The 10 Commandments of B2B Email Marketing
I spent the majority of the last 3 years dealing with email — from setting up automated sequences to thousands of subscribers on behalf of international clients to writing up super personalized B2B sales emails for just the right person at just the right position.
Below are 10 rules I’ve learned through reading, doing, or failing to do.
1. Thou shalt be short & straight to the point
In a research of over 40 million emails (yes, you read that right, million!!) by HubSpot, they’ve found that the ideal length of a sales email is between 25–120 words (around 12 lines of text).
I would argue that it’s not so much the length that will impact your conversion rates, but rather the message itself. In any case — don’t follow blindly the “character length rules”, but DO try to convey your message in as few words as possible. Remember, everybody’s time is precious! ⏰
2. Thou shalt deliver content that will either teach something new or make someone laugh
Sales and marketing should NEVER be about you, your company or your product.
It is always about the customer, how they can benefit from your products & services, how will their life become better if they work with you.
So, instead of bragging about how your product is the best in the world — teach them how to become better at what they do. Educate them on how to ease their life, even for a tiny bit. Or, entertain them the best way you can. The sale will follow.
3. Thou shalt write like a human
When writing in B2B, you should still use your natural tone and everyday language (ok, maybe layoff a bit on the curse words, but you get my point!)
Emojis are fine. Humour is acceptable.
It may feel counterintuitive, but at the end of the day, you’re writing to another human. And humans love humour. 😁
4. Thou shalt write short subject lines
The trick is to convince them that precisely YOUR email is worth opening, out of the hundreds of others in their inbox, with as few words as possible.
It’s difficult, but there are ways to improve your chances of success.
- Be witty & use humour
- Use weirdly specific numbers (ex. 32,768 people got a promotion with this tactic)
- Use the power of scarcity (ex. Only 4 spots left!)
- Include the recipient’s name
- And, be short. General rules say “keep it under 50 characters”. The email service will cut it anyway, so why waste them.
5. Thou shalt do their research properly
Researching the recipient before sending out an email will give you the power to personalize your message. That means to address their real needs connected to their real business and real customers.
And personalized messages will always, and I mean always, outperform one-size-fits-all copy. It’s way better to send 10 personalized emails than 1000 generic blast emails.
Always know who is on the other side & why they should hear from you. 🔍
6. Thou shalt (try to) contact the right people from the organisation
Following up on my previous point — if you’ve done your research properly, you will know who you want to reach and how to convey the benefits of your product or service to exactly that person.
Don’t sell an invoice automation tool to the head of development! 🎯
7. Thou shalt NOT spam the entire organization
It may be tempting to reach out to as many people possible, secretly hoping you’ll get the responses you want. However, spamming the entire company may only decrease your chances of success — you can end up being blocked by that company’s email security filter and you’ll definitely get gossiped around the water cooler as that “annoying salesperson that just won’t stop”.
5–10 people (depending on the size of the business) per company is more than enough.
8. Thou shalt cleanse its list regularly
When working in (email) marketing for an extended period of time, you’re bound to grow your email list to a considerable size. However, people often change or close email addresses — especially in B2B. And, they some times sign up with fake addresses.
That’s why a marketer’s job is to keep their list clean. Many of today’s CRM or Marketing Automation tools will do this for you. If they don’t — schedule a regular cleansing of your entire list every 3 or 6 months. Tools like MailGet and ZeroBounce can help you a lot. You can even integrate these with email discovery services like Hunter.io — to make sure that every email that enters your CRM is verified upfront!
An unclean list will get you a lot of hard bounces & spams. Ain’t nothing worse than getting hard bounces & spams 😟
9. Thou shalt NOT automate creativity
Always give yourself enough time to come up with the mission-critical elements: value proposition; offer; copy & design.
What I’d like to do is (depending on the client/product I’m marketing, of course):
- Spend a few hours or days researching the messages and visuals that top competitors are using on their website, social media, emails or ads. They’ve already invested a lot of time & money to see what works!
- Spend a few hours analyzing my client’s (or mine) offer & value proposition —understand why and how is it better than the competitors.
- Combine my findings into a coherent email copy (and design if needed). Pause for some time. Come back & edit the heck out of it.
- Launch, test, iterate!
Creative work takes time. Give it to it! 😊
10. Thou shalt automate everything else.
Maybe not *everything*, but most of the mechanic, time-consuming activities CAN be automated.
Some of the things you can automate include:
- Searching for prospects. There are TONS of tools that can help you out. Check out this list of 40 tools.
- Extracting data from & to different tools. For example, automatically extract all the results of a LinkedIn Sales Navigator search. Check out PhantomBuster and Zapier.
- Finding & verifying emails. I already mentioned Hunter.io and ZeroBounce.
- The actual sending of emails. I hope nobody’s doing this manually in 2020. 😬 There are thousands of email automation services on the market, too much to start listing. An interesting “underdog” discovery this year for us was Lemlist — I suggest you check it out!
If you’re going to leave this with *one* take-out — let it be being human. Get to know your prospect, research them, understand them, be polite, be friendly, be clear & straightforward, offer help (for free), and don’t push it. The sale will come.
I sometimes share interesting stuff I learn on my day job, and life in general, on LinkedIn. Send me a connecting request — I’d love to hear your thoughts! 😊
