3 Effective Ways to Automate Your B2B Email Marketing

If your B2B company is not using automated email marketing, it’s time to tune up your customer journey. According to research by the DMA (Data & Marketing Association), email marketing ROIs continue to climb year over year. 

What Is Email Automation & How Can It Help My Business?

Simply put, automated emails are marketing emails that are automatically sent when a predefined trigger is prompted. For B2B email marketing, automation can be used in various ways. When it takes more time and effort to influence and close another business, maintaining a consistent digital conversation is key.

Through automation, your business has the opportunity to effectively simulate a one-to-one conversation at scale with potential customers (leads). From lead capture to nurturing leads to winning the deal, automated email marketing is the essential arrow in your quiver. Why? Each automation can be personalized based on your brand.

Let’s look at three simple but effective ways to automate your B2B email marketing.

1. Behavior-Based Emails

At the end of the day, a lead wants value from your company so it is essential that you predetermine the ways a lead might react to your business. A new subscriber will only invite you into their inbox when they’re convinced your brand can deliver valuable, insightful content, products or services. To help your company figure out the behavior of lead coming to your website, ask the following:

• What questions will a lead have?
• What products or services are best for them? 
• What do they want next? 

Once you’ve figured out the behavior of a lead, you can personalize both the content on your website and your email marketing to truly provide them with what they need. Getting a lead excited about something on your website will encourage them to subscribe to a mailing list that is designed to nurture their needs and solve problems. This process is known as behavior-based emails and allows you to set in motion curated email automation sequences according to the actions of a potential customer. 

Yieldify – a CRO platform and customer journey tool to boost e-commerce conversion – has done this is an effective way for leads interested in A/B testing for e-commerce. A lead will fill in an online form which is at the bottom of content related to A/B testing. This will be followed by a sequence of emails promoting A/B testing products for e-commerce including e-books.

2. Drip Campaigns

Even though intimidating, create an automated drip campaign. This type of campaign is a triggered sequence of automated emails that are sent on a predefined schedule. It aims to encourage email subscribers to achieve specific results and usually goes hand-in-hand with content creation (blog or video posts). Drip campaigns are best used in the following:

• Setting up appointments
• Nurturing leads
• Increasing sales 

Due to the longer sales cycle, most B2B automated email sequences are used to nurture leads. Drip campaigns specifically enable you to personalize emails to your subscribers on a large scale.

HoneyBook – an all-in-one project, invoicing and payments management tool – uses its drip campaign to nurture leads while encouraging specific results.

3. Email Autoresponders

Email autoresponders are an effective automation tool especially for B2B email marketing as it gives a lead immediate acknowledgment. Whether a lead contacts your business through a website form or via email, it is essential to let them know that you have received their email and will respond shortly. 

There are various ways to use automated email responses with the most popular being the following:

• Confirmation for subscriptions
  

  TransferWise – a money transfer service often used to pay contractors and freelancers – uses this email autoresponders to confirm subscriptions and email addresses.

• Welcome emails
  

  Asana – a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work – uses an autoresponder for its welcome email. The welcome email also includes ways to use the tool.

What’s Next?

Ready to optimize your email marketing campaigns?[/vc_button][vc_column_text]Marketing automation solutions aren’t going anywhere, and businesses who use them report ROIs of $38-to-$1, according to Litmus’s 2019 State of Email. So, if you aren’t in on this approach, now’s the time to at least test the waters. Start simple with a review of your customer journey. Where do most questions arise? Which are most important to decision-makers?

Depending on your business and marketing goals, there are countless ways and tools to put email marketing automation to work for your business. With a bit of customization and campaign personalization, you’ll trigger meaningful and insightful digital dialogue that provides helpful content that converts.