B2B email marketing has been proven to be a great innovation on a well established internet marketing technique. It has delivered a higher level of success than traditional email marketing strategies because by working directly with business clients to generate sales, you can more easily avoid problems of "spam". In this way, you stay away from the abuses of mass mailing email marketing campaigns that have become so disliked in the internet community in the last ten years.

When you base your strategy for using email as a marketing tool on a B2B relationship model, the paradigm changes dramatically. You are now working with a mailing list of known business contacts. While you might send some emails to prospective clients that you have not done business with before, the process of building your email contact list uses a permission based approach to marketing. As a result, you know you are working with real business contacts of possible clients that have already been validated as real and active in the business world.

The days of creating "spam" and trying to "trick" the recipient into accepting your email or opening it are over. Sure, you still get those kinds of emails. But for a serious business marketing plan to not only increase sales but to build a long term customer base, the B2B model avoids any appearance of the abusive emails tactics of the past. In order to increase the odds that your B2B emails will reach the maximum client penetration and reap the most new business, there are some tips that insiders in this type of marketing know about that can be of help…

Tip #1 - Subject Lines Matter

While a B2B marketing email is more direct and to the point than some of the marketing you see online, one thing remains true about email and that is your subject line is important. You know this from how you react to the emails you get, particularly if they are unsolicited. When you check your email, you might get a dozen more new emails at a time. Skilled internet citizens are capable of sizing up an email from the subject line in a snap to determine if that email deserves to be opened.

How you construct that subject line is driven to a large extent by your objective of the email and your relationship with the business you are contacting. If you already have an existing business relationship with that client, you can utilize that history to remind the client of the success you have shared with him or her. That will make your email compelling and interesting so the addressee will want to see what you have do say.

Use the nature of the mailing list to fine tune the subject line of each email. You may have mailing list of inquiries that came in from the web page. That interest that the prospective client showed in your business that prompted the contact can be the springboard for your email.

Above all, try to avoid any subject line that causes your email to get lumped in with spam. Make that opening statement in the subject line sincere, genuine and to the point because that shows you respect the client's time. You have a good reason to contact these perspective clients. Let that reason shine out in your subject line. If you write a god subject line, your emails will get opened rather than see the email trash bin along with the spam that the client gets each day.

Tip #2 - Tone Down the Marketing Tricks

There are methods that people who write marketing copy use to "hook" customers. These tricks include the overuse of exclamation points, heavily formatted emails with very short phrases and lots of use of color and even graphics right in the email. The problem is that just as you may know some ways to "supercharge" your emails, so do the people you are contacting with a B2B marketing campaign.

If your prospect recognizes tried and true marketing "ploys" in how your email is structured and presented, that will cause your email to be taken less seriously and possibly deleted. So tone down the excessive use of marketing tricks. Allow your email to look like a business letter so that when the customer opens it, he or she sees it as a serious business contact. That is the kind of business relationship you are trying to build so construct your email accordingly.

Tip #3 - Learn as You Go

Being aggressive in your pursuit of success is admirable. But becoming too aggressive when sending out B2B emails can damage your program and hurt your relationship with your customers or prospective customers. Be selective in who you send your marketing emails to. B2B email campaigns are all about targeting a specific type of business based on the kind of response you want and the nature of your existing relationship with them.

Most of your emails will go to a select subset of your marketing email contact list. That is because you are focusing on the goals of the email and addressing that small group of clients or future clients with specific, targeted language. If B2B email marketing works correctly, a typical email might go out to a hundred contacts rather than thousands. But because you targeted your email carefully, your return on that investment in terms of responses and eventual sales will be dramatically higher than the "blanket email" (e.g. spam) approach to email marketing that used to be the law of the land.

In addition to focused email campaigns, don't be so enthusiastic in your goals for your internet marketing that you flood your contact's email in boxes with marketing copy. That is a fast way to be tagged as a "spammer" and your emails become blocked. Instead, put all of that ambition into preparation for a targeted campaign. Then, once your first emails to that specific group of businesses has been sent, give them time to produce results before you send out a follow-up email or start a new marketing campaign.

Tip #4 - Treat Your Clients with Respect

If you have received and/or read very many marketing emails, the tone and layout can be overly slick and quirky. Either the writer attempts to be too familiar or the "pitch" is so clearly created with a marketing emphasis that it shouts out "spam". The business person you are sending your email to is just as skilled at spotting slick marketing copy as you and I are. So every effort should be made to write email copy that is genuine, direct and effective.

Try to write a B2B email as though you were sitting in a conference room at your client or prospective client's office presenting a great new idea that will benefit for both businesses. Treat the business person you are addressing with respect and dignity and let your email text reflect that. While it is good to use any existing relationship and reaffirm that bond that came from previous successful dealings, make your presentation brief and to the point. Let the contact know what you are offering and what is "in it for them" to respond to this email.

By treating business contacts with the same respect you would if you were face to face and by approaching your B2B emails with a completely new approach than have used in other internet marketing programs, you can sidestep the perils of "spam" emailing and see a much greater response and conversion rate to the B2B marketing emails you send out.