Did you know that almost 60% of B2B Marketers believe that email is the most effective channel for generating revenue?
There’s no doubt that email plays a big role in client communication, lead generation, and sales for B2B businesses.
However, if your emails are not hitting the mark, you could end up losing clients or damaging important business relationships.
In this article, we’ll be taking a look at 7 email etiquette tips every B2B marketer should know to help you how to avoid making any business email faux pas when sending marketing emails.
1. Use a professional email address
When sending marketing emails, it’s extremely important to be professional, and make sure that your emails look the part. That’s why you should always send your marketing copy from a professional businesses email.
Sending a marketing email from an email address that ends in a generic domain may be viewed as unprofessional by other business owners, and in some cases, it could even be misconstrued as a spam or scam email.
It’s a good idea to make sure that every client-facing member of your team has a professional email address that they can use for sending marketing emails and other client communications.
2. Always use greeting and closings
In this day and age, it’s not super important to be hyper formal when sending emails. Greetings like ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey there’ are quite common and usually well-received by businesses. However, forgoing greetings and sign-offs all together can be seen as too informal, and some readers may even find this to be rude.
Not using greetings and sign-offs in each email can make a conversation feel rushed and show a lack of effort on your part.
So always be sure to greet the person you’re talking with in a friendly and professional manner and sign off with a ‘thanks’ or ‘looking forward to hearing from you’ at the end of each communication.
3. Personalize your emails at much as possible
When it comes to email marketing, personalization is proven to increase engagement and improve client relationships. Around 75% of marketers say that personalizing emails increases engagement levels, and that’s why it’s super important for B2B marketers to personalize their campaigns.
Personalization can be as simple as addressing your email contact by name, rather than simply greeting them with ‘hey there’, however, it’s possible to personalize in many other ways too.
Personalization doesn’t have to take too much extra time either. Many email marketing automation tools include some personalization features which makes personalization easier to achieve. Making at least some effort to personalize your emails is really good etiquette and could have a huge effect on your sales and lead generation efforts.
4. Always send email confirmation of appointments
B2B appointment setting can be a challenge, and if you’re working with lots of clients at one time, it doesn’t take long for things to get complicated.
Whether you’ve set up an appointment face-to-face, over the phone, or on a zoom call, it’s great etiquette to follow up with a confirmation email.
This email confirmation will not only help you to stay on top of your appointment schedule but will also benefit your client’s organization too.
Remember, they’re also busy running a business, or marketing one, so like you, they probably have a lot of different appointments to keep track of, and will appreciate having everything in writing to refer back to.
5. Respond to your emails promptly
In a B2B setting, things can get hectic fast. If you have tons of potential clients to interact with, marketing campaigns to manage, and other team members to collaborate with, it can be easy to lose track of your inbox.
However, failing to reply to important emails in a timely fashion could have a huge impact on your lead generation and client relationships, so it should take top priority. Try your best not to take longer than 24 hours to respond to an email.
Even if you don’t have time to action the email, or reply in detail, at least reply and provide a realistic timescale of when you will be able to deal with the client’s request. Also, if you plan on being away from the office for more than 24 hours, be sure to set up autoresponder emails to keep your email contacts in the loop.
6. Avoid sending too many marketing emails
When sending marketing emails, you should be wary of sending too many, and overwhelming your email contacts. Most people find excessive amounts of emails to be spammy and it’s bad etiquette to send 1 or more emails a day.
A study by MarketingSherpa found that most email users like to receive marketing or promotional emails at least once a month. So, as a rule of thumb when sending marketing emails, most businesses stick to one or two marketing emails per month.
7. Segment your marketing emails
If you’re a business person that deals with a lot of emails every day, there’s nothing worse than having irrelevant marketing emails cluttering your inbox. This is exactly how your email contacts feel too.
To avoid bothering your email list with generic marketing emails, try to segment your lists so that people are seeing emails and content that are more relevant to them. You can segment based on factors like demographics, or their position in the funnel.
For example, if a lead is already halfway down your funnel and has already been given a full rundown of what your business has to offer, then you don’t need to send them emails that introduce what your business does.
You can use many email marketing tools available now to accurately segment your lists quickly without spending a lot of extra time.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it, 7 email etiquette tips that evey B2B marketer should take note of. Stick to these rules and all of your email marketing efforts should go off without a hitch!