor again and make a sale or lead. And so, the likelihood of these existing customers making a purchase is significantly higher than that of new customers.
In pixel-based retargeting, a cookie is placed on the computer of the visitor to allow you to track which pages the visitor visited, which products they bought, and so on.
Your ads will appear when your visitors read articles, listen to music, or visit other online stores while browsing your site. Using this method, you can influence them to come back to your site and make a purchase when they are ready.
If you already have a contact's data in your database, you can target them through list-based retargeting. Retargeting ads will be served exclusively to the users who have those addresses on those social networks after uploading the list to the retargeting campaign (usually on Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter).
A combination of onsite CTAs, offsite advertising and email marketing is used for email retargeting. Retargeting can reduce bounce rates, increase conversions, and drive revenue.
However, email retargeting is far from easy. Customers can easily become frustrated if you assume incorrect information about them or send the wrong content.
Research also shows that 96% of first-time website visitors are not ready to buy. In order to reach website visitors who abandon your site without converting, you need to retarget them.
The list of common B2B email marketing mistakes would be absolutely incomplete if optimizing your emails for a mobile view isn't on it.
A study confirms that most emails are opened on a mobile device than on laptops today. In fact, 55% of email is now opened on a mobile device.
The iPhone is the most popular platform in the mobile email space (28.4%) followed by Apple iPad (9.3%) and Google Android (2.3%) - Litmus “Email Analytics” (June 2019)
When you optimize your emails for mobile ask yourself these questions:
There’s plenty to consider when you are going down the road of optimizing email mobile responsiveness.
Try going for a minimalistic approach especially when you use ready-to-use mobile email templates. This will help you tick things off your checklist when you have a tight deadline to meet.
Another better alternative is to use artificial intelligence for mobile commerce. This allows you to use email automation tools that send emails only if every predefined criterion has been met. This not only saves time and eliminates manual intervention but also reduces errors caused due to fatigue from manual checks.
And of course, there are the added benefits of segmentation and personalization of emails based on buyer personas and interests that can lead to higher ROIs.
A great email marketing strategy is critical to achieving your overall B2B marketing goals. It gives consumers a tailored, personalized experience while also improving company revenue.
Don't believe us?
Check out these statistics: Using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy is an email marketing mistake you should definitely avoid if you want to build strong relationships with your B2B buyers.
The success of your B2B email marketing campaigns depends on the creation of a successful strategy. Without a clear email marketing strategy, you might as well be shooting arrows in the dark.
To prevent email marketing mistakes that could sabotage your efforts, here are 7 steps you should follow to create a successful B2B email marketing strategy.
The goal of email marketing is to:
Marketing campaigns should align with these or similar goals to avoid email marketing mistakes.
Segmentation is a game-changer for email marketing campaigns.
Having an engaged subscriber list is different from having a contact database. There’s no point spending a lot of money on people who’d never convert. And so, it's important that you segment your email list accordingly.
Every segmented group will have a special approach made. This way, your emails will be relevant to their needs and interests, while you can spend sparingly as well.
Source
You can personalize your emails based on the buying behavior, needs, and interests of your prospects.
If you know how and where your subscribers signed up, you can tailor your marketing efforts to communicate better with them.
It can be through ads or sign-up forms on your website, community sites, social media, and so on.
There are many ways to segment your email audience. One way is to segregate the decision-makers and non-decision makers into separate groups. Also, check if it could be possible for the non-decision-makers to connect you with the decision-makers of their company.
Also, know if dealing with small or large businesses and find out if they can afford your pricing plans. Are these companies currently using your competitor’s products and services?
Understand how your product could help them better. You can also group existing customers who have been loyal to you so far. So when it comes to your VIP, repeat customers, you can share offers that can entice them to buy more of what you provide.
Target each of these segmented lists differently to drive conversions. This will help you target your customers with emails that resonate with their interests and pain points specifically.
Clean up your list regularly to remove random addresses that are not relevant to your B2B business or that may be unopened. Rather, target prospects who are able and willing to make a purchase.
Your email and content will probably be read by an entry-level or mid-level executive, who will then forward it to higher management.
If you want your content to reach the top management, ensure that:
One of the biggest email marketing mistakes a marketer can make is trying to convert B2B customers with a generalized campaign. Prepare a series of email marketing campaigns for different B2B segments instead.
In this way, you can optimize conversion rates by tailoring your messages to the needs and interests of each group.
Decide the number of email campaigns you are planning to run. Decide whether to deploy them weekly, quarterly, monthly, or annually.
You may have multiple emails in one campaign to help a prospect go from consideration to conversion. Plan when to send these with a content calendar. With AI, you can find out what time each subscriber is online, so you can send them messages at that time.
Every B2B customer may have a different budget and spending capacity. You need to ensure that you can cater to all of them by advertising different pricing plans and campaigns based on their needs.
For instance, you can entice a B2B startup with your product's ability to provide them with a greater value for a lower price than your competitors.
Design different approaches to connect with a recipient based on their organizational roles and hierarchy. The same email campaigns won’t work on mid-level executives and CEOs alike.
Set aside the amount that you will spend on your marketing team, automation tools, testing, and so on. Leave nothing to chance.
B2B marketing solely depends on building trusting relationships with your customers and nurturing leads. And, email automation can help you do just that.
Here are a few ways how using an AI-powered email automation software can help B2B marketers:
There are many types of files you will have as you create content, such as docs, images, videos, spreadsheets, and so forth. As a result, you'll have content everywhere, and to make it useful, you'll need to organize and store it all in one place. And this is exactly what a content library allows you to do.
With a content library, you can manage, store, and deploy content needed for email marketing campaigns. The library provides a central location for your team to access the files they need when they need them.
Additionally, it allows you to restrict file access for your team members based on their clearance to protect sensitive information.
You can also save time by using the same content for multiple campaigns at once, making the creation of emails much quicker. You can, for example, save the same email signature in your content library and duplicate it in multiple campaigns simply by dragging it into different designs.
Based on the behavior of your customers, AI can tell you what messages to send and when to send them. Using AI, marketers can provide personalized product recommendations to customers and include them in their email communications.
You can also use cross-selling and upselling marketing within your emails, especially when you are a B2B eCommerce company.
Take, for instance, a company always places bulk orders of office LED lights of a particular brand.
By adding product carousel recommendations into your email that are personalized to meet the likes or needs of your B2B buyer, you improve the chances of a customer buying a product or service that they may have not even considered before.
Creating the right email format, font, and size of the text is essential to success in email marketing for B2B companies.
With a MarComm Creator, you can
Automation triggers are events that immediately begin your automation workflow as soon as they occur. They can kick off an entire automated process in response to web-based, email-based, manual, or application-based input.
Note that a workflow process that is linked to a specific trigger is activated when an automation trigger is fired.
Types of automation triggers
So when a visitor performs a certain action (like sign up for your newsletter), it will activate a specific email marketing campaign and send them the required email.
Behavioral triggers allow you to tailor your email to suit the needs of your customers based on their actions.
The following behaviors can be triggered by retargeting via email:
Here’s an example of a re-engagement email that can be sent through a trigger set when a customer abandons products in their shopping cart:
Apart from setting behavioral triggers, there’s a lot you can do with email automation.
You can pre-assign certain criteria like
Ultimately, not automating your email campaigns is one of the email marketing mistakes that B2B marketers cannot afford to make.
Most platforms make it easy to find, store and analyze data, allowing you to optimize your campaigns.
By tracking the right metrics, you can:
When you choose a platform like ewiz commerce, you don’t have to worry about third-party integrations. ewiz allows you to easily integrate with all the top automation tools in the market instantly.
A/B testing or split testing enables marketers to test distinct elements of their email to determine which copy works best.
You can either do the testing manually or with AI. Despite the approach you choose, there are a few points to keep in mind to get it right.
Here are some tips to get your testing right:
Select the variables you want to test. If you test too many or too few, you may not get as accurate results. The variables can include the subject line (the most popular option), images, CTAs, headlines, offers, etc.
When you have tested each variable, combine the ones that gave the best results to get the best design.
Your testing period depends on your sales cycle. If your prospects go from consideration to conversion quickly, your testing period may be short.
However, if you are a B2B seller with a long conversion period, let your tests run for longer to avoid getting inaccurate results.
A B2B hold-out group is a segment of prospects who continue to receive your old email marketing campaigns with no variation in copy or timing.
This group should be large enough for you to get meaningful results based on your list size, so you don't disrupt a campaign that is working. This group acts as a comparison between the old and new approaches.
The variables not being tested need to be the same throughout the emails.
For instance, if you are testing subject lines, the offer, the copy, the images, and the CTA placements, they must all be the same throughout the emails.
Send out different test versions at the same time to avoid bias based on behavioral or environmental factors. Especially when your list includes people in different time zones.
Many data sets are arranged by geographic location, alphabetical segmentation, and so forth, causing biases. To avoid these biases in your tests, ensure that the data used is completely random.
With AI, you can generate randomized test lines based on your brand voice, and by testing these samples, you can get accurate results about which subject lines work.
When testing, make sure your sample size is not too small because it will invalidate your results. So, you can use a free sample size calculator, such as Phrase or Optimizely, instead of guessing the size of your sample.
Multiple samples usually produce results within a similar range of values. For example, if you test three subject lines simultaneously and two of them are within 12% to 15% and just one exceeds 32%, that would be considered an outlier.
The outlier could be because of built-in bias or bots opening emails, code tracking bugs, or so on. Find out what caused it and fix it.
Understanding your testing method is crucial to ensure it's effective. A variety of email marketing mistakes can occur even if a single variable is off.
Now that you have tested every element of your email marketing strategy, you know exactly what works for your B2B email marketing strategy and what doesn’t.
But that may change tomorrow. Because user behavior and trends keep evolving continuously. And one of the biggest email marketing mistakes a B2B marketer can make is not changing with the times.
Using an AI-powered B2B eCommerce platform, you can integrate your CRM to any number of sales and marketing automation tools.
With Artificial Intelligence, you can gain insight into what type of emails your customers like and hate.
You can then make personalized product recommendations based on their actual interests. With a personalized approach to B2B email marketing, you can
Email marketing automation, when implemented correctly, allows B2B marketers to develop strategies that lead to higher sales. Don’t worry, our tech support team at ewiz can help you with setting up your email automation system and help you reduce making some of the common email marketing mistakes mentioned in this article.
ewiz commerce is an Al-powered B2B eCommerce Platform that can create your online store in less than three weeks and help you every single step of the way.
With ewiz commerce, you can use an AI-powered B2B eCommerce platform that provides:
If you’re interested to know more about ewiz commerce and how AI helps small and medium B2B businesses ramp up their eCommerce sales with an AI-enabled B2B eCommerce platform, you can comment below or talk to us.
What is B2B Email Marketing?
