Introduction:
What Is a B2B Sales Funnel?
There are three processes that are useful for understanding the B2B sales funnel:
- Buying – looking for a solution to the issue.
- Selling – identifying and engaging with consumers who encounter a specific pain point in order to provide a solution.
- Marketing – researching the issues and the people who have them, educating potential buyers and helping sellers.
Want to Drive More Sales?
If you are looking to increase your B2B sales for your business then this article will help you to drive more sales in 2019.
Increasing sales is something that you can profit greatly through your business. Here are the steps to increase your sales:
- Put your products in front of new customers that you haven't reached before
- Build and strengthen your relationship with your greatest purchases
Selling your products or services to people is not the easiest job. After connecting to various proposals, professionally you to have to prove them that your products are useful to them. Even when they get convinced, converting people with vastly different requirements and needs is like another game. When it comes to business to business [B2B] environment closing the sales is difficult.
How to Increase B2B Sales Funnel?
Mainly for sure, it is not a simple as waiting for many customers to come to your door. Your prospective clients want to make sure that they have the right marketer for the right place. Because of the difficulty of the process, it can even take months to close a sale. Here are the best ways to help your organization to improve B2B Sales funnel with email campaigns and help you grow.
Why Do You Need Email for Your B2B Marketing Strategy?
Email is an integral way of communication for most of the businesses in the world, so it’s no wonder why it is still popular, particularly for B2B marketing. For B2B marketers, email marketing is a direct means of communication for reaching and engaging with your customers.
With the development of databases through email, you have the opportunity to attract your target prospects with high-quality content and provide straight to their inbox, as well as gathering essential customer data sets. Other benefits of B2B email marketing include:
- Instant Results
- ROI
- Personalization and Segmentation
- Cost-Effectiveness
- Build Credibility
- Save Time
- And More...
Recommended: 10 B2B Marketing Tactics to Boost Your Brand
1. Understand What the Users Want
Before starting your email marketing campaign, you need to be clear that what the user wants? And why they are buying your products.
B2B companies consider their purchasing decisions with the entire team. This is why when you approach a B2B company with your emails, you must think about the entire perspective. As you learn what your prospect wants from your emails and offerings, ask the following questions yourselves.
- What is your offer?
- Who will benefit from your offer?
- How your business is unique when compared with competitors?
Then build your B2B marketing identity. As the buying journey is more extensive than B2C with multiple decision-makers involved, you can't rely your email messages only on one identity. Each of the subscribers on your list may be peculiar, so it would be a mistake to send out the same messages to everyone.
Again focus on the entire perspective and identify the needs of decision-makers. Analyze the following aspects:
- Are they Fortune global 500 companies or a startup?
- How many numbers of employees they have?
- What are the services they offer for?
- How many decision-makers are involved?
- Do they provide their content via email?
Based on the data that you have collected, construct a detailed B2B identity and start developing your emails according to the interests of the prospects. Your email messages should reflect your company values and the benefits that you offer, as well as show the prospects that you’ve done your previous works.
2. Develop Quantitative Leads
Without setting goals, it is difficult to grow your sales and determine your success. However, to achieve real success, you need to begin with the thing that you can achieve much faster, for example, "Getting 40% of leads from email marketing in the month of April".
3. Videos in the B2B Sales Cycle
The video is one of the most effective means of advertising your company’s product. Most customers like to watch a video about a product than reading about it. Video formats are more engaging. Depending on your industry, product or service, your videos can have many purposes. 90% of customers believe that demo videos are helpful. Demo videos accurately show how your service works and why it beneficial in their business goals. Funny videos can help customers think about your product or service. Client reviews in the form of video testimonials can show a more personal approach to your business.
4. Up-selling and Cross-selling
Both are about to get a whole lot more important for your business. Up-selling is the process of supporting customers to buy a comparable higher-end product itself, while Cross-selling offers related products to your clients.
Up-selling to Improve B2B Sales Funnel
It is a sales approach used to get a customer to spend more by purchasing an upgraded or premium version of what’s being purchased in an attempt to make a productive sale. While it usually requires marketing more profitable services or products, it can be simply displaying the customer to other options that were perhaps not considered already.
Cross-selling to Improve B2B Sales Funnel
Cross-selling is the action of selling an additional product or service to an actual customer. The main goal of cross-selling can be either to develop the income derived from the client or to protect the relationship. The process of cross-selling can be varied. Unlike obtaining new business, cross-selling involves an element of risk that exists in relationships with the client could be rattled. For that reason, it is important to make sure that the additional product or service being sold to the client or client's increases the value they get from the organization.
Cross-sell to Your Existing Clients
Did you know that less than 10% of B2B clients purchase the whole package that marketers offer? That’s a goldmine at your stairs. Imagine if you could convert at least 10% of those to buy from you. You just developed your sales by 10% without looking for new prospects.
The most common reasons why B2B companies don’t up-sell as much are:
- Sales representatives are afraid to go around existing customers
- Sales representatives afraid to talk to the customer’s other key decision-makers
With a good CRM program and open communication with active customers, you can unlock these up-sell opportunities. Open communication means constantly engaging with active customers with new updates or plans about your product that can be useful to them. For instance, instead of merely announcing a new mobile tool for your help desk software, show them how this tool can be used to improve their customer service. Better yet, case studies can relate to the customers. This is where your content marketing should place in. With a good flow of content about the B2B landscape, your customers are regularly connected to you even in between sales pitches. You are, in fact, building a long-term relationship and trust by adding value to your client communication. When the time comes to up-sell, it’s easier to get their attention since they have developed this bond with you.
5. Use Automation
According to some reports, B2B marketers who use marketing automation increase their sales pipeline by an average of 10%. Email automation is a subgroup of marketing automation. Email automation will not convert only leads into prospects. It makes satisfaction for an existing customer and encourages them to make use of your product. This will boost up sales, and additional purchases. There are a lot of good email automation platforms like Hub Spot, and Benchmark.
Recommended: How B2B Marketing Automation Would Add Value to Your Business Revenue
6. Personalize Your Emails
Personalizing your email messages will increase engagement. It will make your emails exactly related and useful to customers. Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates, but 70% of brands do not use them. If you are not personalizing your marketing emails, you are missing a lot of sales opportunities. Personalization is not only just using people’s names in messages. It is way beyond that.
7. Send out Exclusive Content at the Correct Time
Exclusive Content is a powerful marketing tactic that many brands have been using for years. Apple uses these tactics. That is one of the reasons it’s the most valuable company in the world despite the fact that it has an only very small market share in the Smartphone industry. With exclusivity, you can get more email subscribers and generate more sales leads. The idea can be done by creating exclusive content which is available only to your email subscribers. It can also be creating a product that is only open to your email list. You can use exclusivity to build a deeper connection with your email subscribers.
8. A/B Testing
Digital marketers do A/B testing for their website designs, Facebook ads, Google AdWords, and landing pages. The same thing applies to email marketing.
You should continually do A/B testing for your email messages.
Here are the things to do A/B testing:
- Call to action (Example: “Buy now” vs. “Book now”)
- Subject lines
- Testimonials (or no testimonials)
- The layout of the message (different placements for different elements)
- Personalization
- Body text
- Headline
- Closing text
- Images
- Test different offers
Pick one or two elements and see how it increases conversions before testing the next two or more elements. It’s important that you know why you’re testing before you do a test. You may test the headline for open rates. You may test the image for conversion rates. And you test the call-to-action text for click-through rates.
9. Add Urgency to Your Emails
If your emails put recipients under urgency to act, you will convert more subscribers into customers. For a long time, digital marketers have been using key phrases like “Hurry up", and “Only a few items left” to convert the users. Urgency is a key feature of the human brain. Urgent situations make us act very quickly.
One of the most powerful ways is creating urgency in emails to set a deadline for your offer.
10. Write Inviting Welcome Emails
When someone subscribes to your email list, you should welcome them with a greeting message. The welcome message is like the first impression of how you’ll invite and treat them through emails. If you don’t treat them amazingly right for the first time, you risk getting ignored when you start sending messages. You need to make your welcome message have a long-lasting impression on new subscribers.
Overstock uses their welcome email to give you a 10% offer coupon. Think of something valuable can make use to welcome new subscribers to your email list.
11. Use One Call-to-action in Each Email
A call-to-action (CTA) is the button or link you put inside your email that asks prospects to buy your product or start a free trial. CTA can be anything like “Buy Now,”, “Click here”, “Browse Catalog,” "Shop Now"
Conversion, revenue, and profit all depend on the efficiency of your CTA. Your CTA should be appealing to your email subscribers.
How many CTA's you should have per message?
One
You can repeat the CTA two or three times because people’s attention duration is very short.
But when you have different Call-to-action that ask for different things, it becomes difficult to convert prospects. You won’t be helping subscribers buy your product when you do that.
12. Integrate Email and Social Media
Email marketing is more powerful when combined with social media marketing.
Most of your email subscribers are on social media too. And keep in mind that your competitors are also on social media. Getting on social media to connect with your subscribers gives you an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with them. People don’t make buying decisions based on the information they get from a single medium. They combine different sources like email + social media + reviews + blogs + influencers. Therefore, elaborating your connection points with subscribers beyond email is highly recommended. If you’re publishing on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you should request your email subscribers to follow you. Facebook allows you to systematically target your followers and similar people to them through ads. The thing you need to do is upload your subscriber lists on Facebook.
Facebook also allows collecting emails directly from the Facebook Page.
For example, Salesforce uses the Facebook page to save more emails for its newsletter.
13. Send Emails at the Right Time
Getting people to open, click and share your emails creates a snowball effect. It leads to generate more traffic, more subscribers, and more customer conversions. You can get all these by sending your emails at the right times. The perfect time is when your current subscribers are likely to open, read and visit your website and shares the content with their network on social media.
According to Co-Schedule, the best day and time to send emails is:
- The best day to send emails is Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
- The best time to send emails is 6:00 am, 10:00 am, 2:00 pm, 8:00 pm, 10:00 pm and 12:00 pm.
Wrapping Up
Increasing your B2B sales funnel with email marketing is not too hard. You need to understand your target market thoroughly and develop the messages to address the important parts of the prospects’ customer journey while developing relationships at the same time.
Don’t be shy to experiment with your email marketing efforts. Test things out and measure them for improvements. Implement the above practices, and grow sales that are bound to happen.
Andrew Rayel is an email marketing expert based in Houston. I am currently working as a Marketing Strategist with AverickMedia, aB2B Database Marketing Agency in Houston, Texas, offers innovative solutions when it comes to providing direct mailing lists, data quality management services and email appending services. I am passionate about meeting people and interacting with them. I help businesses to stop playing around with B2B marketing and start seeing tangible ROI.
