The unique Challenges of B2B Email Marketing

It is always a struggle to get that first customer. It doesn’t get much easier for the next few customers. It’s a constant fight to acquire and retain every customer. This is where you want to be spending your time; using each customer as valuable feedback to refine your product or service to get product market fit. Even at product market fit you need to figure out how to scale revenue without substantial costs.

Reduce costs, reduce costs, reduce costs. Not realising this was a key mistake I made at a startup I started and failed. I talk about this in my article on B2C newsletter tools for ecommerce startups.

Mailchimp can be an effective tool to market and sell to businesses, there’s no doubting that. There’s a reason it is the most well known. This does not mean you should go with it…

• There are cheaper alternatives
• Some of these alternatives focus on features that you should prioritise

I would consider a couple of alternatives that might suit your business. Sender and Sendgrid are great tools that have some of the most flexible free plans. They are feature rich for scaling and moving onto paid plans.

On the ‘let’s keep it simple’ side of the scale, Sender keeps it simple much like Mailerlite.

Prioritising Email Marketing Features for B2B Startup Success

You should have three main goals with your emails:

1. To get people to see the email

You need to get into the recipient’s inbox, avoid their spam or promotions folder, and have a great subject line for that elusive ‘open’ in email marketing.

For the latter there are various best practices you can follow, such as keeping the subject line relevant, eye catching and less than 50 characters. Getting into the inbox is a bit of an art. That said, an email marketing tool can help with this. Pick a tool that helps with your deliverability and what is referred to as your ‘sender reputation score’. This can be one of those massive time-saving email marketing features for B2B.

2. To get people to read the email

Once you get the open, what’s next? You want people to read the content of the email.

You need to make the content of the email relevant, engaging and something of value to the reader. Remember, always provide value. Aim to be the email that the recipient looks forward to receiving each week (or however often you want to send it). Avoid massive chunks of text and make the email ‘skimmable’ by using bold titles and easy to read paragraphs.

3. To get people to do something, based on the email

Do you want the reader to buy something, sign up for something, or perhaps just get to know you and your business? Either way, keep this in mind since you will want to call them to action.

Comparison of B2B Email Marketing Tools

I would consider a couple of email marketing alternatives that might suit your business. Sender.net and Sendgrid are great tools that have some of the most flexible free plans, and are feature rich for scaling and moving onto paid plans.

Sender.net: The Value Proposition

On the ‘let’s keep it simple’ side of the scale, Sender.net keeps it simple, much like Mailerlite. Both have great newsletter and email automation-type features, but whereas Mailerlite brings in forms and landing pages, Sender.net includes SMS and deliverability.

Sendgrid: Ideal for scaling but complex

On the other side of the simplicity scale, Sendgrid has powerful APIs that allow the tech savvy or those with access to developers to create a more sophisticated website integration with dedicated IPs (think deliverability!), webhooks and SMTP relay. As a Twilio product there’s the added possibilities of SMS, Whatsapp and Video combinations.

Other Alternatives to Consider

It’s important to focus your time and that’s where I hope this article comes in handy. The last thing I want is for you to repeat my mistakes. Don’t waste time and money on trying out the wrong tech when building your email marketing tech stack. Instead narrow your focus and comparison to 2 or 3 email marketing tools.

As a head start, you can stay clear of GetResponse. I’ve had very poor deliverability results there, and the reporting is weak. There are others that you could consider, such as MooSend, Benchmark, SendInBlue and Constant Contact. However, I have done a feature vs subscriber count vs email sends pricing comparison and do not believe that they are the right choice for someone in the early stages of their business.

Choosing the Right B2B Email Marketing Tool

Rather than focus on all the different features, I believe it is important to narrow down to those that matter the most. What matters the most? Features that can save you time and money at this very early stage of your business. For this you need an easy to use drag and drop email editor (ideally with slick templates), email automation to be able to implement email funnels, and a clear understanding of what costs there would be when you need to move away from the free plan (yay growth time).

The only tools that provide these features on a free plan are Sender.net, Mailerlite and Sendgrid. See comparison chart below (repeated for ease of access).

Which Email Marketing Tool is Right for Your B2B Business?

Sendgrid is more complex to set up and operate. Although it is great for scaling a business, it will suck out a lot more hours of your day. I admit I do love Mailerlite as another great value easy to use option (it’s what I use). It is just that its features are ever so slightly more suited to a B2C or ecommerce startup.

That is why Sender.net is the go to option to save time and money for a B2B startup.