B2B Beginner’s Guide to Acquisition Email: 5 Steps to Success

With the flashy rise of new marketing channels, it can be easy to overlook the importance of email. But the fact is, while Tik Tok may be booming, people still check their inbox multiple times a day, especially B2B buyers.

A 2021 study conducted by Statista found that email is the most commonly used digital communication channel in the U.S., with over 90% of adults using it regularly. Another survey conducted by HubSpot in 2020 found that 73% of respondents prefer to receive communication from businesses via email. That's precisely why email marketing is essential for B2B marketers—and why email is a top strategy for finding new customers.

But if you’re struggling on your journey to achieve success with acquisition email campaigns, you’re not alone. Here are the most common pain points and the pain-free steps for creating campaigns that convert prospects into customers.

• Email Deliverability Issues

With spam filters becoming increasingly sophisticated, it's more challenging than ever to ensure your emails land in your potential customers’ inboxes. The past few years have also seen increased employee turnover, resulting in higher-than-typical data decay. Accurate contact data is crucial to achieving high deliverability rates. Not only is bad data a waste of time and resources, but it can also damage your email sender reputation, putting you at risk with email service providers who could blacklist your company, preventing you from emailing at all.

Using third-party data from a provider that maintains clean and accurate email data can help you avoid this problem and ensure that your emails are delivered to engaged and interested prospects. (At OMI, we’re so confident in the quality of our data that we offer a 95% email data validity guarantee.)

It's also important to pay attention to email formatting, keep concise subject lines, avoid spam trigger words, and personalize your email to enhance its relevance in your prospect’s inbox. 

• Audience Selection Struggles

Many marketers struggle with identifying the right audience for their acquisition email campaigns. Third-party contact data can provide accurate and up-to-date contact information for your target market, but you still need to define the factors for building that audience. One strategy is audience mirroring, a process that looks at traits of your best customers—such as by company types, size/revenue, number of employees, etc.—to build a new audience that matches.

Another way to find the right audience is through intent monitoring, which involves tracking online activity to identify potential customers who have shown an interest in your products or services based on defined search terms. This goes a long way toward enabling you to build an audience of buyers who may be in-market and are more likely to engage with your brand.

At OMI, audience building is a big part of our work to develop acquisition email campaigns for clients. Our best advice to marketers is this: if you don’t start with high-quality data or take the time to develop the most optimum audience for your campaigns, all your efforts will fall flat – no matter how strong your creative elements may be.

• Content That Doesn’t Connect

One of the most significant challenges in B2B acquisition email marketing is creating content that resonates with your audience. Here are some simple steps to match your content to your buyer's needs:

• Segment your audience and define each segment based on pain points, goals, interests, buying stage, engagement level, etc. The more detailed you can get, the better you’ll be able to refine your content to effectively engage your prospects.
• Use personalized messaging that speaks directly to those buyer persona pain points and interests and offers solutions to their problems.
• Use clear, succinct language that communicates your message effectively and avoids any ambiguity.
• Consider using case studies, customer testimonials, and product demos to showcase your brand's expertise and how it can benefit potential customers.

Come back next week for the second part of our two-part series on getting started with B2B email acquisition. We’ll cover two other top pain points and the steps you can take to overcome them.

OMI’s high-quality B2B business contact data comes with a 95% email validity guarantee. Fortune 1000 firms and start-ups use our data to drive modern digital marketing initiatives—including intent monitoring, email marketing, ABM, and omnichannel campaigns utilizing display, social media, and more. Reach out to our team today for more information.