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Let’s face it. The success of your email marketing strategy depends largely on the quality of your leads. Generating high-quality B2B leads is a tough ground to break but with the right strategy and knowledge, the results are well worth the effort.
Compared to B2C companies, it takes more time to qualify a B2B lead. That's because in B2C marketing, customers are the sole decision-makers whereas in B2B marketing, several stakeholders are involved.
But how exactly do B2B companies generate leads via email marketing? Here are six effective strategies.
1. Optimize your forms on web pages.
Because the B2B lead generation process is longer than that of its B2C counterpart, B2B marketers must consider all of the elements involved in a lead generation form.
The key focus is the visitor’s intent. There’s a difference between when a visitor scrolls through your website’s resource section and its pricing page. In the former case, they have shown interest in getting to know your brand. In the latter case, they may be considering buying from you.
Considering these differences, it's good practice to design your forms according to user intent.
Most businesses have an embedded form at the top of their web page where it is most noticeable to the visitors. For instance, check out this page from BirdEye.
But B2B marketers often stumble when creating and optimizing forms on their web pages. To better optimize your lead generation form, follow these best practices:
- Avoid including more than three fields.
- Make it easy and quick for visitors to fill in their information.
- Ask for information that aligns with your business requirements. For example, if you have an enterprise software solution, the most pertinent info is the visitor’s name, title, or industry — not age or gender.
- Make your forms interesting and engaging to grab visitors’ attention. For instance, use a freebie, bonus, or early-bird discount. The example below from WPForms includes a bonus spin wheel alongside its pop-up form to get undivided attention.
2. Create different landing pages.
Did you know companies can witness as much as a whopping 55% increase in leads by increasing the number of their landing pages?
According to research from HubSpot, companies did not experience any improvement in their leads when they increased their number of landing pages from 1-5 to 6-10. But they saw a boost in leads when they increased their landing pages to the 10-15 range.
This may beg the question: why do you need more landing pages?
Simple—individual landing pages that cater to different industries, verticals, and use cases can drive more leads and conversions.
This strategy will help you further segment your email lists since you can track and link the sign-up information with landing pages. Creating more targeted landing pages also benefits your site because they’ll appeal to users with more specific needs and high intent.
For example, Slack has landing pages for different industry verticals. That includes a page targeting the financial services industry.
Targeted landing pages can ultimately lead to more quality leads coming right into your funnel.
3. Use lead magnets and appropriate CTAs.
B2B leads don’t give up their information easily. So if your forms aren’t getting any submissions, try using lead magnets to entice more users.
What’s a lead magnet? You can think of it simply as a gated content resource that you’re offering in exchange for a user’s name and email address.
Use lead magnets alongside appropriate CTAs on your site. CTAs should be highly targeted based on a visitor’s intent and needs. For instance, for someone reading your blog post on video marketing, you might want to include a relevant CTA like “Download our free guide on 50+ video marketing techniques”.
Here’s one example by HubSpot. When users finish reading HubSpot’s post on co-marketing, HubSpot offers a free co-marketing kit. The catch: you’ll need to provide your email address to get access.
Taking inspiration from HubSpot, you can create high-quality resources to offer users. After all, if you want visitors to turn into leads and potential prospects, you need to provide them value in some way.
Although your CTAs should align with their respective landing pages, don’t think you need to insert and format them the same way across every page. For instance, you don’t need to use pop-ups on every blog post. On the contrary, consider testing different CTAs for your lead magnets.
4. Let automation do the work
Lead generation doesn’t have to be all manual. You can use an email marketing tool to automate some tasks—like sending a drip email sequence based on the lead’s behavior. For example, whenever a visitor submits their information and becomes a qualified lead, you can set up an automated sequence of welcome and onboarding emails.
To illustrate, here’s an example of an automated welcome email from task management tool Todoist.
Apart from including personalized copy, the email also includes a free guide on how to use Todoist’s product. It’s a simple email—nothing over the top—but it’s effective in continuing to engage the visitor further since it offers a useful resource. And the fact that it’s automated means Todoist’s team didn’t have to set aside their other tasks to send this message.
In short, email marketing automation covers your bases so that you never miss an opportunity to interact with your potential prospects. You can even delineate the specifics of what you automate by setting workflow rules like:
- Enter users into a new email sequence once they’ve finished receiving onboarding emails
- Send a reminder email one day in advance for an upcoming webinar to anyone who’s RSVPed
- Send an internal notification email if a user clicks on a product demo link within an email
Ideally, your email marketing software will track the web page where visitors sign up and sort them into email lists, triggering targeted messages based on that initial signup page. This way, you won’t have to manually send out emails to every new lead that submits information on your site.
5. Organize virtual events.
The uncertainty caused by the coronavirus has led many organizations, including B2B companies, to a new marketing approach: virtual events.
More virtual events and webinars than ever occur on a daily basis. Your inbox might show evidence of this trend—and for good reason. The truth is that virtual events, like conferences and webinars, are an effective way to attract high-quality leads. After all, virtual event registrations and confirmations take place via email.
Even if you get only 10 new signups for a webinar, it’s still a worthwhile starting point.
The key is to plan and organize events that are relevant to your target audience. Attracting high-quality leads largely depends on two elements:
- The speaker
- The topic being discussed
Collaborating with industry experts opens up many networking and business opportunities. Rather than trying to attract only new leads, you should also send bulk email blasts about your events to your existing email base. They may further share your invitation within their own networks if they find your event valuable.
For example, here’s an invitation from HubSpot for a webinar about account-based marketing campaigns. After receiving it, I forwarded the registration link to several of my team members to accompany me.
6. Launch a re-engagement email campaign.
Businesses tend to forget about the existing B2B leads that have turned “cold”—or faded—over time. These leads may have dropped off for one of many reasons. For instance:
- They signed up when you were still experimenting with your email marketing efforts.
- Your content didn’t align with their interests or needs.
- Your emails landed in their spam folder.
In order to tap into this audience, consider launching a re-engagement email campaign. Re-engagement campaigns come in a variety of forms, from sending feedback or review emails to offering a special promotion to sending a confirmation email that users still want to be a part of your email list.
Below is an example from Zoom. Note that it doesn't ask for anything except feedback.
Sending re-engagement emails is important because keeping a list of inactive subscribers can increase your bounce rate and hurt your business’s email marketing metrics in the long run.
Just because a lead is inactive doesn’t mean all hope is lost. You can still influence them and potentially convert them into an active user. To do so, the content of your re-engagement email should reflect that you still value them and have not forgotten them.
<div class="tip">Re-engagement isn't the only email campaign your B2B company should try. Experiment with these other B2B email marketing strategies to see what works.</div>
Final Wrap-up
In the end, successful B2B email marketing is all about providing value to your target audience. Everyone has an intent and interest in browsing your product or services. You just need to be influential and convincing to close the deal.
What do you think? Leave your thoughts in a comment below.
About the Author
Shivani Srivastava is a freelance writer at SendX. A content marketer by heart, she is passionate about writing anything in the field of the technological landscape.
