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Email Marketing Benefits and Challenges for B2B Businesses – Expert Insights

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In the B2B marketing world, social media is the top platform due to its wide reach and its freeness.
Email Marketing Benefits and Challenges for B2B Businesses – Experts Insights

Email Marketing Benefits and Challenges for B2B Businesses – Experts Insights

Introduction

B2B Email Marketing involves sending email campaigns to businesses rather than individual buyers.

The goal is to reach out to your prospects (B2B buyers) via their work email, educate them about your products, and convert them into marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

A few Email Marketing stats that you need to know in 2022.

  • SuperOffice says that $1 spend on email marketing gets you more than $43 in return.
  • 31% of marketers say email has the biggest per-channel impact on revenue.
  • The Content Marketing Institute says email is the third most popular distribution channel for marketers, with 87% leveraging the channel.
  • Backlinko says that 82% of marketers stick to a subject line limit of 60 characters.

 

Here’s Our Expert Panel

#1 Larry Weil

High Quality Research, Copywriting and Targeting Equals Email Marketing Success

Author Bio

Larry is an expert seller, negotiator, presenter, and strategist. He has successfully represented properties and sponsors in categories including Conferences, Trade Shows, Convention and Visitors Bureaus, Entertainment and Sports Properties, Financial Services, Tech, Real Estate and non-profits. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#2 Andrew Miller

Automation of B2B email marketing using various software tools can save you time, and bring back leads from the dead. Creating a nice drip campaign is an incredible way to keep people opening your emails, warm prospects, and turn a subscriber into a customer. Beyond that, even when you are very new you can hone your messaging 10x faster using automated B2B outreach. If you don’t know how, DM me on Instagram @andrewstartups.

Author Bio

Andrew Lee Miller is a prolific bootstrapped startup Marketing expert also known as @AndrewStartups who over the past 15 years has driven 3 VC-backed startup exits and dozens of successfully funded startups! Andrew’s specialty lies in helping companies scale efficiently in the early stages and he has taught and lectured around the world in over 15 countries on Paid Advertising, Growth Hacking, Public Relations, Search Marketing, and more. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#3 Sheena Rijwani

Ideally, you should invest in the channel where your audience is most active. While social media has taken a hit in this space, for the B2B segment, emails are among the most effective ways to connect with and convert your audience.

There are many reasons why you should invest in email marketing, but here are our top 3:

1. You own your list: Once you have an email list, it’s yours to keep. You can download it and keep it safe on your hard drive for future and present use. It’s an owned asset, which can help grow your business.

2. Educate your audience: While selling is one aspect of using email marketing, your audience will only buy from you once they trust you. To gain their trust, educating, providing value, and solving problems are important.

With an email newsletter or resource list, you can educate your audience. Grab a common pain point, address it, provide innovative solutions, and redirect them to a helpful blog or resource on your website.

3. Greater conversions and ROI
Email marketing has an ROI of a whopping 4400%. That’s a crazy percentage for any marketing channel, and it’s the primary reason why many B2B businesses are now focusing their attention on email marketing.

B2B Email Marketing is worth the investment, and if you’re still missing out on it, you may need to rethink your marketing strategies. Selling to businesses is not easy. It requires some serious research, targeting, understanding, and personalization to convert them.

If you know your game in email marketing, you will not see any challenges and as mentioned above it is one of the efficient go to market strategies in the B2B segment

Author Bio

An innovative & well-rounded marketer with over twelve years of B2B experience in the technology space. Always believe in common sense to tackle business issues and have an aptitude for improving processes, experiences, and initiatives. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#4 Celeste Walsh

When it comes to the benefits of email marketing, what comes to mind is the ability to directly communicate with your target audience, anywhere and anytime. B2B integration is utilized to help ensure a successful outcome of a campaign. Whatever the case may be, email marketing plays a role that helps to communicate what your services, special offers, and is a tool to help communicate what the target audience needs. This strategy is used solely for telling the interested client that you have the skills and resources they are looking for. Email marketing is classic, quick, and gets the job done!

The downside, just like any marketing strategy there’s risk involved. Your campaign might not get the results you projected. If this happens, go back to the drawing board and review the campaign results. Challenges may arise in your B2B email marketing, but you have the resources to explore what went wrong and how you can resolve the issues in the future. Use the tools provided to you to your best advantage in your next campaign!

Author Bio

Celeste Walsh is the Head of Client Services for Miami-based digital marketing company, Flourish Media. She has worked with various brands in the online space helping to establish their online presence, including beauty, tech, fashion, and family law. She can help you flourish! www.flourishmediaconference.com.

#5 Daniel Soldan

 

The challenges and benefits of B2B email marketing are related. Strengthening the bond with potential customers and building a long-term relationship with them from the beginning is a great challenge and a huge benefit if it is successful.

All companies use email marketing as a sales and loyalty tool, and since these are emails between professionals and businesses, it is fundamental to educate the prospects to start conversations and pay attention to the users’ feedback.

As the contracting term is longer between B2B companies than in B2C, it is possible to develop non-aggressive strategies focused on the person’s real need concerning its objectives, and at the same time, we can position our brand as an expert in the solution offered.

The most important challenge for companies that work or want to work with email marketing B2B is to stop talking about themselves, and to actively listen to their customers to achieve business opportunities.

Author Bio

Made in Argentina, Dani Soldán, founded emBlue, an omnichannel communication hub created to optimise communications between companies and customers. You can connect with him on https://www.embluemail.com/en/.

#6 Mark Asquith

The main challenge facing B2B businesses looking to execute high-quality email marketing is the attention span of readers! Creative content is a must and email marketers should spend time focussing on story telling rather than “marketing” – our job is to educate and amplify that education and well considered email marketing is vital to that.

Author Bio

Mark Asquith is a serial entrepreneur who has built several globally successful businesses since he quit his real job in 2005. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#7 Alex Gray

Cold email & LinkedIn multi touch success

Author Bio

Always building, always learning. B2B marketing, sales, and building my perfect life. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#8 Shannan Seely

An email greeting with “Hi Everyone” will engage no one. Think of one person and write to him. Realise he’s a human who is constantly asking, “What’s in it for me?” Answer his question succinctly. And your message will resonate with him and others like him.

Author Bio

B2B and Healthcare Digital Copywriter | Website, landing pages and email copy expert. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#9 Lori Highby

Email is one of the most important assets to any B2B business. We don’t own the social media channels where our followers and prospects are engaging with us, therefore, email is the tool that allows us to stay in touch with our ideal customer and own that relationship.

Challenges that most B2B entities encounter with email marketing is having the correct email address and maintaining a clean list. One of the best ways to ensure your email list remains clean is to evaluate it as you use it. When sending out new messages, look at the last time you sent out a message and confirm if any adjustments need to be made such as removing emails that are no longer active or ones that have low engagement rates.

Looking to grow your list? Don’t have a “sign up for our newsletter” box on your website, rather offer something of value and use the price to access this as their email address. Focus on solving a problem with the giveaway, provide tips and tricks your ideal customer would appreciate.

Last, getting individuals to open your email is likely one of the biggest challenges. Think about this, there are two reasons an email is opened, 1) they know the sender and/or 2) the subject line is enticing enough that they click open. The first part is easy, the second part here is where there’s a lot of missed opportunities. Spending time crafting a subject line that will wow your audience will help open rates increase.

Author Bio

Lori Highby is a podcast host, speaker, educator, and founder of Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency. Through strategic actionable moves, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies to micro-business owners, to achieve their marketing goals. Lori carries her energy and drive to empower and educate fellow life-long learners. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#10 Miles Anthony Smith

Most B2B purchases are high consideration ones, which means they usually need more convincing to buy than a B2C purchase. This is great news since more B2B buyers than ever before are searching for information online! It’s the perfect opportunity to ask your website visitors/prospects to opt-in for your emails and give them valuable ebooks in exchange. Email is currency so don’t expect many people to sign up for it without something of real value in return.

Once subscribed, use email marketing automation (an email a week for X weeks after subscribing) to nurture those prospects with more content, all intentionally along the topic of the ebook they signed up for. The rule here is to lead with more content with a 3:1 ratio of content (articles, videos, ebooks, whitepapers, etc.) to product/service pitches. People will buy your stuff if you give more content that helps solve some of their pain points (or demonstrates your company knows its stuff) before you ask them to buy.

And keep in mind that despite the fact that a business is making a purchase decision, there are people behind that company that pull the trigger. So consider their emotional reasons for purchasing and position your products/services accordingly. We only rationalize our decision after the fact.

Author Bio

Miles is a speaker, author, investor, and SEO consultant who helps organisations generate and nurture leads with advanced SEO & inbound marketing strategies. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#11 Moaaz Nagori

Sending emails that don’t land in spam, industry needs a lot of knowledge about that.

Author Bio

Moaaz Nagori is currently the CMO and Co-founder at Cloudlead.co a B2B data company focusing on helping make contact data more actionable and predictable. Before Cloudlead, Moaaz had a career in marketing and branding and loves talking about topics like B2B sales, lead generation, email marketing and how they are relevant in this day and age. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#12 Hillary Read

The benefits are clear: you’re using your first-party data to remarket to people who have already engaged with your brand, and your costs are limited to whatever platform you’re using. Emails are easy to segment, provide clear data on messaging – what works, what doesn’t – and go out when you want, which means you’re choosing when and how to engage your users. In a world of rising CPAs, email campaigns allow marketers to focus on optimising existing leads rather than spend exclusively on new leads.

Challenges include the erosion of first-party data and, generally, the increased expectation for user privacy. The privacy angle has two dimensions: 1) people who don’t remember engaging with your brand are increasingly likely to unsubscribe/disengage; 2) it’s harder these days to come by first-party data even as marketers’ emphasis on it increases. Marketers must make sure they’re providing tangible value to their audiences or risk losing them altogether.

Author Bio

Hillary Read is CMO of eCommerce operations ecosystem Cenports. She has over 11 years of experience in B2B marketing, with verticals ranging from SaaS to eCommerce to FinTech. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#13 Amanda Kostro Miller

The beauty of email marketing is that you show up directly in their inbox with good potential for conversions – all for relatively low cost and little effort. It’s a great opportunity to let potential clients get to know, like and trust you.

With great emails, you can provide value, offer solutions and keep your company top of mind – or top of the inbox!

The challenge is that it’s WAY too easy for a potential client to see your email, and trash it. Or their inbox automatically does it for them.

A couple factors to getting an email trashed is the use of spam words in your subject line and/or an email message that simply doesn’t resonate with your audience.

Plus, so many B2Bs are already bombarding a client’s inbox, so your emails have to stand out at the subject line. Even if you send 1000 emails, it should sound like you’re speaking only to them.

Author Bio

Amanda Kostro Miller is a professional copywriter with experience working for a variety of industries in the B2B realm, including SaaS, healthcare and global dental supply. She helps companies improve their brand copy to increase effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#14 Kelly Wade

B2B marketing is often a very different beast when compared with B2C marketing. For a substantial portion of the B2C industry, people are shopping and businesses just need to put their products and services in front of those shoppers.

When it comes to B2B marketing, however, businesses have a problem and for many of them, it could be weeks or months (sometimes years) before they get to the point where they decide to make a purchase. That’s why email marketing is such a powerful tool for B2B businesses.

Email allows you to gradually win the trust of your audience and keep your business front of mind for long periods of time, so your business becomes the first place your audience turns to when they’re ready to buy. The challenge, especially now that Apple has introduced its ‘hide my email’ feature, is to create email newsletters that your audience will truly find valuable. If you fill their inboxes with ads or content that provides only a hint of value, they won’t stick around.

Providing real value requires you to really understand your ideal business customers, the problems they’re facing and the types of content they like to consume. If you can speak to their pain points in a way they find engaging, email will turn the world into your oyster!

Author Bio

I’m a full-funnel marketing specialist and my mission is to build a better tomorrow by helping organisations that solve crucial problems, efficiently generate sustainable growth with strategic marketing assets that attract, nurture, convert and retain the target market. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#15 Luca Troise

Benefit: increase trust and reduce scepticism over time to facilitate the user journey and increase conversions. Challenge: Setting this up + Getting it right once setup.

Author Bio

I am an expert on Facebook Ads & Instagram Ads. Being a high-level thinker, my focus is on scaling businesses through producing positive ROAS (including my businesses), however, my mission extends beyond business. My mission in life is to bring enough light into the world so that a difference becomes possible. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#16 Kitty Kalman

Email marketing is not dead.

Email marketing is still the only way to own your list.

All the other social media platforms are only borrowing your lists.

If you don’t invite them and get their consent to email them, you are risking your main asset.

Social media platforms are fantastic to grow your audience, to engage with them, to build trust, but if you don’t take one more step to grow your email list, you are missing out on a big opportunity.

If you do it right, you can build real connections with your potential clients and partners. Especially in B2B. You are not just selling something to them, but solving a big problem and maybe want to sell them more than once. If you don’t build up the trust and connect with them, stay in their mind, they will choose someone else when they get to the position to decide who they want to support them with their services.

When there is an opportunity to sell a business, its value is measured based on the size of the list they own. Just think about why Facebook has purchased Instagram? Wouldn’t they have been able to make a platform like Instagram? Yes, easily. But the people who were already on Instagram were the real value, not the app itself.

Why is that?

Because growing your audience is not always as fast as you would like it to be. But you can grow it by leveraging joint ventures, referrals, putting out value where they have to opt-in with their emails.

To do this the right way, always lead with value and think about it. If you were receiving that email as a potential client, would you be excited opening it and eventually reading it? If both are yes, then great! Go ahead!

Tip: When you send out broadcasts, always check the conversion, open rates (where they are still available), response rate and other data. All the good ones should be turned into evergreen emails and added to your automated email sequence.

If email is not your thing, hire someone to do it for you. Who understand segmentation, automation and broadcasts together with value-led content.

Otherwise, you are taking too many hats and it just won’t happen.

Be consistent and build connections, friendships. There are people behind the email addresses, not just companies.

Author Bio

Kitty has experience in working with Fortune 100 CEOs and CFOs.
The range of industries she has worked with are extremely wide; from banks to mining companies, from pharmaceutical companies to car manufacturers, from restaurant chains to construction companies, from retailers to consulting companies and more. You can contact her on LinkedIn.

#17 Donna Sauve

Email Marketing allows you to monetize your list of contacts. Unlike Facebook Custom Audiences or Google Ads targeting, you are not utilising a third party list to build your business. If you were to lose access to any of these third party platforms you run the risk of losing your revenue sources.

This is why building your own email list is like gold, because you can turn your email list into money.. The contacts generated are your contacts, and you can market to them whenever you want (until they unsubscribe) — for free.

Choosing the right email marketing software is the greatest challenge, there are so many options available so it is important to choose the right one for you and your business. To choose the right email marketing software for your business, make sure you have the final goal in mind. What would you like to accomplish with your list? Perhaps you would like to automate your lead generation and send out specific emails to your contacts or automate birthday and Christmas wishes to your clients and prospects.

Author Bio

Donna Sauve is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Your Digital Advantage. Donna offers internet solutions services such as: website development, paid online advertising, search engine marketing, website analytics, and email marketing. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#18 Jasmine Sid

Collecting data is getting more and more complicated everyday now with the overflow of free content available online.

Author Bio

I am a fully bilingual (English & French) International Business Strategy Consultant located in Canada. I specialise in helping companies, with a bigger focus on SMEs, develop a strategy tailored to their business to help them get started, or grow by diversifying and starting to export internationally. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

#19 Matthew Hunt

Cold email is a great way to connect with your ideal prospects if you do it with intention and you acknowledge where you are on the trust-o-metre. Remember, if you are a stranger it means danger, so going from cold outreach to pitching your services is NOT usually a great idea. You might find that 1-3% of the marketplace responds with being interested in your offer, however, the remaining 97% doesn’t like it. In fact, I’d even argue that it creates a lot of negative reputation on your and your company’s brand to do cold outreach this way. However, if you build a dream 120 ideal client list (120 because that is 10 companies per month) which is a more doable outreach campaign for any company, then you can take your time to do the research necessary to send a really good cold email that gets responses. You don’t need to spray and pray when you lead with care. If you sprinkle in the offer to feature your ideal clients on a magazine, podcast, etc you’ll get much better results and you’ll have your ideal clients helping you create your content. Much like this round-up post. 😉 What is a podcast interview, it’s really just a really good discovery call without the sales pressure. When you approach outbound with this kind of love and care, it works well. If you spray and pray, you are really just a dirty rotten spammer.

Author Bio

Matthew Hunt knows that no one likes to be marketed to, or sold to, especially prospects. After scaling and exiting 2 search marketing agencies, he’s committed himself to teaching busy B2B CEOs how to more easily scale leads and sales with less effort, less time, and less money. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

#20 Katry Ann Beaudoin

With 2022 right around the corner, I think that the ongoing challenge for increased brand personalization is still on, with content that reflects the voice of the target audience, that catches their attention, is relatable and stands out. Prioritisation of user experience is also an ongoing must, making sure user intent and what you wish your target to do is considered. This can be done, for example, by making sure conversion points are obvious. Interactivity is also an element that can contribute to enhancing that overall experience, which can easily be done by sharing downloadable links. B2B content marketers must continue to integrate marketing collaterals in their email initiatives, such as visually appealing infographics, brochures or e-books. The benefit of integrating email automation in B2B sales and marketing efforts is also a great way to gain productivity and to engage with prospects. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t have the resources for an internal marketing team. They can definitely reach out to agencies that can fill that gap, and outsource that work to an extended team that shares their vision and goals.

Author Bio

Seasoned Marketing Content Specialist & Strategist. Fluent in UX/UI, content adaptation and localization. In charge of French content for Brainrider, a people-first marketing and creative agency. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

About Author

A passionate and innovative professional encompassing excellence in B2B marketing industry. Develop and manage integrated programs including content strategy, Lead generation approach, Digital, and social media strategy.
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