What Is a B2B Email Marketing Agency and Why You Should Outsource
A B2B email marketing agency helps businesses put together and execute an email marketing campaign that delivers pre-agreed results. These results could be greater awareness, lead generation, or sales.
A full-service B2B email marketing company provides end-to-end email marketing services that encapsulate all aspects of email marketing campaigns to maximize conversions.
Think strategy, design, copywriting, deliverability, and analytics.
The team isn’t just skilled in creating a campaign but employs the practices needed to bring your emails to life and evoke positive responses in the audience.
What email marketing services does an email marketing agency offer?
- Conducting Market Research
Before shooting marketing emails, the agency will analyze your industry and target audience.
They will dig into your customer base to determine their needs, motivations, purchase behavior, and the platforms they use.
This helps inform their strategy to ensure they can reach these audiences, convert them to subscribers, and ultimately drive sales.
- Building Landing Pages & Lead Funnel Creation
Email marketing agencies set up high-converting landing pages to both collect email subscribers and create entire lead funnels.
Once a person signs up, they can be directed to another page that offers limited-time discounts, trial membership, or limited-time premium membership.
- Running Ads
In addition to collecting email subscribers from blogs, your email marketing agency can create and run high-converting ads on social media and Google targeting specific audiences.
Since the ads are segment-specific, the chances of driving conversions and ROI are higher. An important factor for small businesses that want to scale up cost-effectively.
- Creating Welcome & Follow-up Emails
Deriving sales from your email list boils down to the experiences you provide.
Right from the welcome message to the sequence of follow-up emails, top email marketing agencies work on building lasting relations that bolster trust.
They set expectations of what will follow to keep the audience interested, motivate open rates, and convert subscribers to customers.
- Sending Newsletters & Promotions
Welcome emails and follow-ups can only run for so long, so what happens next? You still want to be current in their minds, right?
At this stage, email marketing agencies come up with a mix of informative newsletters and promotional emails to keep subscribers informed and drive sales.
Depending on your goals and industry, these emails can go out weekly bimonthly, or monthly. The email marketing agency will advise on the frequency that will work best.
- Analytics & Reporting
As with other digital marketing tactics, monitoring email campaigns helps determine areas that need improvement.
Whether it’s through Google Analytics or other software, the agency will track email marketing engagement metrics, and share data-driven results.
The best email marketing agency doesn’t sugarcoat reporting or "manage" you, rather, they are transparent about the campaign results so action can be taken to improve.
If your campaign experiences low open rates, you may need to experiment with subject lines. If click-through rates are poor despite high open rates then the copy or CTA may need more work.
If unsubscribes are increasing or recipients are putting the spam label on your emails, then you might be annoying them with overly promotional emails.
These are scenarios an email marketing agency could help you with to improve results.
- Email Design
These days people view their emails on phones, tablets, and computers.
On your own, it can be challenging to create a design that works on all devices, resulting in lower open rates and unsubscribes.
Experienced email marketing agencies invest in tools that create user-friendly and professional email designs that can be customized to your liking.
- Content Creation
Some email marketing agencies use client-produced content while others curate content from your blogs.
Others still, will put together industry-relevant content for your audience.
- A/B Testing
An email marketing agency will experiment with different subject lines to see which ones grab attraction and encourage open rates.
At SalesHive, our multi-variate A/B testing platform allows us to test different elements of an email from subject lines to greetings, CTAs, and closing remarks.
This allows us to bring together high-performing variables to ensure your email campaign is optimized for the best results.
What’s Email Marketing & Why Is It Important for Your Business?
A core element of digital marketing, B2B email marketing involves sending emails to clients and target audiences to promote business solutions or offer incentives.
With B2B sales cycles taking longer routes home, brands use this online strategy as a soft sell tactic.
They use the email channel to take prospects on a journey, educating them on their pain points, solutions, and the value the sender can offer.
As the target audience becomes familiar with the sender and their offerings, they are likely to explore these solutions when it’s time to make purchase choices.
The top benefits of email marketing include
- Driving Brand Awareness
With a curated contact list on hand, you can reach multiple recipients on a regular basis and share your best content with them.
Showing up in your target audience’s inbox allows you to showcase your offerings, talk about the latest trends, and answer questions.
Done right, email marketing ensures your brand stays in your subscribers’ minds. The readers can always go back to their inbox, pull up your email and engage it when the need arises.
- Scalability
One of the best things about digital marketing efforts is their scalability.
This means that your email list can comprise large numbers of recipients, a select few, or different segments according to your customer profiles.
It all depends on the message you’re pushing through.
- Driving Conversions
With a clear understanding of your target market, you can tailor email campaigns to address their specific needs.
This may help increase audience curiosity and encourage them to take the next step or engage your team to know more.
Your business development team can also put together promotional emails containing discounted offers or personalized coupons to push sales.
- Driving Customer Loyalty
Follow-up emails are fantastic for nurturing relationships with clients, asking for feedback, and engaging idle customers aka those who abandoned their carts.
With busy schedules and distractions, it’s easy for buyers to leave halfway through a purchase hoping to come back later.
A friendly but targeted email reminds them to go back and complete their purchase.
When Is the Best Time to Partner With an Email Marketing Agency
Here are several instances when looking for and partnering with an email marketing services provider can come in handy
- If You’re Adopting a Digital Marketing Strategy
Many businesses are now adopting digital marketing strategies to promote growth and compete effectively.
But if you have no B2B email marketing experience, generating qualified leads can be a headache.
Embracing an email marketing agency will do more than help lead generation tactics.
They will build your email marketing strategy from scratch providing a solid foundation for growth and improved customer interactions.
- If Your List Has Stagnated
You ran promotions, offered free trials, and created ebooks but for some reason, you just can’t get your subscriber list to grow.
Email marketing agencies specialize in lead generation.
They will examine your existing strategy, study your market, your advertising campaign, and your distribution channels to identify the reason for the stagnation.
They will share ideas on how to revamp your efforts for better conversions.
- If You’re Receiving Unsatisfactory Engagement Rates
It’s frustrating to have a list of subscribers, send them what you believe is a great email, and receive minimal or no engagement at all.
When an email marketing agency steps in, it will consider your content strategy, subject lines, email timing, and frequency.
Overly sales-y content may have your subscribers mentally blocking you while poor subject lines aren’t attractive.
Bad timing could see your emails get pushed further down and escape the recipient’s attention. With infrequent emails, the subscriber could forget you, and too many can end up in the trash.
The agency will help refine and bring balance to your email marketing strategy so you can see more positive results for your efforts.
Advantages of Partnering with Email Marketing Services Providers
Teaming up with the best email marketing company offers incredible benefits including
Saving Time
A successful B2B email marketing strategy requires time, effort, patience, and resilience.
Hardly the stuff busy companies can afford in the wake of all the other things to do. A professional team has the time and plan to execute the campaign.
Building Your Brand.
Before you start generating leads, you need to make potential clients aware of your offerings.
An email marketing agency will work toward increasing awareness and send professional well-thought and timely emails to build your image as well.
Receiving Better Quality and Quicker Results
The expertise top email marketing agencies put into their work ensures your campaign reaches the right individuals on time. It saves you from trials and errors while ensuring you see results faster.
Helping With Customer Retention
Buying from you once doesn’t guarantee a repeat purchase. While you take care of improving customer experiences, the agency will run upsell, upgrade or new product emails, and industry-relevant newsletters. It helps you maintain touch with your customer base.
Recovering Abandoned Carts
Cart abandonment is the bane of online marketing and e-commerce.
An email marketing agency ensures you capture the prospective customer’s email earlier in the process so you can send abandoned cart reminders should the need arise.
Qualities of Top Email Marketing Agencies
While your team can learn how to perfect email marketing over time, choosing the best email marketing agency shouldn’t be a trial-and-error thing.
Here are 6 important factors to help you determine the best fit
- Team Expertise
These are the people who will create, run, and manage your campaign and you want to be sure that they can deliver results.
Some companies have an “about the team” page on their website where you can check for information about the employees, certifications, and experience. If this information isn’t available on their site, ask for it.
- Their Portfolio
An email marketing services provider portfolio sheds light on the work the company has done for its clients and its quality.
Look at the samples and ask for customer feedback to determine how effective the email campaigns were.
Check if they’ve worked with companies within your industry to ascertain their competence in your field.
- Look at Their Pricing Page
B2B email marketing is one of the more cost-effective strategies on the market, but affordability remains a concern for businesses.
What does the basic plan entail? What additional features are in the other plans?
The best email marketing agencies invest a lot of expertise and tech tools to offer true value, so keep that in mind when considering the fees.
- The Tools Company Uses
Some companies partner with marketing automation companies to run email campaigns while others use their own software.
Knowing the tools, the email marketing team uses lets you know the extent of what the team can do with your campaign.
- What Values Do They Uphold?
You’ll probably be working with this B2B email marketing services company for a while and it’s important to know that your values match. Is lead generation just a game of numbers or do they look for quality?
Do they understand that they are guests in the prospect’s inbox and thereby use best practices to send emails?
Long after the contract is over, your prospects will still remain and they will remember how poorly your team treated them
- Are there Additional Services?
With time, you may want to explore other digital marketing tactics, in which case a full-service agency is your best option.
Keeping digital marketing campaigns in one place (company) is more convenient than having multiple companies handling complementary work.
In addition to the email platform, do they have other lead generation tools to aid growth or entry into new territories?
Top Questions To Ask a Potential B2B Email Marketing Services Provider
As a final measure on the checklist of the best email marketing services provider to work with, here are 5 questions to ask
- Are you strictly a B2B email marketing agency? An agency that purely serves the B2B space will have a better understanding of how B2B buyers think and decide. They will know the triggers to include in a B2B email to attract leads.
- What is internal and what do you outsource? Are there services the digital agency outsources? You’ll want the team handling your email marketing in the same region as the target market. They will be better placed to understand the nuances that may help differentiate you from the competition.
- What metrics and reporting are provided and how easily accessible are they? Here, you’ll want data on open rates and a list of the people that opened the email, number of clicks, bounce, and unsubscribe lists.
- Will recipients have an easy way to opt-in and unsubscribe? What steps do you take to ensure compliance with US rules and regulations as well as email service providers’ requirements?
- What email marketing platform do you use and are you open to exploring other email platforms should my company prefer those?
Sign Up with the Best Email Marketing Agency
Email marketing agencies play an important role in helping businesses connect with leads and interact with clients effectively.
Their services can range from project-based email marketing services to full-agency online marketing services.
At SalesHive, we look at your business model, target market, and data-driven research before brainstorming a custom email campaign that will convert leads. Our top-of-the-line digital tools allow us to evaluate every aspect of your email and package a B2B email worth sending.
Are you ready to switch things up? Talk to us, today
