The days of generic messaging delivered to audiences regardless of their distinctive features are long gone. B2B marketing should be just as personalized as B2C marketing.
While B2B marketing is aimed at companies, you are marketing to the individuals who make purchasing choices for those firms. As a result, the human touch in marketing and communications is still required.
Personalization initiatives are critical to developing relationships and enhancing B2B marketing outcomes.
Why Is Personalization Crucial?
Personalization in B2B email marketing campaigns is crucial for several reasons. We’ll highlight the three most impactful reasons here:
Higher Engagement
Email communication that is personalized boosts engagement. Most email marketing initiatives ignore clients’ demands in favor of generating a sale, which typically results in low engagement rates.
Customer-centric, customized content is essential for enhancing email marketing campaign engagement. As many as 72% of customers will only interact with marketing communications tailored to their interests.
Increases Conversion Rates
There is little doubt that a tailored email marketing strategy is one of the best ways to boost conversion rates.
Prospects are more likely to purchase after opening and reading personalized emails since they provide content that is relevant and valuable to them. It just makes sense.
Don’t worry, though. Email customization does not imply writing to each consumer individually. Instead, market segmentation and a selection of focused content will enable you to automate your tailored email marketing.
Shortens the Sales Cycle
Email personalization enables you to use data about your customers to decrease sales friction, boost lead nurturing, and shorten the sales cycle.
Personalizing emails sent to consumers ensure that you offer them the items or services they require while avoiding bothering them with unnecessary offers.
Furthermore, personalization enables you to boost your lead nurturing efforts by giving leads material that will assist them in resolving their pain points and achieving their objectives.
Statistics on Email Personalization
There is no better moment to begin exploring the potential of customized emails than now.
According to recent surveys, marketing personalization has gone mainstream.
A McKinsey & Company study showed that 71% of customers demand individualized marketing, and 76% are upset when it is unavailable.
Email is the most popular and effective channel for implementing personalization. According to Statista, 78% of marketers use email for tailored communication.
This greatly outpaces the second most preferred medium, the internet, which is personalized by 56% of marketers. Only one-third of sponsored advertisements, social media, and mobile applications are personalized.
But perhaps the most important report comes from McKinsey & Company. It points out that brands that use customization make 40% more revenue than those that do not.
Levels of Personalization
You must have noticed in your inbox that not all email customization is equal. Let’s look at the levels of personalization to get started.
Segmentation
This level of email personalization divides your contacts into segments, allowing you to customize the experience for different subscribers.
If you’re still batch-and-blasting the same messages to your whole email list, you’ll appreciate the effects of segmentation and customization. Segmentation and customization are technically distinct approaches. However, you can customize your emails better if you can correctly segment your audience.
When you combine list segmentation with personalization, you go beyond merely changing the email text and personalizing the entire experience.
That is because, rather than simply inserting a name in the appropriate field, the content of the targeted email is more likely to be relevant to the subscriber. Seeing their name is just the icing on the cake. The more segmented your list, the more relevant your tailored emails can be.
For example, because small firms have different requirements and interests than big enterprises, you may separate a B2B list by company size. But why should we stop there? When B2B contacts are segmented by industry, the chance to give important information and messages increases.
Advanced Email Personalization
The gurus of email marketing personalization can provide email campaigns that feel tailor-made for the individual. When recipients get these emails, they should think, “Wow, this brand truly gets me!”
Access to relevant data, such as verified firmographic data, technographic data, and buyer intent data, and the ability to connect it with email, is essential for producing a tailored inbox experience.
Firmographic and technographic data help you segment the email list and offer personalization to the recipients. For advanced personalization, you can incorporate buyer intent data that gives you the intent of your recipients. Brands that use B2B data and show it in emails provide some of the most customized email experiences.
Consider how Google distributes monthly tailored analytics to YouTube producers, Google Maps, and Google Analytics users. Consider how health and fitness tracking applications send out individualized progress updates to users.
Another wonderful approach to leverage first-party data for tailored mailings is through rewards and loyalty programs.
5 Trending Ways to Super Personalize Your B2B Email Marketing
Once you know the levels of personalization, you can explore different ways to create a personalized email experience. Here are the five most effective ways to personalize your emails.
1. Use Contextual Subject Line
Your topic line is important. With customized subject lines, your email average open rates will increase by 26%. A subject line that complements your email content might work wonders for you.
B2B leads receive a large number of emails every day and dislike generic subject lines. So keep your subject lines contextual, and describe what the email recipient may find in the email.
Consider this subject line example from LinkedIn. Notice how the brand has managed to pull off a contextualized subject line that’s also personalized? The reader can immediately tell what the email is about, and they’ll also know it’s meant for them. It’s not a mass email from a random brand.
What’s interesting is that LinkedIn has managed to pull this off without even mentioning the recipient’s name, which is a pretty common personalization tactic.
How did they pull that off, you wonder? Segmentation. The brand understands its audience and knows how each one of them interacts with its platform. That allows them to craft relevant subject lines.
You need something similar for your business. Invest in email marketing automation tools that can pull contextual data from your customer database and use it to send emails with contextual subject lines that will drive engagements.
2. Align Emails With the Buyer’s Journey
The most effective emails provide the appropriate information at the appropriate stage of the buyer’s journey. That involves, for instance, creating personalized email sequences to engage new subscribers and keeping them engaged until they become your customers.
Begin with creating buyer personas based on your ideal customer profiles. You can map the prospects to the appropriate stage of the buyer’s journey. Use buyer intent data to understand where your prospects stand in the buyer’s journey. This will help you draft the right email message to the right audience at the right stage.
The following are the three stages of the buyer’s journey and ideas to create emails for each stage.
Stage 1: Awareness
New subscribers will join the buyer’s journey at the top of the funnel during the Awareness stage, indicating interest in the material your company has to offer.
Subscribing to your email list will be the first time many prospective purchasers have connected extensively with your company.
Therefore, they are likely to need more time before they are ready to purchase. They’re also unlikely to respond to forceful or repetitive advertising communications, as the vast majority will be irrelevant to their interests.
Email Ideas for the Awareness Stage
Consider offering free eBooks and whitepapers that resonate with your B2B audience. This will help new subscribers (or you can consider them top-of-the-funnel leads) to build trust and relationships with your brand.
Actionable materials like templates and worksheets that assist your new subscribers in working through a pain point they may be experiencing are also helpful. This comprises material relevant to a certain sector, such as an editorial calendar template.
Sharing tips and tricks to help your audience with an existing pain point can also be helpful. That’s what a brand like Zoom does with the email below.
Newsletters or educational bulletins that allow readers to learn something new or be notified ahead of time about a pertinent trend or development are examples of impactful content.
Stage 2: Consideration
When a consumer is aware of your company and likes what you’re selling, they’re likely to move on to the Consideration stage – but they’ll need more information before making a purchase decision.
Though it is obvious that your prospective consumers are interested in the items or services your organization provides, pressuring brand-new subscribers to buy too soon is likely to turn them off.
Email Ideas for the Consideration Stage
A marketer’s objective for clients in the Consideration stage is to show the prospect that their product is the best option. Therefore, you can write emails directing users to some of your comparison guides and case studies.
Stage 3: Decision
The prospect is almost ready to buy, but they may need a final push. The decision stage is your opportunity to persuade prospects that you have the best answer for their problem.
Decision Stage Email Ideas
Because the prospect is almost certainly close to making a purchase decision, these emails should be more transactional. Successful Decision stage emails must include an offer, discount code, or coupon that resonates with the prospect.
For the best results, make these offers time-limited to create a sense of urgency and accelerate conversions.
Besides offers, you can also write an email inviting the recipient for a live demo or free consultation session. SaaS companies can also provide free trials at this stage.
Create tailored workflows and sequences to ensure everyone on your email list receives what they need when needed. There should be a structure in the sequences. For example, seasonal promotions should have a structured sequence.
3. Leverage Behavioral Triggering
The most skilled email marketers use behavioral triggers extensively. Behavioral triggering may sound like a complicated process, but it isn’t. It consists of automatic email responses that are deployed depending on how customers engage with your product or site.
Behavioral triggering extends beyond welcome emails to allow you to re-engage consumers and promote items. It’s used widely by online shopping websites.
Behavioral emails can be triggered by the following:
Registrations
A registration may trigger several emails, including welcome, FAQ, onboarding, and getting started emails. Their purpose is to greet visitors and introduce them to the product.
For example, when you sign up for Slack, you receive a welcome email sharing some tips and tricks on how to use the platform. The email also contains links where users can learn more about the platform. This is very useful in helping the user get the most out of the tool.
This is only one of a series of welcome emails. The user may also receive additional emails sharing more insights on how to use the platform.
Conversions
These emails are sent in response to actions such as subscriptions, events, purchases, sign-ups, downloads, and opt-ins. They aim to express gratitude and notify users about the transaction.
PayPal welcomes new clients by sending them a nice, welcoming email.
Sending welcome emails, such as this one from PayPal, is an excellent approach to make your new customers feel appreciated.
Site and Social activities
Viewed pages, links clicked, shared posts, account activity reports, watched videos, written comments, and so on are all triggers for this type of behavioral email. Its purpose is to turn interested consumers into buyers.
Some email platforms like GetResponse, Zoho campaigns, and HubSpot can help you automate your email sequences based on such triggers.
4. Categorize Customers Under Different Personas
No two leads are alike. That means sending the same message to all leads might be detrimental. You’ve gathered enough information on your leads to separate them and place them in various persona pockets.
You can use B2B data such as firmographics, technographic, and intent data to create detailed and accurate buyer personas. You can then generate different types of emails based on these personas to fit their character and allow them to take action.
Creating personas aids in providing a more personalized experience. A better lead experience increases the likelihood of a conversion. What are the most pressing issues for each persona? Exploit that data to send relevant emails that your recipients will resonate with.
5. Compliment Your Audience
As we pointed out earlier, you may be marketing to a B2B brand, but that doesn’t mean you’re not talking to a person with emotions.
There are still human beings behind those brands. And one of the things human beings love is compliments. Except, instead of making personal compliments, you want to compliment your B2B audience whenever their company hits a new goal or achieves something.
Did your B2B prospect just go through a successful seed fundraising? Or perhaps they won some major award? Whatever it is, use these achievements to personalize your email communications with them.
Conclusion
Personalizing your messaging has never been easier. You can keep track of all your customer data alongside a robust email marketing autoresponder to run super personalized email campaigns.
It may appear exhausting, but monitoring, analyzing, and investing in personalized communications will deliver better returns for your company. Here’s to your success!
