3 B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

B2B email marketing seems to be a source of contention among marketing professionals, largely in part to the reputation email marketing has gotten in the world of B2C marketing. The reputation of “spam” and scams run by less than reputable people trying to wrong people over the anonymity of email has caused everyone to write off email marketing. Well, at least, that was the case until a few years ago, anyhow.

With the success bloggers have had in adopting email marketing, it took very little time for B2B content marketers to regain email momentum it had lost due to the ill-gotten reputation of the decade before. It never completely went away, but today, we see a new renaissance in email marketing both in B2B and B2C contexts.

So, what are some things to bear in mind if you want to use email marketing in B2B scenarios without giving off a spammy aurora? I’ve touched on these briefly before in my blog, but let’s look at a few more.

#1 – Choose Your Mailing Platform Wisely

In the past, mass mailings were handled by harvesting email addresses through dodgy tactics. After creating a fully-fledged list, marketers would set up a hefty server script to send out a plain template with little lead or targeting.

This is what contributed heavily to the reputation and association of spam with email marketing altogether. But today, we have a number of intuitive mailing systems like AWeber and MailChimp, which provide more legitimate ways of sending email. These systems can target subscribers, convert social and browsing leads into targeted marketing opportunities, and are easy to turn off if a recipient considers an email unwelcome.

These also allow for rich-media marketing templates in email, allowing for more aesthetically-pleasing and trackable emails. Depending on your business and campaign scope, some platforms will work better, choose wisely!

#2 – Backlinking? Backlinking!

Ok, this is a slight corruption of the term backlinking, if you’re holding it to the same definition used in SEO, but it is an appropriate name for it used by many. In email marketing, it simply means providing a series of simple and quick links that allow the reader to quickly open and consider your company. I know this sounds like it has limited effectiveness, but in my experience this can make all the difference, especially in the sense if someone reads the email, likes what you have to say but has to pass it on, they can forward a URL to their superiors or another interested party.

#3 – Avoid NoReply Emails

Consumers are used to the “noreply” concept, which is ok in your carefully crafted B2C email marketing, but it’s a bad idea in B2B. Allow the recipient to reply directly to the email to open a rapport with you. This can be accomplished by redirects on your server or by bootstrapping the mailer to an active account directly (the former usually being a better idea).

These are some more important B2B email marketing points to consider. In the future, we’ll cover still more of these as this tried and true marketing strategy regains its place at the top of the totem pole.

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