When it comes to connecting with clients and prospects, email has retained the spot as a key medium of communication for many B2B companies. Despite the argument that email is dead, there are now
over 5.5 billion active email accounts worldwide and that number is increasing every year.
Emails give organizations the ability to both, share concise information, and have detailed conversations through group and 1:1 exchanges or cadences. There are several other reasons why emails are important in B2B marketing and communications. Read on as we discuss some of the benefits of emails in B2B marketing and why emails are important in B2B marketing communications.
Addressing Long Sales Cycles
With B2C products or services, purchase decisions are often immediate and are often based on emotions. This is not so much the case in the B2B space where:
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- Sales cycles are longer as the buying decision is critical for the client’s business
- There multiple buying decision makers and influencers
- Where leads need to be kept constantly engaged and nurtured down the funnel
- The purchase-decision is tied to an ROI as products/services are usually of a higher monetary value
With such kinds of purchases, marketers have to spend a lot of time finding out the needs of the prospect and how to address that in creating relevant content that talks of utility, ROI and others. This is where emails come into play, giving the marketer the perfect platform to communicate with their leads. You can design custom emails for your prospects, thus ensuring that your brand is on top of their mind when they finally make the decision to purchase.
Generating New Leads
Email marketing is still one of the most reliable and cost-effective ways to generate qualified leads. Emails work effectively at different stages of the sales lifecycle, right from prospecting to nurturing and aftersales. The success of your email campaigns will largely depend on the quality of your prospect data – email accuracy, intent of subscribers, and other factors such as timing when following up, content quality and so on.
Our popular business card scanning app, ScanBizCards, not only helps to scan business cards which can then be added to a centralized database for email marketing and more, but also helps to find new leads from emails.
The Email Capture feature of this app helps you to connect your mailbox account for capturing leads from emails and exporting to popular CRMs and email automation platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot, marketo and more. When you connect the app, it will give you suggestions whenever it gets a new contact from your emails or email chains.
Sending Customised Messages
When you are designing emails, don’t rely on a single templated email to send to all prospects in bulk. Once your database of leads has been segmented, you should keep separate emails ready for each group. Such customization will make the leads feel more valued as it will address their needs more specifically than a generic email would. Customization is one of the biggest benefits of email marketing. When campaigns are tailor-made based on a specific buyer persona, the leads can be nurtured better. This improves the chances of more positive responses from leads and increases the chances of conversions.
As B2B purchases are based on logic, leads usually seek to know detailed information about your offering. Emails are a sure shot way to keep them informed and also to set you apart from the rest. Emails can share information like:
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- Why your offering is better than the competition’s – adding testimonials from social media and review sites like G2 and so on
- New offerings and product launches
- The current trends in the market where you can get creative by adding graphs and infographics
- A set of FAQs compiled based on the most often asked questions
- Detailed analysis of issues and queries that clients and prospects might have related to your product or service
- Guides on how to use your product/service in their industry, for their use case and so on
Allowing Prompt Follow-ups
Emails can be a great way to do prompt follow-ups with leads.
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- Often hundreds of new leads are gathered at events and conferences but not all are equally qualified. It is a good practice to follow-up with leads promptly after the show is over – usually in 24-48 hours. This is where emails come in handy. A simple “It was good to meet you” mail will start the engagement with the prospect. Since emails stay in the inbox, the brand recall is more than if you were to simply make a phone call, which can be forgotten about.
- If you have just had a fruitful meeting with a prospect where there is a high chance of a conversion, then you should follow up soon after the meeting. Sending an email thanking them for their time and talking of your offering in detail will egg the lead towards a purchase.
Dealing With Multiple Decision-makers
B2B purchase is not always about one individual buying your product but about the affirmation of a number of departments in an organization. For instance, when it comes to purchasing software for an organization, it’s not just the IT team’;s decision but also the end user team (design, marketing, sales, project management and so on). Hence, you will find that you have to convince many influencers for a purchase to happen. Emails help because it allows you to send information based on what the person in a particular department is looking is for – right from pricing, benefits, features, and others.
Inexpensive and Less Time Consuming
Inexpensive
Most forms of marketing methods come with a high cost like, say, sidplay advertising cost, location cost, photoshoot, printing cost, and others. In comparison, email marketing is the most inexpensive marketing method which can target a wide audience with a much higher ROI.
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- You can easily carry out surveys and gather data.
- It is easy to send traffic to your website, thus improving your SEO without having to spend much money.
- Email marketing campaigns will help you to easily qualify your leads and if you lead scoring you can track your leads who open your emails and click on the CTAs in them, etc.
Less Time Consuming
- There are many software tools that make measuring the effectiveness of an email campaign easy and the analysis doesn’t take up much time.
- Designing an email and launching a campaign doesn’t take up too much time. Once you have relevant content you can launch the campaign.
- From the point of view of the leads, too, emails take up less time. Since it can be read at any time at their own convenience, it does not waste their time. It thus, allows you to engage with prospects without disrupting their busy schedules or invading their privacy.
Summing up
Yes, in the modern world social media marketing, private chat groups and other forms of digital marketing have gained a lot of popularity but email marketing continues to be a very important channel in the B2B space. When you launch your email campaign, do remember this – the smartphone has become the key to marketing. Hence, when you create your emails, check them for multiple email hosts like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo! and also across various devices and screen sizes. This way, your prospects will be able to easily read your emails, no matter what screen they are viewing it on.