Author: Loïc Bresler

Email marketing is an essential tool for developing and maintaining strong business relationships in the B2B sector. To take full advantage of this strategy, it’s crucial to focus on your customers’ needs and create a customer avatar, which represents your ideal client. In this article, we’ll guide you through the different steps to optimize your B2B email marketing strategy by focusing on the customer, gathering their needs and creating a suitable customer avatar.

🗣️ Talking about your customers’ needs

Analyze B2B market trends 📊

To fully understand the needs of your B2B customers, it’s essential to start by analyzing market trends. This will help you identify the opportunities, challenges and expectations of companies in your sector. To do this, consult research reports, market studies and expert articles. Also keep abreast of new technologies, innovations and regulatory changes that could affect your sector.

Identify the challenges and issues facing your business customers 🎯

Once you have an overview of market trends, it’s time to focus on the specific challenges and problems your customers are facing. To do this, it’s important to talk to them, analyze feedback and follow online discussions on professional social networks or specialized forums. This will enable you to identify common pain points and better tailor your offering to meet their needs.

Tailor your communication to meet corporate needs 📝

Now that you’ve identified the needs and expectations of your B2B customers, it’s essential to adapt your communication accordingly. This means adapting the content, tone and frequency of your emails to better address their concerns. For example, if your customers are concerned about data security, be sure to include information about the security measures you have put in place in your communications.

📚 Gathering your business customers’ needs

📋 Use of B2B surveys and questionnaires

One of the most effective ways of gathering your B2B customers’ needs is to ask them questions directly. To do this, you can use B2B-specific surveys and questionnaires. Be sure to include open-ended questions that allow respondents to express their concerns and expectations in detail. Then analyze the responses to identify common trends and needs.

Setting up focus groups with professionals 🗣️

Focus groups are another effective way of gathering the needs of your B2B customers. Invite representatives of target companies to take part in discussions on topics specific to your sector. These exchanges will enable you to gather valuable information about their needs, expectations and concerns. Focus groups can be organized in person or via videoconferencing platforms.

Analysis of feedback and customer opinions in the B2B sector

Feedback and customer reviews are a valuable source of information for identifying the needs and expectations of your B2B customers. Analyze comments left on your website, professional social networks or specialized review platforms. Take note of recurring problems and suggestions for improvement, so you can adapt your offer and communication.

Exploit professional social networks and specialized forums

Professional social networks such as LinkedIn and forums specialized in your sector are invaluable sources of information for gathering the needs of your B2B customers. Follow discussions, publications and comments to identify trends, issues and expectations. Don’t hesitate to ask questions and seek feedback to better understand your customers’ needs.

🎯 Create a B2 customer avatar

Determine company sector and size 🏭

When creating your B2B customer avatar, start by determining the company’s sector of activity and size. This will help you target the companies most likely to be interested in your products or services, and tailor your communication to their specific needs.

Identify the main needs and motivations of target companies

Next, identify the main needs and motivations of the companies you’re targeting. What problems do they face? What goals are they trying to achieve? What motivates them to seek a solution like yours? By answering these questions, you’ll be in a better position to understand your customers and offer them appropriate solutions.

Define the major problem your product or service solves for B2B customers ❗

To create a relevant B2B customer avatar, it’s essential to determine the major problem your product or service solves for businesses. This will enable you to focus on the most important aspects of your offering and communicate its benefits effectively.

Describe the profile of your ideal customer, taking into account the specific characteristics of the B2B market.

Finally, describe the profile of your ideal customer, taking into account the specifics of the B2B market. Think about the size of the company, the sector of activity, the specific needs and motivations that drive them to seek a solution like yours. This avatar will guide you in adapting your B2B email marketing strategy.

How to use B2B customer avatars to improve your email marketing strategy

Email personalization and segmentation based on company characteristics

Using B2B customer avatars enables you to personalize your emails and segment your lists according to company characteristics. This means you can send messages tailored to each segment, taking into account their specific needs and context. Personalization and segmentation are essential for improving customer engagement and satisfaction.

Let’s imagine you’re a company providing project management software. You’ve created a B2B customer avatar for the healthcare and technology sectors, and you’ve identified specific needs for each sector. Here’s how you could personalize your emails and segment your list according to the characteristics of these companies:

Segment your subscriber list by industry:

* List A: Companies in the healthcare sector
* List B: Technology companies

Create personalized content for each segment:

* For List A (health) :

Discuss the challenges of complying with specific healthcare regulations (e.g. HIPAA) and how your project management software helps them stay compliant.
Share case studies or testimonials from healthcare customers who have successfully improved their project management efficiency thanks to your software.
Inform them about the features of your software specifically designed to meet the needs of the healthcare sector, such as the management of sensitive patient information.

* For List B (technology) :

Focus on the integration of your project management software with other tools commonly used in the technology sector, such as development platforms or human resources management systems.
Share tips and tricks on how technology companies can get the most out of your software to manage complex, collaborative projects.
Showcase the specific features of your software that help technology companies track and improve their product development processes.

Adapting content and tone to the B2B customer avatar

Based on the customer avatar, adapt the content and tone of your emails to better meet the needs and expectations of your target companies. For example, if your customer avatar is a company in the healthcare sector, you could include information on regulations specific to this sector, or address issues related to data confidentiality.

For our example above, we would have :

* For List A (healthcare), use a professional, formal tone, emphasizing the importance of compliance and data security.
* For List B (technology), adopt a more relaxed and dynamic tone, emphasizing innovation and collaboration.

Monitor results to adjust your strategy in real time

To monitor results and adjust your B2B email marketing strategy in real time, it’s important to track a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and use appropriate tools to measure them.
The most commonly used key performance indicators include :
* Open rate: percentage of emails opened in relation to the total number of emails sent
* Click-through rate (CTR): percentage of clicks on the links contained in your emails in relation to the total number of emails opened
* Conversion rate: percentage of recipients who carried out a desired action (purchase, registration, download, etc.) after clicking on a link in the email.) after clicking on a link in the email
* Unsubscribe rate: percentage of recipients who unsubscribe from your email list compared to the total number of emails sent
Then adjust your strategy in real time according to the results obtained.
By analyzing the data collected using the tools mentioned above, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of your email marketing strategy and adjust your actions accordingly. For example, if you find that the open rate is low, you could test different email subject lines to attract recipients’ attention. If click-through rates are low, you could work on improving the relevance and quality of your email content.

Continuous experimentation and optimization in the B2B context

Finally, don’t forget that optimizing your B2B email marketing strategy is an ongoing process. Test different approaches, content and formats to identify what works best for your target audience. Learn from your mistakes and successes to refine your strategy and continually improve your performance.

Implementing a customer-focused B2B email marketing strategy can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and sales performance. By talking about your customers’ needs, gathering their requirements, and creating an adapted customer avatar, you’ll be able to personalize and optimize your communications to better meet business expectations. Don’t forget that optimization is a continuous process: monitor your results, learn from your experiences and adjust your strategy accordingly to achieve your business objectives.

Emailing can generate a negative brand image

For many Internet users, receiving spam from an advertiser is a real turn-off. The Internet user forms a negative opinion of the brand, and is unlikely to become a customer in the short or medium term.
But this statement needs to be qualified. What is spam?
By definition, this is unsolicited e-mail. But, in reality, it’s the recipient who subjectively decides whether it’s spam or not. In fact, most Internet e-mail providers base their decisions mainly on their users’ reports of spam, and don’t look to see if an e-mail is legitimate or not.
Moreover, legitimacy varies from one country to another. In France, for example, it is legal to send an unsolicited e-mail to a professional without his or her consent, as long as the message relates to his or her business.
On the other hand, a perfectly legitimate e-mail addressed to a private individual who has agreed to receive e-mails from a brand may be flagged as spam. All it takes is for the user not to feel concerned by the message, for the message to be badly targeted, or simply for the advertiser to send too many e-mails.
Please note that we do not advise you to send an unsolicited e-mail to a private individual. However, an appropriate and interesting message (both in terms of the offer and the added value of the content) sent to a professional without his or her consent will have no negative effect in most cases.

Internet users are in high demand

Open and conversion rates have tended to fall in recent years. Internet users, whether individuals or professionals, are receiving more and more e-mails every day. Competition in the mailbox is only increasing. Nevertheless, B-to-B email prospecting remains the most affordable marketing acquisition channel compared to other marketing channels. There’s still plenty of room for improvement before we consider abandoning it. This encourages us to improve the quality of the e-mails we send, both in terms of content and form, and to remain creative in order to stay ahead of the game.

Base quality can wipe out all efforts

A good message sent to the wrong target won’t produce good results. The same applies if half the addresses in the database are obsolete. Whether addresses are collected and managed in-house, or purchased, it’s important to keep your database up to date. Bad addresses must be removed from future mailings. Unsubscriptions must always be taken into account. And it’s crucial to take a few precautions before [purchasing a B2B prospecting database].

An emailing file loses its value over time

Individuals sometimes change their email address. Professionals change jobs. Over time, part of a database becomes unusable. The solution is to maintain a constant effort to collect new email addresses and compensate for this natural erosion. In concrete terms, 1 to 2% of the addresses in a database disappear every month. If a continuous effort is made to collect new contacts, this volume of contacts can easily be compensated for.

Deliverability can be a drag on results

Between unsolicited mass mailings without any targeting, and malicious e-mails such as phishing, Internet mail providers have equipped themselves to protect their users and clean up their inboxes. As a result, it has become almost impossible to get a large number of e-mails through to the inbox if the campaign is of poor quality.
Conversely, e-mail traffic of good quality will not be penalized.
Here is a list of points to consider before sending out a campaign.
Sending parameters must be well configured. The IP addresses used must be authenticated to have the right to send emails from the domain name of the sending address. These are settings to be made on the DNS of the sending domain name: SPF and DKIM. If you use an emailing platform, your service provider will manage these technical settings for you.
An anti-spam test before sending ensures that your IP addresses, the domain name of the sending address or the domain names of the links in your message are not listed in an anti-spam blacklist (or RBL for Realtime Blackhole List).
A thorough analysis of the error messages received when sending your campaign enables you to detect any problems and resolve them. When an e-mail is rejected by a mail server, the associated error message is often very instructive. The email address may no longer be valid, but the message may also have been refused for other reasons: it is considered spam, a blacklist has responded positively, there are too many reports of spam by users of a particular email provider, etc. Here again, if you use an email marketing platform optimized for prospecting, your service provider will take the necessary actions to maintain the best possible deliverability according to the quality of your email traffic.

Emailing is not suitable for certain targets

Some targets are less responsive to email marketing. These include individuals under the age of 25, who only use their email address for service messages. For most of them, social networks such as Snapchat are more appropriate.
Similarly, for certain ultra-competitive activities with little differentiation between service providers, it will be more difficult to make an email marketing campaign profitable. Here are just a few examples: pet insurance, window sales, employee luncheon vouchers, etc.
This disadvantage can be compensated for by building brand awareness through advertising. A brand with high brand awareness systematically has a lower ratio of spam reports. We have very clear statistics on this subject. For example, we have twice observed that a TV advertising campaign (for a car manufacturer) reduced spam reports by 50%.

The lifespan of an email campaign is short

Once a campaign has been sent out, a flow of visitors is sent to the landing page or website for a few days. Mainly the first two days. A week later, there’s no impact at all. Some users may archive the message for later processing, or bookmark the website. But these are in the minority. An email campaign therefore has a lifespan of just one week.
Don’t panic, the solution is simple if you want a constant flow of traffic or leads: send every week. To the same recipients, provided your e-mails contain information that’s relevant and instructive for your target audience (e.g. educational content), or to a different target if you’re addressing a wider audience.

There are a number of technical constraints, and setting up an emailing campaign is relatively complex.

There are many things you can’t put in an email message: scripts, a video player, original fonts, etc… Or rather, you can, but the result is random depending on the recipient’s email environment.
Correct display on computers, tablets and mobiles requires a message that is either ultra-simple or responsive (adapts to the user’s resolution).
But there’s no need to learn HTML and CSS coding. If you’re using a full-featured email marketing platform, you’ll have access to a responsive editor that lets you design beautiful responsive messages without any special knowledge. You can also delegate the creation of responsive emailing to professionals.

Since 2007, we’ve been seeing press articles and bloggers pitting email against social networks (Facebook in the lead) and announcing that email is outdated. But it has a huge advantage: it doesn’t depend on any organization like social networks, and it’s universal.

Emailing is far from obsolete

Despite its age, email is far from obsolete for B2B use. Corporate employees have been using email since the 90s, and its use became widespread in the early 2000s.
While consumer usage changes regularly; instant messengers like Snapchat have taken market share, particularly among younger people; communication patterns are relatively stable for professionals. Corresponding by email with colleagues, customers or suppliers is perfectly natural in the workplace.

It’s an effective communication tool that has the advantage of being much less intrusive than the telephone and more formal than instant messaging. With an email, there remains a written record of a communication, whereas this is not the case with Slack or a phone call. With the rise of telecommuting in the wake of the health crisis of the 2020s, the number of emails exchanged has exploded.

So it’s certain that email will remain the primary mode of business communication for decades to come. Statistics show that there are 3.9 billion email users worldwide, compared with 40 million Facebook users. Prospecting by email therefore makes it possible to potentially contact almost all professionals (and all those with an office job).

On the negative side, professionals are very much in demand by email. As it’s a cheap prospecting channel, it’s widely used, and a communication email can easily be drowned in the mass. Not to mention deliverability problems (the fact that an email arrives in the inbox), which also degrade performance. It’s not uncommon to hear marketers complain that the return on an email campaign is falling every year.

It’s true that people are very solicited. There’s more wastage than there was 10 years ago, both in terms of the rate of completed e-mails, and in terms of opens and clicks. And the ever-increasing number of new regulatory constraints is also increasing the complexity of email marketing campaigns.

But there are always people interested.

Emailing is the most profitable outbound marketing channel

And at Ediware, we’re convinced that the B2B email prospecting channel remains the most profitable outbound marketing channel for a long time to come.

Professionals will continue to use email as their preferred means of communication. Social networks will continue to develop, but not necessarily to the detriment of email marketing. Rather, as a complement.

You simply have to work harder than before and optimize every aspect of your email marketing strategy to stand out from the crowd, despite the ever-increasing number of e-mails received by Internet users.

Despite over-solicitation, email open rates remain stable

The DMA (Data Marketing Association, formerly Syndicat National de la Communication Directe) has published the figures for the 15 leading routers in France in 2021. The 15 companies providing emailing routing services have communicated their figures for both prospecting and loyalty. Ediware took part in this study, as it does every year.

• 139.87 billion emails were sent, an increase of 12.01% on the previous year.
• Internet users receive an average of 7.44 e-mails per day
• The average open rate for these 139.87 billion emails is 18.15%.
• The average click-through rate on this same volume is 5.35%.
• Email routing is a channel with the highest return on investment of all marketing actions. Marketers consider email to be the most important strategic channel (91%), ahead of social media (83%).

The DMA France publication on e-routeurs 2021 figures is here.

If we compare the evolution of the opening rate over the last few years :

(figures from the e-routeurs survey published each year by DMA France)

The performance of email marketing campaigns has remained stable over the last few years. The over-solicitation of Internet users and regulatory constraints have not reduced the performance of email marketing campaigns.

Emailing remains the preferred marketing channel for businesses

The DMA UK’s “Marketer email tracker” survey comes to the same conclusions:

“Email-marketing remains the primary channel for the majority of marketers (75%), although social networks (55%) and online advertising (35%) are effective in supporting acquisition campaigns.”

The same study indicates that despite the adoption of the RGPD, the return on investment for email-marketing campaigns remains stable overall each year. This is despite the increase in the number of emails received by each Internet user. This can be explained by the widespread adoption of best practices by companies to comply with regulatory constraints. These good practices compensate for the drop in yield induced by the growing number of recipients being solicited.

In the next article, discover the advantages of B-to-B emailing