Article's Content
Article's Content
If you have a company that does business-to-business (B2B) sales, you know that you need to reach out to other companies. Your business can look at email and SMS marketing examples to find ways to improve it. However, doing email marketing on your own could become difficult.
Your business needs to focus on many things, so you should take advantage of email marketing automation. This will let you maintain your B2B interactions and build up relationships with those brands. Doing so will allow you to focus on other things while the software handles the email marketing. Apply these five tactics so that you can improve your B2B relationships.
1. Generate Leads
Your business needs to generate leads if you want to succeed and to grow. B2B leads are other companies that may have interest in making a purchase from you, which means that you provide a product that they can use to make a profit. This then allows you to set up deals with those retailers or companies to sell them your products for profit. You can utilize specialized tools for B2B prospecting and improve your opportunities for valuable partnerships.
This image shows that nearly 2-out-of-3 B2B marketers list generating high quality leads as one of their top three options for using automated software. This makes sense when you consider the difficulty of lead generation, without any automation. One such tool in the non-profit sector includes Virtuous, a nonprofit marketing automation tool. This software empowers your B2B marketing team with a suite of automated tools, creating a personalized experience for each potential lead. Such strategies can scale lead engagement efficiently while ensuring that each potential business partner feels uniquely valued and connected.
Marketers know that businesses save money and resources when they use marketing automation to handle lead generation. Make sure that you take advantage of email marketing automation so that you can use it to generate leads.
2. Use Autoresponders
While you could hire someone to sit at a computer and wait to respond to emails, some situations don’t need a person to do it. Email autoresponders help with this situation by automatically sending emails that your business created ahead of time. This allows them to send out relevant emails immediately to those leads.
Autoresponders can send emails based on different situations.
- Sending welcome emails for people that just signed up for your emails.
- Sending important information to different companies.
- Confirming subscriptions or purchases from those companies.
Overall, autoresponders make things easier for your company since they handle basic emails that can reuse the same template each time. Keep them conversational so that it feels like a human is responding, and include all of the basic elements you would in your regular emails, like a greeting line, email signature, etc.
In short, you create welcome emails and other common emails, ahead of time, so that your autoresponder will send them to your leads as needed. After all, you shouldn’t have to create a new confirmation email every time you need to send one. Have the autoresponder handle all of those common emails to make things easier for your business.
3. Segment for Relevant Information
You may have different types of emails that you want to send to your leads. However, certain emails may not be relevant to some of your leads, but they are vital for others. With this in mind, you shouldn’t send every type of email to all of your leads. It can cause those businesses to have negative impressions, such as:
- Businesses feel like you don’t know what they want.
- They can mark your emails as spam if you send information that doesn’t apply to them (a lot of companies are using email security protocols to handle unauthorized email usage)
- They feel like your business has nothing to provide them.
You never want businesses to feel this way, so you can use email marketing automation to segment your audience. Doing so will benefit your business.
As you can see, segmenting emails allows you to increase your open and click-through rates. As you have your marketing automation segment your audience, you can see these benefits apply to you.
4. Lead Nurturing
When it comes to email marketing, you don’t just send one email and expect it to turn your leads into customers. If you want them to work, you need to nurture your leads. This means that you help those businesses become customers by continuing to send them relevant information and invitations to work with your business.
In essence, you want to nurture your leads by offering incentives for decision-making. Your automated marketing software can do this based on their interactions with you. Look at this example:
- A business opens your email that mentions one of your products.
- The business’ representative goes on your website and looks at your different products.
- Your software picks up on this and sends them an email. This email contains a 10% discount on their next purchase.
You can set up your automated marketing software to send these emails to businesses when they perform certain actions. This includes any other types of emails that you want to send them to help them through the lead nurturing process.
If your target audience is active on social media, send them auto messages via Facebook messenger. As research from SocialPilot shows, social media accounts can be a fully functional sales channel that drives revenue.
5. Collect and Analyze Data
You should always seek to improve your business and to adjust it so that you can work with other companies. You can accomplish this by collecting and analyzing email data. Luckily, email marketing automation will collect that data for you so that you can see how you perform.
Automated software places all of the data into one spot so that you can easily access it and see the changes that occur in your email marketing. Consider these questions as you look over the data.
- What areas did we improve in? Where did we perform worse?
- What changes did we make that affected those areas?
- Should we keep those changes or try something else?
You won’t have to collect and organize this data on your own. Instead, you can use SMS marketing or let the automated software collect this email information for you. This will allow you to look it over and make changes to improve your business.
Wrapping up
While you can handle email marketing on your own, you will make things easier for yourself by using automated software. Doing so will save you time, make you more money, and allow you to work on other aspects of your business. These five tips give you a general idea of the possibilities with email marketing automation and how it can help your business.
Keep in mind that email automation can do so much more for you, but these five tactics will help you get started and make it immediately useful. You can use it to improve your business and build it up so that you can reach out in the B2B community.
If you’re considering working email automation into your overall B2B marketing strategy, check out our free guide to building a strategy that works.
Guest contribution from Evaldas Mockus, Marketing at Omnisend
