Best Entry-Level Email Marketing Platforms For B2B Companies

Best Email Marketing Solution For B2B Marketers

If you’re a B2B marketer, you understand that B2B marketing is way different than B2C. You also know that a conversion usually means more than a single high-dollar sale. That means a new client with reoccuring sales. You’re also nurturing entire businesses as a whole, instead of individual consumers. All of this means that B2B marketing requires different features than B2C marketing.

 

 

What’s Important In B2B Email Marketing

There’s a number of email marketing features that have a high appeal to B2B marketers. Here’s what I’d suggest looking for when evaluating what email marketing suite is the best fit.

 

CRM Integration

You know how important the CRM is to the sales team and marketing department. Data is everything. So having an email marketing platform that integrates with your current CRM is very important. Especially if the email marketing platform can also append new data and recipients to the CRM as well.

 

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is huge and a major component to marketing automation. Lead scoring can go beyond email marketing as well. Many of the email marketing suites also offer web-based analytics. This enables you to create web-based goals as well as email-based goals. Each of these goals can be assigned a positive or negative number that helps you score your leads. Certain suites will also allow you to segment recipients based on lead scores, enable sales team notifications or trigger campaign automations after a certain score thresholds.

 

Campaign Automation

Not only do drip-campaigns put your email marketing on autopilot, they’re also much more effective than normal email blasts. That’s because these campaign series are tailored to the recipient. The recipient must perform an action to trigger the automated campaign. Each message builds upon the previous and the entire campaign is geared around the subject matter that recipient was engaging with while opting into the campaign.

Having a complex campaign workflow full of if/then statements and campaign forks builds upon that even more. This allows you to serve content based on the recipients interactions with the previous emails, web-based triggers and more. When built right, this delivers insane relevance while guiding the recipient through the research and purchasing phases.

 

 

Recommended Email Marketing Solutions

Now that we’ve gone over some of the more important features to look for, lets take a look at some of the best email marketing solutions for B2B marketers. All of these solutions will have all the features outlined above and more. Integrate with your current CRM, nurture and score leads and put your B2B email marketing on autopilot!

 

 

GetResponse Email Marketing / Marketing Automation

GetResponse – Email Marketing, Webinars and Landing Pages

GetResponse is a truly impressive email marketing platform. In addition to email marketing, GetResponse also offers landing pages and webinars. This is a functionality that is definitely geared more to B2B marketers than B2C. Best of all, these different features and all integrated with each other, making for some truly effective marketing.

 

Email Marketing Automation

GetResponse is a highly automated platform. The automation workflow is highly intuitive and beautifully designed. Simply drag and drop various items onto the workflow to build out the campaign. Fork the campaign with if/then statements to send recipients down different paths based on a wide range of criteria.

In addition to drip campaigns, GetResponse also features some of the best autoresponders in the industry. While other autoresponders are only date-based, GetResponse can send autoresponders using a wide range of criteria.

 

Hosting Webinars

GetResponse is more than just email marketing. The platform also makes it insanely easy to host your own webinars. Perfect for B2B marketers! Not only can you host webinars, but the functionality integrates with all the other GetResponse features. You’re able to quickly and easily generate landing pages with forms to signup for the webinars. Once a recipient has opted-in, they’re entered into the webinar campaign automation. This automation will confirm the registration, provide reminder emails and follow-up emails after the webinar. You can also append a lead-score for all the webinar participants.

 

Landing Page Builder

GetResponse makes it easy to design and deploy campaign landing pages. You can even whitelabel the landing pages so they appear on a sub-domain of your website. The landing page builder makes it easy for visitors to request additional information on your products and services, request a sales follow-up, opt into your mailing list and more. The landing pages can be used to begin campaign automations as well.

 

Learn More About GetResponse

 

 

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign – Automated / Personalized Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign is another solid platform for B2B marketers. ActiveCampaign is highly automated, contains tons of sales features and integrates with an impressive amount of other products and services. Here’s all the main features for ActiveCampaign email marketing.

 

Email Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign can be used to build  highly advanced campaign automations. Sales follow-up notification can also be programmed into the campaign workflows. This will send an automated email or SMS message to a user or team once a recipient has reached a certain point or goal within the campaign. ActiveCampaign also offers web-based analytics that allows the platform to place recipients into automated series based on web-based actions and goals.

 

Integration With Tons Of Platforms

If you’re looking for an email solution that easily integrates with a wide range of platforms and products, ActiveCampaign is the solution for you. ActiveCampaign is very proud of their API on the very impressive list of integration partners. It’s difficult to find a CRM, CMS, POS, sales tool or social network that ActiveCampaign can’t integrate with. This is very useful for pushing and pulling data between multiple platforms. With so many integration partners, the possibilities are endless.

 

Automated Sales Follow-Ups

Help bridge the gap between the marketing and sales department with sales automation. It’s possible to build automated lead notifications to the sales department based on a wide range of criteria. These triggers can be built into automated campaign series. This informs the sales department of the type of content the prospect is interacting with, so the sales follow-up can be tailored to the interests of the prospect. Sales notifications based on a recipient reaching a specific lead score is also possible.

 

Gmail Email Tracking Plugin

ActiveCampaign also has a handy Gmail plugin. If you’re using Google Apps For Business for company email, this is a great feature for both the sales and marketing departments. The Gmail plugin allows you to easily track all your sent emails. Knowing when a recipient is interacting with your emails is a great way to gauge interest. You can also import the email recipients directly into ActiveCampaign, access the tasks, deals and search the ActiveCampaign contacts.

 

Learn More About ActiveCampaign