If you’re still managing your email campaigns manually, or if you’re dabbling in automation without a solid strategy, you’re leaving opportunities—and revenue—on the table.
Email marketing automation looks different for every company, but the end result is the same: it allows your team to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Consistently.
Today, we're diving into what it takes to build a successful B2B email marketing automation strategy that boosts your company ROI without leading to excessive burnout on your team.
At its core, email marketing automation allows you to send targeted, personalized emails to your prospects and customers based on predefined triggers, behaviors, or time intervals. Unlike B2C, where messages are often transactional or impulse-driven, B2B email automation focuses on nurturing relationships over longer sales cycles.
When done right, email marketing automation in the B2B sector can produce a variety of benefits:
To reap these benefits, however, you need to establish a solid strategy—and have the software tools to bring it to life.
While we all like a good, quick win, B2B marketing is typically more focused on building trust and providing value at every stage of the buyer’s journey. That can be a tough pill to swallow, especially when leadership teams are harried for quick revenue boosts and want to see projects that "move the needle forward."
When building out your B2B email marketing automation strategy, remember:
The average B2B sales cycle involves multiple touchpoints. Automation ensures prospects don’t fall through the cracks during this process.
Research shows personalized email campaigns can increase open rates by up to 26%. Automation lets you personalize emails for hundreds—or thousands—of contacts based on their needs and behaviors.
With automation, you can track engagement, measure results, and continuously optimize your campaigns for better ROI.
Before you start, define what you want to achieve. Common goals include:
When you have clearly defined goals, you can start to prove the success of your efforts to leadership, and reverse-engineer the funnel to ensure that each micro conversion contributes to overall success.
Despite the name, B2B marketing and sales aren't just about companies—they should always be focused on the people behind them.
Create detailed buyer personas and segment your audience based on criteria like industry, job role, and pain points. Every campaign you send out should have a specific persona in mind, and a specific goal that you're helping that persona to achieve.
Are your emails marketing or sales focused?
There's a difference. Marketing guru Neil Patel shares this great clarification, "Your marketing funnel creates touchpoints and gives the prospect reasons to purchase. Your sales funnel details the tangible actions you take to convince people to make a purchase." (Source).
Take time to craft emails that align with each stage of the fairly complex B2B funnel (which often includes lengthy decision-making processes and multiple stakeholders).
An over-simplified sample of some content pieces that you might want to create and promote through your marketing automations include:
With your funnels and campaigns mapped out, create a list of must-haves for your CRM.
Some of the top tools that B2B businesses tend to use include HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, or Pardot (now known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud)—but you can also use a tool like Vendorbox to ensure that your CRM is a good fit for your specific goals and needs.
Each of your automations should be automatically triggered based on specific actions or timelines. The more common campaigns that you might set up (or optimize) include:
Each of these should be set up with goals that allow you to track the effectiveness of your content and email flows. Typically, you'll want to revisit frequently and use A/B testing to refine subject lines, email content, and CTAs. M
Monitor metrics like email deliverability, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, and don’t hesitate to tweak your strategy based on performance.
Pro Tip: Many of the CRMs popular within the B2B industry have challenging, clunky interfaces. If you find that your team struggles, you might want to lean on popular email building tools like FeedOtter to reduce your email build time from hours to minutes.
For those ready to go beyond the basics, here are some advanced techniques:
Email marketing automation isn’t just a tool—it’s a strategic advantage in B2B marketing. By investing the time to plan, segment, and optimize your approach, you can turn email from a communication channel into a revenue-generating machine.
Ready to take your B2B email campaigns to the next level? Explore how FeedOtter can simplify automation, deliver insights, and help you craft campaigns that convert.
