BtoB email campaigns: key figures and best practice

By Charlotte Goyard

Published: 23 October 2024

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

This practice is essential for prospecting, with effective results with prospects and customers. However, there are a few key figures and BtoB emailing rules to be aware of if you want your campaigns to succeed.
SUMMARY

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B2B emailing: key figures for sales prospecting

Nomination's 2016 BtoB email campaign barometer is a reliable indicator of the potential of email campaigns for marketing and lead generation, as well as the main trends and best practices.

This BtoB emailing observatory takes into account the analysis of the results of 950 email campaigns, representing more than one million professional messages sent on behalf of 99 clients across 13 business sectors.

Key figures for B2B email campaigns:

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

Of course, these key figures vary depending on when messages are distributed, both weekly and annually, and on the type of email campaign.

Average open rate and click rate:

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 far as the day of the week is concerned, Monday and Friday are the best times to set up an email campaign.
The types of pros campaign with the highest success rates are appointment requests, content emails, invitations and sales prospecting.

Statically, not all fields and sectors of activity record the same results. For example, a decision-maker in the IT sector is more likely to open an email than a decision-maker in the education sector. So it's a good idea to take account of target audiences and their habits when working on marketing pressure.

4 best practices for successful BtoB campaigns

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

1. Define your sales and marketing objectives

Before launching your email prospecting campaign, you need to define precise and 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 professional 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 email, 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 properly segmenting your audience:

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

3. Choosing 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 of activity and your company, carry out tests with different sending times.

One golden rule: the longer an email remains 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 in the morning at 8 a.m. ;
and in the early afternoon, preferably at 2pm.

4. Analyse email campaign statistics

You can obtain valuable information about the effectiveness of your email marketing by analysing 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 gives you an idea of the relevance of your B2B email subject lines. The click rate and response rate are indicators of the quality and personalisation of the content of your campaign.

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

On the BtoB email marketing market, there are few solutions that allow you to manage all the marketing automation criteria quickly and easily. However, a player like Nomination is part of a new range of turnkey tools that make it easier to generate leads and convert prospects into customers.

More than a marketing automation solution, Nomination goes further and helps marketing managers to improve the overall performance of their actions and to adopt best practices.

As its name suggests, marketing automation enables marketing actions to be automated according to predefined behaviours. In the context of email campaigns, it is an essential tool for segmentation and the creation of content and scenarios tailored to the needs of target audiences.

Here are the main criteria to consider when choosing the right tool for managing B2B email campaigns on autopilot:

Deliverability

Whether you're a small organisation or a major account, having an up-to-date and reliable database of decision-makers is your guarantee of good delivery of your business emails. This type of solution, which integrates marketing automation, can give you a deliverability rate of up to 97%. And if you want to keep your emailing files at the top of their game, you need to be able to keep abreast of the latest appointments of decision-makers in real time.

The power of smart data

A sales and marketing intelligence solution gives you easy access to biographical data, enabling you to target your campaigns using a wide range of criteria: job title, career path, number of employees, etc. The guarantee of the right message, to the right contact, at the right time, and therefore of 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: generating leads and winning new customers, building loyalty, corporate communications, recruitment, etc.

Simplified contact, follow-up of "clickers" and "openers", identification of new business opportunities... all to make managing your business and your sales prospecting easier!