In B2B marketing, email remains a powerhouse for nurturing relationships and driving results. But to truly maximise ROI, simply sending out mass emails isn’t enough. It requires a strategic and tailored approach. In this post, I’ll share five advanced strategies that a top B2B email marketing agency would use to significantly boost ROI, based on proven practices and my extensive experience in the field.

This article focuses specifically on engaging with existing customer or email lists—people who already have some connection to your business. Cold email outreach is a different challenge. While it can be effective when executed correctly, its success often depends on factors like the strength of your offer, the industry you’re targeting, and the quality of your contact list.

In my experience, LinkedIn Sales Navigator typically delivers a higher ROI for finding B2B leads. However, with the right strategy, cold emails can also yield solid results.

Contents

1. Phased Campaign Approach
2. Leveraging Email Marketing Analytics
3. Content Personalisation in Email Marketing
4. Automation and Behavior-Triggered Emails
5. Continuous Testing: Optimise for Excellence
6. Summary

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Phased Campaign Approach

One of the most effective strategies an email marketing agency employs is a phased approach to campaigns. Rather than sending out a single email blast and hoping for the best, a phased approach involves multiple waves of targeted emails. Here’s how a basic phased campaign would work:

• Campaign 1: The initial email is sent to your entire contact list. This email is designed to capture attention and encourage engagement.
• Campaign 2: For those who did not open the first email, a new email is sent, with a different subject line.
• Campaign 3: For recipients who opened the email but didn’t take further action, a follow-up email is crafted to nudge them closer to conversion. This could include additional offers, case studies, or a more personalised message. The amount of follow ups you can send is unlimited (within reason), usually one is enough.

This phased approach ensures you don’t miss any opportunities and maximises the visibility of your message among relevant contacts. It can drastically improve open rates, engagement, and overall campaign ROI.

Leveraging Email Marketing Analytics

Analytics is the backbone of successful B2B email marketing. A top-tier email marketing agency carefully tracks every aspect of a campaign’s performance, using this data to refine and enhance future strategies.

Engagement tracking is key—every interaction, from opens and clicks to forwards and shares, is monitored. This detailed data reveals which contacts are most engaged with your content, providing valuable insights into your audience’s preferences.

Additionally, the most engaged leads—those showing significant interest but not yet converted—get flagged and passed on to the sales team. This integration allows the sales team to reach out proactively with a personalised approach, greatly increasing the chances of conversion.

If you don’t have a dedicated sales team, anyone in your business skilled in customer-facing roles can handle this responsibility. The goal is to create a seamless customer journey and proactively capitalise on your marketing efforts.

Content Personalisation in Email Marketing

Personalisation within email marketing is now a necessity. Email marketing B2B services that excel use personalisation to tailor messages to specific segments of your audience. This can be as simple as addressing the recipient by name or as complex as creating content that resonates with the specific pain points of different industries or roles. The depth of personalisation you can achieve depends on the time you can invest in a campaign and the size of your customer list.

Dynamic content is a powerful tool within email marketing platforms (see here for a top 10), allowing you to create content blocks that change based on the recipient’s industry, job title, or previous interactions with your brand. This approach ensures that each recipient receives highly relevant content, increasing the chances of engagement.

However, to effectively use dynamic content, you must first have a well-organised CRM with appropriately segmented data. The quality of your CRM directly impacts how personalised your email marketing can be. While CRM segmentation can be highly detailed, a good starting point is for you to focus on the basics. Ensure that every contact has this essential information:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email
• Role
• Company Name
• Sector / Industry

Additionally, I recommend implementing a classification system within your CRM to categorise customer relationships at the company level. This could be as simple as a tiered system like Gold, Silver, and Bronze. The tiers would be based on how much they’ve spent with you or their potential future value. This classification helps you prioritise and tailor your outreach.

Personalised content not only enhances engagement but also builds trust with your audience, making them more likely to convert.

Automation and Behavior-Triggered Emails

By setting up automated workflows, you ensure that your audience receives timely, consistent communication without the need for manual effort. This keeps your brand top-of-mind and nurtures leads effectively, guiding them through the customer journey.

Behavior-triggered emails respond to specific actions your contacts take, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or making a purchase. These highly personalised and relevant emails often lead to higher open rates and conversions. When combined, automation and behavior-triggered emails can create a seamless and personalised experience for your audience.

Continuous Testing: Optimise for Excellence

A top-performing B2B email marketing agency continually tests and optimises every aspect of its campaigns. This process includes A/B testing subject lines, email content, send times, and even the design and layout of your emails. By experimenting with different versions of an email, agencies can identify which elements resonate most with your audience, leading to better performance in future campaigns.

These tests provide insights that refine and enhance your email marketing strategy, ensuring that your campaigns constantly evolve and improve.

Summary

I hope you’ve gained valuable insights into how an email marketing agency approaches driving more ROI for your business. By implementing these strategies, you can cultivate a more responsive and engaged audience. Remember, reaching the highest level of email marketing effectiveness requires a fully segmented CRM.

While I’m not an agency, I’ve spent the past four years helping clients develop successful email marketing strategies and more. If you’d like to discuss these strategies or explore other areas of digital marketing and creative work, don’t hesitate to reach out!