Email marketing is one of the best ways to nourish your B2B leads by creating targeted and personalized emails. This blog focuses on the benefits and challenges of email marketing for B2B businesses to let you take appropriate actions to hit your B2B sales and marketing targets in 2022.
Every B2B company develops many products or services to solve problems people are facing but what differentiates a product or service from others is a well-written & properly executed email marketing plan. Email marketing is the best way to build your relationship with customers and deliver them valuable services, updates, promotional discounts, etc. at an affordable cost. Let’s dive to check the top benefits and challenges of email marketing for B2B businesses:
B2B email marketing targets decision-makers rather than individual buyers. The main goal is to reach out to your prospects, educate them about your offerings, and drive them to your sales funnel. So to experience email marketing success, check, learn, and use the following benefits to unlock the power of email marketing for your B2B business:
Email marketing is a very low-cost marketing strategy as you don’t have to pay for printing and advertisements costs that involve with other type of marketing. It is the best way to nurture your relationship with the existing customer base by sending them personalized emails. You can easily reach out to new customers or decision-makers across the globe and introduce them to your B2B offerings.
There is no rocket science in creating an email. Any non-technical person can easily create emails just with a few clicks. What matters is the way you attract customers to your emails (subject lines), interest them to click the links, and divert their minds to your sales funnel. Once you create an email with all the details like subject line, email body, call to action, and promotional offers if any, you can easily launch or shoot it to the desired email list with just a click. Today, there exists plenty of software or tools that help B2B marketers to keep track of their email marketing campaigns. You can easily measure market reach, open rate, click ratio, conversion ratio, and many other hidden insights using these free or paid tools.
You can create attractive emails by inserting images, videos, infographics, etc. to enhance your conversion rate. There exist plenty of tools that allow you to experiment with the design and content of your emails. Email marketing is the best scalable technique to target short & long subscriber lists and is the best choice when it comes to targeting a larger email base. Sharing the content of the email is very easy which gives an extra benefit to word-of-mouth marketing.
Many B2B businesses are now shifting their focus from social media marketing only to email marketing first. Why? Email marketing has proved to be a greater converting and ROI-driven strategy than any other method. With a whopping 4400% ROI, it is worth the investment than any other marketing channel.
Email marketing is not like targeting each customer that comes across your brand rather it is targeting only those customers who want to receive emails from your brand. You run an email marketing campaign for the customers or visitors who are interested in your B2B services/products. Email marketing is the best method to connect with your customers in real-time. With the help of automated triggers, you can convert them to buyers with the right offers and at the right time.
As you have seen, email marketing influences your sales and ROI with its benefits. However, some challenges keep away B2B businesses to utilize those benefits. Let’s have a look at those top challenges with some useful ideas to overcome them.
Email marketing is a successful but more challenging marketing method at the same time. There exist various pain points like personalization, brand awareness, customer retention, engagement, etc., some marketers struggle with one, while others face many of these. The following are the main email marketing challenges faced by today’s B2B marketers:
Improving email personalization is the number 1 challenge reported by most B2B businesses. The average rate of opening emails in 2021 was dropped down to 17.80% from 22.60% in 2020. Customers are less inclined to open salesy emails. They are more interested in reading emails that grab their attention, point to their interest, and help them to solve their problem. This is where personalization comes in. It is proven that a perfect personalized email help B2B brand build a strong relationship with the audience and convert them to buyers from subscribers.
Ideas to Get Rid of This Challenge:
More than 35% of B2B marketers find it difficult to gain new customers who buy products or services via emails sent to them. A survey conducted by the top B2B platform reports that not every email subscriber is ready to buy at first click till the first 15 months and after that, if you succeed to build a fruitful relationship with them, 40% of them get converted to buyers. Why customer acquisition is difficult? The cost of customer acquisition is rising, the untapped market shrinks with growth in customer base, and by acquisition, B2B marketers only try to obtain a new customer.
Ideas to Get Rid of This Challenge:
More than 55% of B2B businesses failed to increase their audience engagement rate. A low engagement rate is a universal problem when it comes to email marketing. This directly impacts your ROI and email open rate. The following are a few reasons for low engagement rates for all B2B industries in 2021:
More than 38% of B2B businesses found it very challenging to get their brand seen online. It is observed that a recognized brand converts six times faster than other brands due to customer loyalty and trust. Many B2B businesses don’t prioritize brand awareness as their top goal and here they lost the competition. Also, many B2B marketers think branding means putting content everywhere, from emails to social media to blogs. But it is not the same. When customers open your emails, read them, click on call to action, and finish up buying your products/services, your brand is in a recognized position.
It is observed that B2B businesses lose on average 18% to 20% of existing customers annually. Thus improving customer retention is also one of the top challenges faced by many B2B businesses. Acquiring new customers is five times costlier than retaining your existing customers. B2B businesses use email marketing as their selling tool, but only a few of them succeed in it. Even if you increase your retention rate by 5%, it can increase your profits by more than 70%.
Every B2B company tests and implements multiple marketing strategies to build a strong online presence. B2B companies generate leads in many ways, from PPC ads to social media marketing to email marketing. Email marketing, though it has been used for quite a while, is the most effective method for business promotion, lead generation, and sales enhancement. It is observed that more than 60% of consumers prefer to receive promotional material via email only. Your B2B success in 2022 depends upon how you improve your email marketing campaign and how you overcome the email marketing challenges.
DemandCircle assists global B2B companies in implementing ROI-driven email marketing strategies for better results. We’re ready to help with lead generation to grow your business quickly.
