B2B Email Newsletter Ideas and Approaches for Your Next Campaign

B2B email newsletter best practices to try in your next campaign

B2B newsletters need to be handled differently than emails to consumers in a B2C segment. 

Most B2C campaigns target individual consumers, but in the case of B2B email newsletters, you are going after multiple individuals, occupying different roles within target companies. When an individual gets a B2C email, they are usually “responsible” for all stages of their customer journey. Within a company though, people of different roles are responsible for different stages of the journey and decision making, and these people would look at a purchase each from their own angle. 

That’s why B2B newsletters need to address the concerns and questions of all categories of people involved, and a great way to do it is to use different types of emails. In the following paragraphs, we will look at email newsletter best practices, examples, and ideas packed with actionable insights to enhance your B2B email campaigns.

Don’t be pushy in selling

Potential buyers might be having a multitude of questions like:

• Is this product going to solve my issues? 
• Is this the best fit? 
• What will it cost to switch to it from my current solution (or from scratch), onboard employees, and keep it working?
• What about the security concerns?

Yes, many of these would be usually addressed by having a direct talk with your sales people, but they’d want information before they get to sales. The B2B audience is not going to be tempted by marketing language and great deals. The main goal of the newsletter here is to earn their trust and get your brand known for what you offer. Focus on educational content and valuable resources, and provide the information people in your target company need to make decisions.

The example below is an email sent by Calendly (a platform for teams to schedule, prepare and follow up on meetings) to its users on a free plan. They list a number of convenient options the upgrade can bring, and close the email by bringing in impressive statistics about the tool’s users.

Talk about your values

A business is affected by how its values align with values and trends in society — it can’t antagonize or ignore them. It is just as true for B2B as it is for B2C. This can extend to how they choose business partners and from whom they buy. That is, companies that value creativity might prefer to work with others who do the same and can provide it.

So it’s a good idea to make your business values clear and known to others. You can do it in your newsletter: explain your brand’s values and how they tie to their clients’ companies or other problems around, environmental or otherwise.

In the example below, the marketing agency Rock Candy Media explains its approach and values and sets itself apart by directly stating the difference.

Use infographics

Business people don’t have entire days to read emails; they are busy professionals looking for on-point content that’s easy to digest. An infographic conveys information in a quick and easy-to-understand way, and it’s clear what it contains at a glance.

LogMeIn by Central made good use of an infographic in an email to illustrate their end-of-year numbers:

Make use of storytelling

Storytelling is one of the easiest ways to make emails more interesting and raise engagement, and it’s also one of the ways to differentiate your brand’s B2B emails from everyone else’s. 

Storytelling in email marketing for B2B sees the benefits because on the receiving end of it is a human being all the same. And for many humans, a story beats pure logic.

The LogMeIn team’s email in the screenshot below makes use of storytelling to bring out their customer’s emotions. They immediately get the point across by using a vivid comparison of a data breach to an Apocalypse for that specific business. Once emotions get involved and people give it a thought…  the readers are much more likely to invest in better security.

Highlight your products

Pushing a sale in a business-aimed newsletter may be counter-productive, but on the other hand, sometimes a simple, straightforward B2B email is all you need to encourage users’ purchases. This will remind subscribers of what you have to offer and will guide the ready ones to the purchase. 

Ubiquity’s email newsletter below demonstrates this by introducing its new products, each section leading to a page with more details for those who need them.

Customize the emails

Chances are, you are using an email marketing service to handle your email marketing, and many of them allow you to do marketing automation — such as automatically inserting your reader’s name in the email’s body or in its subject line. 

Personalize and customize email campaigns as much as possible — especially for existing customers, whose information (name, company, job role, etc.) you most likely know. 

You can personalize your newsletters by addressing the reader by name or sending an email about something unique to this particular business. 

In the example below, Unsplash takes advantage of the platform’s analytics to send a personalized congratulation and offer a physical token to commemorate the occasion.

Show how to get more out of your product

 B2B newsletters that are aimed at actual users of the product need to:

1. Educate the users
2. Show that there is value in continuing to read emails from the brand

You need to demonstrate that your newsletter is useful, starting from the very first after-purchase email. 

In the example below, HubSpot educates its new users on something that can save them time and effort — the link to the knowledge arrives straight into their inbox instead of them needing to look for it.

Send out a holiday-themed newsletter

Black Friday, an end-of-year sale or the company’s anniversary are all good occasions to send out the holiday-themed newsletter. The content of the email depends on what your business does. 

It could be a reminder to choose gifts for employees and business partners like Greetabl in the example below, a sale, or valuable educational materials along the lines of “How to prepare X and Y to double your next year’s revenue”.

More B2B email newsletter examples from real brands

Asana: Product feature information for a new user

New users of a product would unsubscribe if they feel the emails aren’t useful to them. The first emails to such contacts need to contain clear value and be worth opening.

Asana’s new user email has large photos and concise text to convey they are sending over useful resources and nothing else — as a project management tool, they are very clear about how busy business people are. 

Sketch: Curated content email

Curated content is one of the types of emails that are easy and fast to create, and it can drive a ton of traffic to your blog posts, social media like YouTube or TickTock, or other content from newsletter’s subscribers. 

Take a page out of Sketch’s (the all-in-one platform for digital design) book — although there are quite a lot of things in there, their email still looks clean and is easy to scan at a glance. They stick to just a few items with clear titles, images, and subheaders while using a simple white background.

Loom: “New feature” email

The key to company update email is to clearly tie the news to what directly impacts the user. 

Loom does this beautifully, starting from the catchy title to the attention-grabbing image, and then getting straight to the point and explaining the essence of the software’s new feature.  They’ve also included a video explanation of how it works.

Adobe: Live event/webinar email

Adobe’s upcoming event email checks out all the checkboxes of business email: colorful header image followed by white text on a black background that matches the brand’s tone. The actual content conveys all the important information quickly and in a concise way. The email is easy to scan and understand at a glance — perfect for busy readers.

Vimeo: Holiday discount email

Black Friday and the holiday season is a great time to offer discounts to get more customers on board or upscale existing ones. This is true for B2B as well, and Vimeo — a video hosting, sharing, and services platform — makes good use of it. 

They announce the discount followed by a brief introduction of the features that are available on the paid plans and wrap it up with a comparison between the three paid plans themselves. The “video” at the top is actually an automatically playing GIF, and they continue with “videos” by using illustrations with video-associated elements like a progress bar, pause and play button, and a “Live” mark in the corner.

Conclusion

B2B email newsletters are different from B2C emails because, in B2B, there is not just one person but a group of people at the target company (usually in different roles) who influence the buying decision and take part in a customer journey. 

A successful B2B newsletter is segmented and customized based on these people’s roles and their stages in the customer journey. Here are some of the ideas that work for B2B:

• Don’t force the sale, inform and be helpful to your potential customers’ instead. 
• Explain your values and things your company prioritizes — it will help build trust and show how aligned your brand is with what they expect of their business partners. 
• Customize and personalize the newsletters — starting from greeting your readers by name, to sending emails based on individual occasions. I.e., their company’s anniversary, them reaching a milestone in using your product or service, etc.
• Even in B2B, its people on the receiving end of your emails — use storytelling to make your brand and product more relatable, and make it all easier to read with infographics.
• Highlight your most popular products — this will keep people in the loop about what you offer.
• Send information and advice on how to get more out of your product to those who already bought it. Make sure to include those nifty convenient features that aren’t obvious from the first look.  
• Send out holiday-themed newsletters — Black Friday sale is an obvious example, but things like gift reminders and advice on how to do better by using your product are great topics too.