In 2021, the digital marketers at Constant Contact estimated that each dollar spent on email marketing sees a return on investment of $36 dollars. That’s a hard marketing investment to ignore, but you won’t likely reach — or even better, exceed — that marker with basic, boilerplate emails. Try out these expert-approved Ecommerce email marketing methods to nurture your customers through the sales funnel, all while building a strong online identity for your B2B enterprise.
1. Start Strong
When it comes to Ecommerce email marketing, there’s a truth in the B2C world that’s just as true in the B2B sphere: it’s all in the header. The Guardian estimates that the average office worker gets about 121 emails every day, which means that a lot of emails either aren’t opened or aren’t read past the header. Subject lines need to give the reader a reason to click the email in the first place — whether it’s an urgent call to action or even just something eye-catching like an emoji — while headers should go beyond being just a logo and transmit a clear message right off the bat.
Speaking of clear messages, be sure to use your mailer software’s preview feature (or just be aware of the first sentence or so of your email), as the recipient will see that text in their Gmail preview even before they open the message.
2. Build Your Own List
While it can be tempting to purchase a ready-made email list, the B2B content marketing strategists at Foundation encourage taking the time to build your own. Especially in B2B, specificity is crucial. By curating your own list from your contacts, from website signups or from customer grouped lists, you’re speaking to an audience that has already expressed interest, making for less of a transition from lead to sale. More than that, when you build your own email list, you can always take it with you, however your company might evolve.
3. Segment Your Messages
There’s a reason Zoey features numerous options for segmenting your client list; list segmentation simply makes for a more tailored marketing message. Let’s say you have multiple product lines, where Customer A universally buys from the first line and Customer B only buys from the second. Segmenting your Ecommerce email marketing lists based on buyer behavior – like frequency, purchase volume and so on – personalizes your marketing to maximize your opportunities. Just like having a bespoke marketing list, segmenting gives you a leg up as you’re pitching to an interested audience. And in this case, that audience already has a particular product or service on their radar.
4. Set a Schedule
Frequency is important, as is regularity, but a balance between the two is even more important. The right email frequency has a huge impact on your Ecommerce email marketing’s success, full stop. Mining data from 20 different studies, CoSchedule suggests that the sweet spot for B2B is at least one email per month, but no more than five monthly emails.
5. Use Approachable Language
Ecommerce email marketing is all about generating leads and converting leads into sales. So to nurture your customers, specificity and targeted communication is good, right? Well, yes, but that comes with a small caveat. Consider that your buyers may range from corporate CEOs to neighborhood business owners to techy entrepreneurial upstarts. While they’re all part of your shared audience, it’s important to use language that speaks to everybody in an easily understood fashion — you never know who’s opening that email on the other side, or who’s pulling the trigger on a purchase.
6. Authenticate Your Domain
Here’s an easy one that’s often overlooked, especially for B2B companies (which might not have as much online presence as your average B2C outfit). If your company’s website lives on a server that isn’t authenticated, your marketing emails can easily end up in the spam folder; authenticating your domain helps your marketing email avoid that fate. Based on data from their own clients, the site hosts at Kinsta found that making this simple move can increase your emails’ open rate by almost 5%.
7. Put Facts Forward
Customers buying for pleasure behave very differently than customers buying for business. OptinMonster puts it plainly: “B2C communication focuses on emotions. B2B communication focuses on information, facts and profit.” For B2B, it’s vital to build much of your email marketing’s core content around hard facts that concisely illustrate why your product or service benefits the buyer. Per the same source, about 90 percent of the most successful B2B marketers share a similar tendency: they put their audience’s informational needs before all else.
8. Keep It Human
This may sound like a contradiction, but it’s something that information-focused B2B marketing often overlooks, and to its detriment. Even if your Ecommerce email marketing covers rotary spool valves or DNS propagation services, people respond to content that feels personal. Speaking to Foundation, email marketing strategist Val Geisler says, “the most effective emails come when written from human to human.” So before you schedule your next blast, try looking at your draft and reframing it as a letter from you to a close friend — the results may surprise you.
9. Offer Promotions
If your company is healthy enough to afford both a customer discount of some sort and a potential uptick in volume, offering up promotions in your email campaign can generate a wonderful combo of interest, grassroots recommendations, and customer loyalty. Consider deals like free shipping, discounts for first-time or loyal customers, coupons as rewards, or plain old price cuts on certain items or services. Before starting a promo campaign, always ask and answer the question, “what do I hope to achieve by offering my customers a deal?” to establish your intention and cadence.
Nurture Customers with Ecommerce Email Marketing
“Nurture” is a key word, here. At its most effective, your Ecommerce email marketing serves as an expressive tool that doesn’t beat readers over the head with hard pitches or blast them with 20 calls to action across 10 paragraphs — it takes their hand and leads them through the sales funnel like an old friend, turning that cold lead into a brand new conversion.
For more B2B Ecommerce marketing tips, check out our Sales and Marketing blog posts.
Dan is a small business owner and freelance writer based in Dallas, TX. In over a decade of experience, he’s been fortunate to write and collaborate with business-facing brands including The Motley Fool, Chron, Office Depot, Fortune and more.
