Email marketing is the backbone of many B2B companies. That’s for a good reason, because it works extremely well.

However, it can be difficult to navigate, with spam filters ready to blacklist you at the drop of a hat.

On top of that, there’s CAN-SPAM, GDPR and CCPA to contend with. Not to mention how hyper-aware professionals are of marketing-speak, being sold to, and how finely-tuned your messages need to be.

If you want to navigate these challenges and knock your lead gen goals out of the park, read on for our B2B email marketing rules for best practice.

Rule 1: You’re Only as Good as Your Contact List

You might have the best email campaign in the history of marketing, but if your contact list isn’t well-sourced, that campaign isn’t going to perform.

Spam traps, email addresses that no longer exist (or never existed in the first place), honeypots, and all kinds of other contacts that aren’t potential leads can tank the quality and deliverability of your campaign.

When you send to those contacts, you’ll get hard bounces, spam flags, and spam filters glaring at your IP and domain suspiciously.

This is where blacklisting happens. Getting blacklisted is the kiss of death for email marketing, so ensure you source your contacts from a reputable provider.

Even then, trust but verify. In this case, literally – you should always run your contact list through an email verifier. Any list, whether purchased or not, will naturally decay over time, cleaning it up before you send is important.

Rule 2: Use Landing Pages to Reduce Friction.

This is a mistake that gets made too often: some marketers link their email CTAs to their home page.

You should always use a dedicated landing page for your campaign. That way, you can message-match your email and landing page content, so there’s a seamless experience for the contact.

You want to make it easy to convert. With that in mind, make your form as short as possible and put it right on your landing page, which should support your email. 

Rule 3: Make It Personal

Personalization tokens are a given in any good email sending platform these days. The trick is to use them properly.

For opted-in leads, you’ll have a lot more data to use for personalization. When it comes to cold contacts, you’re a lot more limited – usually just to their name and company.

Fortunately, those are the most important things to know.

Let’s be real – everyone knows that when you get an email that greets you by name, it’s just an automatic token. Most people are savvy enough to be aware that that’s the case for pretty much any personal information in a marketing email.

Luckily, it doesn’t matter. It still works. It’s even expected. A marketing email that lacks any kind of personalization just comes off as lazy.

Experiment with using tokens in different ways, in your subject line and working it into your email copy. If you can give even the slightest impression that you might have created this email specifically for the person reading it, you’re doing it right.

Rule 4: Your Subject Line is Key

If you’re not taking as much time to craft your subject line as you are the rest of your email, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Sure, it’s only a handful of words – how important can it be?

Turns out, it’s critical.

Your subject line is what makes your email stand out from tons of other emails. If your subject line is weak, your body content and landing page don’t matter at all because nobody’s going to click through.

It’s worthwhile to spend time crafting, testing and refining your subject lines. Getting eyeballs aimed at your email is the first step towards success!

Rule 5: Always Be Testing

If you’re always testing, you’re always improving.

This can be anything from your subject line tokens to whether you use an image in your email or not, or different landing page strategies – anything you can think of, you can test.

With testing, keep it simple. That way, you can concretely say that one variation did better than the other, keep the winner and scrap the loser.

A/B testing is valuable for all channels, not just email. That said, cold email campaigns generate a whole lot of data points to work with.

Once you adopt a testing-based strategy for improvement, you can comfortably experiment with new content, and occasionally you’ll happen upon a change that will give you a big boost.

Rule 6: Don’t Scare the Spam Appliances

Spam filters are skittish: slow to trust, quick to flee (or junk your emails).

Spam appliances judge your trustworthiness based on a sender reputation or sender score. This is a score from 1-100 that tells them how likely your messages are to be spam.

It’s really easy to damage your reputation, and can be difficult to bounce back from. Once your reputation is damaged, your emails will start going to the junk folder more frequently – which means your engagement is lower, which can result in a lower reputation.

Keeping your sender score high is critical, and it’s also something many marketers aren’t aware of.

Rule 7: Be Aware of the Regulations and Compliances

It’s important that you understand the ramifications and requirements around your activities. Depending on your location, these can differ.

GDPR is still a big buzzword, and to a lesser extent the ePrivacy Regulation is as well. You can check out our roundup on both of them right here.

CAN-SPAM is the main legislation around email marketing, and has particular requirements. You can learn everything you need to know about how to send email marketing without spamming in this guide.

And there you have it! Follow these B2B email marketing rules and you’ll be well on your way to success.