BtoB email campaigns: key figures and best practices

By Charlotte Goyard

Published: October 23, 2024

A BtoB email campaign essentially consists of sending loops of emails and messages of a professional nature.

This practice is a must for prospecting, with effective results with prospects and customers. However, there are a few key figures and BtoB emailing rules you need to know to make your campaigns a success.
SUMMARY

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B2B emailing: key figures in sales prospecting

The 2016 BtoB emailing campaign barometer initiated by Nomination is a reliable indicator of the potential of email campaigns in marketing and lead generation, as well as key trends and best practices.

This BtoB emailing observatory takes into account the analysis of results from 950 email campaigns, representing over a million professional messages sent on behalf of 99 customers across 13 business sectors.

Key figures for BtoB email campaigns:

96% deliverability rate ;
20% email open rate;
2.6% click-through rate.

Of course, these key figures vary according to the timing of message delivery on a weekly and yearly scale, as well as the type of email campaign.

In average open and click rates:

The best performances are recorded in April and September. Before the start of the school year, decision-makers and managers are more likely to be receptive to the content of BtoB prospecting campaigns.
As for the day of the week, Monday and Friday are the best times to set up an e-mail campaign.
The pro campaign types with the highest success rates are appointment requests, content emails, invitations and sales prospecting.

Statically, not all fields and sectors record the same results. For example, a decision-maker in the IT sector is more likely to open an email than one in the education sector. It's therefore advisable to take targets and their habits into account when working on marketing pressure.

4 best practices for successful BtoB campaigns

To set up effective BtoB email campaigns and increase your sales and return on investment, here are four tips and best practices to implement:

1. Define sales and marketing objectives

Before launching your email prospecting campaign, you need to define precise, achievable business objectives. Do you want to acquire new customers, qualify your leads or build loyalty among the subscribers to your emailing file?

To create effective messages in real time and over the long term, keep these marketing objectives in mind throughout your pro campaigns.

2. Segment targets and lead files

Your BtoB email campaign must meet the real expectations of your target prospects and customers. This is a key principle inherited from inbound marketing: to activate the right decision-making levers, you need to send the right message at the right time to the right people.

To make your recipients want to respond to your e-mail, segment your contact bases according to various criteria:

their location ;
their function (head of sales, manager, sales representative, decision-maker) ;
their preferred content;
their sales history.

The figures clearly show the advantages and benefits of segmenting your audience correctly:

39% of marketers who have segmented their email list have a better open rate;
28% have a lower unsubscribe rate;
and ¼ of them improve the deliverability of their campaigns.

3. Choose the right time to send your messages

Choosing the right time to send your BtoB email campaign is crucial. To find out which time slots are most effective for your sector and your company, carry out tests with different sending times.

One rule of thumb: the longer an email sits in an inbox, the less likely it is to be opened. The best time to send BtoB emails is therefore in real time, when your customers are checking their inboxes:

preferably at 8 a.m. ;
and in the early afternoon, preferably at 2 p.m.

4. Analyze email campaign statistics

You can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your email prospecting by analyzing the performance indicators of your email campaigns: opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.

A low or high deliverability rate gives you an idea of the quality of your base. The open rate tells you about the relevance of your BtoB email subject lines. Click-through and response rates are indicators of the quality and personalization of your campaign content.

What marketing tools can you use to optimize your campaigns and improve your statistics?

On the BtoB emailing market, there are few solutions that enable you to manage all the criteria of marketing automation quickly and easily. A player like Nomination, however, is part of a new range of turnkey tools that make lead generation and prospect-to-customer conversion much easier.

More than a marketing automation solution, Nomination goes one step further, helping marketers to improve the overall performance of their actions and to adopt best practices.

As its name suggests, marketing automation enables the automation of marketing actions based on predefined behaviors. In the context of email campaigns, it is an indispensable tool for segmentation and the creation of content and scenarios adapted to target needs.

Here are the main criteria to consider when choosing the right tool for managing BtoB email campaigns on autopilot:

Deliverability

Whether you're a small business or a major corporation, having an up-to-date, reliable database of decision-makers is the best way to ensure that your business emails are delivered correctly. This type of solution, which integrates marketing automation, can bring you a deliverability rate of up to 97%. A must for an emailing file that's always at the top of its game is to be informed in real time of the latest decision-maker appointments.

The power of smart data

A sales and marketing intelligence solution gives you easy access to biographical data, enabling you to target your campaigns according to a wide range of criteria: function, career path, number of employees, etc. This guarantees the right message, to the right contact, at the right time, and therefore an optimal conversion rate.

Sales management

A tool like Nomination and other leading BtoB emailing players have developed a range of services to meet the most specific needs: lead generation and new customer acquisition, loyalty, corporate communication, recruitment...

Simplified contact, follow-up of "clickers" and "openers", identification of new business opportunities... making it easier to manage your business and your sales prospecting!