Introduction to B2B Email Marketing [Steal our Strategy]

Email marketing lays the foundation for any successful inbound marketing strategy. So much so that 59% of marketers consider it their top channel for revenue generation, according to PoweredbySearch.

So, why are there calls from marketing gurus and advertising aficionados that ‘B2B Email Marketing is DEAD’?

We dig into this in our B2B email marketing guide, looking at what exactly email marketing looks like in 2025, best practices, and some of our first-hand examples, and we give you our playbook for creating powerful email marketing campaigns. Let’s dive in.

Email is a cog in the marketing machine.

Email marketing needs to work alongside and complement your inbound marketing strategy. Find out how to do this in our ‘Introduction to Inbound Marketing’ article.

What is B2B Email Marketing?

B2B email marketing is when one business uses email to connect with another, usually to promote what they offer, share useful info, or build relationships.

It’s all about sending the right messages to the right people in other companies, like decision-makers or team leads, to help move them through the buying process or build demand for your product or service.

With B2B buying cycles being longer, and buying committees becoming even bigger, emails are focused more on providing information and delivering value, as opposed to creating impulsive sales and driving quick traffic to their website like B2C counterparts.

Is B2B Email Marketing Dead?

This is the million-dollar question here - does B2B email marketing actually work in 2025?

Like every other B2B marketing channel, the influx of AI-powered tools has changed the B2B marketing landscape and, with email marketing specifically, enabled marketers to up the number of emails they’re sending out.

According to EmailToolTester, 45.6% of all emails sent were spam in 2023. To couple with this, 63% of marketers now employ AI in email marketing tools for their email marketing efforts to a report by ArtSmart.

Now, just to be clear, we’re not saying these are inherently connected. You would be silly not to utilise AI in some capacity to help you with output. But what we are saying is that the rise in AI-driven emails and the increase in spam could be correlated to the fact that writing emails at scale has never been easier and more accessible.

Essentially, you need to use that AI power for good.

We’ve spoken about B2B email marketing effectiveness before and boiled this down to 6 core issues why you may be feeling email is no longer an effective channel for you:

• You’re sending too many emails - Bombarding contacts with frequent emails leads to unsubscribes – 69% of users opt out due to excessive emails.
• Your emails are the wrong length - Sales emails should be 50–125 words for best results. Too long and you lose attention; too short and they may be flagged as spam.
• You rely too heavily on images - Overusing images slows down load times or causes emails to fail altogether.
• You’re sending at the wrong time - Blanket sends across time zones, hurt engagement. Analyse past performance to find optimal send times and use automation tools to personalise timing for different segments.
• Your emails aren’t mobile-friendly - With more emails opened on mobile than desktop, non-optimised content risks being ignored.
• Your emails lack personalisation - Generic emails feel impersonal and underperform.

But these are just small changes. Purely changing a couple of things in an email may not be the difference between someone making a B2B sale and choosing a competitor.

So what’s the secret? How are 59% of marketers considering it their top revenue-generating channel?

Well, the final bullet point talks about personalisation, but this doesn’t mean a simple ‘first name’ in the subject line. Like with Inbound Marketing, people want a combination of personalisation and real-life insight.

The problem with B2B, however, is that it lacks trust. Inboxes already bursting with noise, every brand claims to be the ‘trusted partner’ or the ‘go-to solution’. But rather than feeling informed, most buyers feel overwhelmed, paralysed by conflicting messages and unable to move forward with confidence.

Email marketing should build trust, not add to the confusion. Yet in today’s climate, earning that trust is harder than ever. When a prospect opens your email, they’re taking a leap, offering time, attention, and potentially their data. To earn that leap, your message must deliver on what it promises. Misaligned messaging erodes trust fast. But emails that genuinely help, educate, or solve problems lay the groundwork for longer-term engagement - and ultimately, better-qualified leads.

Two emergent methodologies have led this email marketing revolution…

Person-Led Content

Person-led content is B2B email content anchored in the voice, insight, and lived experience of an individual. Typically, this is a subject matter expert, leader, or trusted voice within the business. This is quite often manifested in the form of a regular newsletter.

Unlike faceless, brand-heavy messaging, person-led emails feel like a one-to-one exchange. They offer first-hand perspectives that aim to educate, challenge, or support the recipient in solving a real business problem by explaining how they faced and overcame that challenge themselves.

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged is a great example of this in action.

Every ‘newsletter’ he puts out uses personality over polish, giving a human touch to marketing problems he’s solved himself. It uses a natural tone and leverages his personal experiences to give the audience lived proof of what he knows and believes to be right in B2B marketing.

Using his personal brand as a trust signal, he’s generated a loyal following of users who read every newsletter and engage with this content, not just over email, but also over social media.

Although this takes the long-form approach of building a personal brand and audience, Kyle shows that, even in 2025, you can create trust and, ultimately, business success through B2B email marketing.

Zero-Click Content

Zero-click content refers to email content that delivers full value within the body of the email itself - no clicks required.

In B2B marketing, it’s a strategic choice to remove friction and provide insight or utility up front, rather than gatekeeping value behind a call-to-action or external link. This means you’re no longer judging emails on click-through rate or website traffic generated from an email marketing source, but rather the amount of dwell time on an email or the number of replies directly to the email you get. This, in layman’s terms, judges engagement over clicks.

The reason this is so effective is due to how frictionless this content is. It doesn’t require someone to click on your website. It doesn’t require them to read a 2000-word blog. It simply requires them to read your email and gather all the insights they need to solve their problem, right in their inbox.

With this method, you’re putting usefulness before conversion and building trust and expertise early. Meaning your audience doesn’t have to search around for it on your website endlessly.

The other fundamental benefit of inbound marketing is that you’re meeting the customer where they are and allowing them to consume content in the way they want to. It allows them to consume the content within a single scroll and not take time out of their day looking for the insight they need to solve their problem.

So yes, B2B email marketing is far from dead in 2025. You just need to leverage your insight and data more effectively to build trust and share your expertise.

Cold Email vs Warm Email Marketing

Taking a step back here, as there’s still an ongoing debate about cold vs warm email marketing.

Here’s the lowdown:

• Cold Email Marketing - This outbound B2B email marketing method doesn’t require you to obtain a database first, but rather explore what companies within your ICP are in the market for your solution and ‘go after them’.
• Warm Email Marketing - This inbound B2B email marketing method requires you to obtain contacts first (usually organically), and nurture them with informational content to show you’re the industry leader. By doing this, you empower the user to learn more about your solution before they come ‘in-market’ and choose you as the logical solution to their business problem.

Ultimately, this comes down to whether you believe inbound or outbound marketing is more effective than the other.

Listen, I’m sure you expect us to say, as we’re an inbound marketing agency, that you must opt for warm email marketing. However, that isn’t always the case - I mean, we included cold email marketing as one of the 34 most effective ways to generate B2B leads.

The only thing we would say about cold email is that it only works when someone is considering or in the market for a solution like yours. According to Pareto’s Principle, only 5% of buyers are in the market at any one time. Which, conversely, means that 95% aren’t in the market. This means if you cold email 100 companies, only 5 will be interested in what you’re selling.

Now, if you do it correctly, personalise your emails and make an effort to understand your customers, then this can be an incredibly successful channel. For those with a very niche target addressable market (TAM) or the search volume for your solution is incredibly low, this can be an extremely effective channel to get your product in front of the people as a demand generation play.

However, if your TAM is large and there is a search for your solution, then you’re better off providing insight and information to your target audience and letting your database increase organically rather than ‘interrupting’ your users. If you produce the right informational content and offer it to your audience when they require it, then your customers will come to you. This is why warm email nurturing is still so powerful.

So, in summary, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.

You just need to test and see what works for you.

Nailing Your Email Marketing and Best Practices

That being said, there are 7 best practices we abide by when doing B2B email marketing:

• Start with a strong, benefit-driven subject line - Your subject line determines whether the email gets opened. Make it short, relevant, and focused on the value the reader will get, not on what you want them to do. Avoid vague clickbait and be clear about the benefit upfront.
• Lead with clarity - In B2B, decision-makers don’t have time for fluff. Your opening line should instantly communicate why the email matters to them. Make the context clear and get to the point quickly, then expand only if the content truly warrants it.
• Write like a human, not a brand - Avoid formal, robotic copy. Use conversational language that feels like it came from a real person, because, truthfully, it should. Person-led content builds trust and encourages response. Read it aloud: if it wouldn’t sound natural in conversation, rewrite it.
• Focus on solving one problem per email -Don’t overwhelm readers with multiple messages or CTAs. Choose one pain point, one insight, or one offer, and deliver it well. Simplicity increases clarity, which increases action.
• Make it skimmable -Use short paragraphs, bullet points, bold text (sparingly), and clear formatting. B2B audiences are often reading on the move or between meetings, making it easy for them to get the gist in seconds and offer up a ‘too long; didn’t read’ (TL;DR)
• Don’t waste the CTA - Whether it’s ‘book a demo’, ‘read the full guide’, or ‘hit reply’, your CTA should feel like a natural next step, not a push. Deliver enough value in the body of the email to justify the ask. If you're linking out, make it clear why it’s worth clicking.
• Use personalisation and segmentation to stay relevant - Tailor your messaging based on who the contact is, what role they’re in, and where they are in the buyer journey. Use segmentation to send the right message to the right people - then layer in personalisation (like name, company, or relevant pain points) to show you’ve done your homework. After all, relevance builds trust and an understanding that you know what they’re going through.

I’m sure these are all very self-explanatory, and a lot you’re doing by yourself without us telling you.

However, take a look at the emails you have received today. How many of the emails that you have gotten today abided by these best practices? Probably not many, right? The truth is, if you don’t take this on board, your emails are going to be lumped in with the bad emails, and you’re going to miss valuable pipeline opportunities.

Make sure you have these in place every time you send an email and prepare campaigns like the following…

Examples of B2B Email Marketing Campaigns

Although we use our playbook to generate revenue for both ourselves and our clients, there isn’t a set way to generate leads from B2B email marketing due to the differences in audience from business to business. This goes for the length of the sales cycle, the market penetration your business has, the depth of your data, etc.

However, some common email campaign examples are:

• New Content - these campaigns usually have 4-5 emails as part of a strategy, helping people solve a particular challenge with new content created. This could include a blog series, podcast recaps, eBooks, etc, driving traffic to those specific pages. These are popular amongst the inbound marketing crowd, looking to push prospects further ‘down the funnel’.
• Re-Engagement - another popular campaign, this time trying to re-engage contacts that haven’t heard from you recently. This could include showing them recent work/stories or giving a business update, for example. This focuses on engagement and reminding prospects of who your business is and what you do.
• Automated Nurturing - We cover this in more detail later in this guide, but automated nurturing usually follows a form fill on your site. It’s a personalised, automated sequence of emails that follows up with prospects and urges them to get in contact with your sales team for more information.
• Customer Voice/Case Studies - This is promoting your newest case studies or stories from clients. Fairly self-explanatory, but this type of campaign promotes the good work your team is doing and shows that you have expertise in what you do.
• Event Emails - This is a teaser-style sequence ahead of a product launch, webinar, or campaign. Include sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes content, or early-access invites to build anticipation.
• Newsletter - This is a regular email blast to your database, highlighting several things, including any new content, company updates, or client wins.

We’ve used all of these different campaign types over the years with varying success.

One such occasion was the work we did with an old client of ours. We re-engaged their existing database for a quick win as their inbound marketing strategy ramped up with us. Following some creative copywriting and concise messaging, they eventually secured a contract with one of the largest UK-based supermarket companies with a deal worth around £250,000 - all off the back of a re-engagement sequence.

Similarly, we used a ‘new content’ campaign to re-engage our existing database, to generate MQLs for our B2B website design service. Having generated some MQLs, we sent a ‘break-up email’ to contacts that hadn’t responded, which piqued the interest of our new client, Redway Networks.

Following our sales process, they went on to choose us as their preferred website design company, and we designed their brand-new, modernised website.

The final, and most recent, B2B email marketing example we wanted to share was following our work with Bridge Coffee Roasters. Together with our inbound marketing work with them, we created email campaigns that an existing client saw. They subsequently called them directly after receiving the email to upgrade their coffee machine, increasing lifetime value.

We hope this doubles down on B2B Email marketing still being effective in 2025. But how can you assure success? Just make sure to follow our playbook below…

Our B2B Email Marketing Strategy Playbook

Let’s preface this first - this isn’t the playbook to use if you want to ‘increase open rates’ or ‘increase clicks to your website’.

This playbook details how to break down your email strategy, being able to engage your real target audience, bring informational value to them, and ultimately, optimise your strategy going forward. We would like to think it goes beyond advice like ‘put the contact’s first name in the subject line’.

This is the proven B2B email marketing strategy we use for our clients, from the ground up.

Want us to execute this playbook for you?

Discover how our expert team can deliver this playbook for your business, as well as wider inbound marketing support, by downloading our pricing guide today.

Step 1: Know your Audience

Hopefully, you don’t need us to say this, but understanding your audience (or the audience you’re targeting) is the most important stage of any B2B marketing campaign, especially email marketing.

Before sending any email, you need to decipher:

• The industry, size, and revenue of the company you’re targeting
• The key stakeholders needed to convert a B2B deal
• What their interests are
• How you’re going to target them

Start by creating a spreadsheet of your current clients and look for patterns.

• Which sectors convert fastest?
• What roles are consistently part of the buying committee?
• Where do you consistently deliver the most value?
• Which accounts have the highest lifetime value?

This data will start to form the basis of your ideal company profile (ICP), based on which companies derive the most value from your offering, and your customer personas, based on which contacts are consistently part of the buying committee and the problems your solution solves for them.

However, data will tell you who your buyers are, but to create powerful email content, you also need to know what broke the status quo - what made them stop, search, and, hopefully, say yes.

This means you have to build out your ICP and personas to reflect the key traits of your best customers and companies. When crafting email content, consider:

• Their biggest challenges
• The questions they’ll have before they even come across your product or service
• What they’ll search for once a need is identified
• What sites or social media platforms do they use for research
• Who do they trust for recommendations - colleagues, communities, or industry media
• The concerns or hesitations they may have about your offering
• Why they might choose a competitor instead - and how your content can address that

The more you understand who you're speaking to, the more relevant, helpful, and high performing your B2B email marketing campaigns will become.

Step 2: Form a Strong Narrative and Opinion

Many B2B companies step back from having a strong opinion or narrative because they don’t want to be controversial or ‘rock the apple cart’. However, people wouldn’t be on your website, subscribed to your emails, or reading your content if they weren’t looking for advice on how to solve their challenges.

As Axon Garside Managing Director, Ian Guiver, puts it:

“ - But that to me is the key thing, adding real value, talking about what we talk about, and finally, I would say, having an opinion because most of us go and ask people. The reason people are watching this now is they want an opinion. They want advice.”

People crave real advice and opinions from real people. Think back to when we spoke about person-first content. The reason Kyle Poyar is so successful isn’t because he’s simply a human, but it’s coming from a human - it’s because people place their trust in him, his experiences, and how he solved real problems for marketers. He does that, not through having a non-partisan approach to his content, but by having real opinions behind what he says.

I understand that this is hard to put into practice for businesses - after all, B2B marketing is rooted in risk-averse behaviour. However, an easy way to look at it is through the eyes of messaging and market positioning.

For example, say if you’re a disrupter in the world of manufacturing, making the parts-ordering process cheaper, then you would naturally position yourself in the market as the ‘affordable parts-ordering solution’.

Now, look at this through the eyes of having a powerful opinion. Your target persona might feel that the traditional parts-ordering process is long, too expensive, and makes it hard for them to complete their job. You can then form a company opinion of ‘The parts-ordering process is bad - here’s how we can make it better’ (as a rough idea).

Following that, your content across your inbound content (more on this in a second) and B2B email marketing strategy should echo this opinion. It should cement your ideas in the mind of the customer and help your business stand out from the competition. In email marketing, this helps strengthen brand affinity and encourages prospects to keep engaging with your emails and listening to your company’s message

Step 3: Merge with Inbound Marketing Strategy

You knew this was coming. For B2B email marketing to be successful, it needs to interlock with your inbound marketing strategy.

Once you have a deep understanding of your existing customers and who you want to target, as well as forming a strong narrative behind your company and campaign, the next step is to create content that gets in front of your target audience.

The fundamental inbound marketing activities are:

• Blogs and content marketing - Write informative articles to engage your audience and see yourself as the market leader in your industry.
• Social media marketing - Using personal brand and company pages to promote your content and opinion across multiple social platforms.
• SEO - Optimising your content to show up on search engines like Google and Bing to maximise visibility
• Webinars and Videos - Creating visual content to give a different dimension to your content, making it easier to share on social media.
• Podcasts - Similar to video content, creating an audio-first content platform to drive visitors to your brand.

And, of course, B2B email marketing. All of these content types should mix to create a cohesive inbound marketing strategy.

Now, email, as a channel, is primarily a distribution method, not a content creation source.

Due to this, you should be taking your written, audio, and visual content and repurposing it for email in a way where your audience can take advantage of the content without having to consume it in a way they don’t want to.

What do we mean by this?

Say you did a podcast. That is a piece of audio content - something that can’t be consumed over email. However, you can turn this into a newsletter where you break down the discussion in the podcast and turn it into an actionable, digestible email where your audience can get all the main points without having to listen to the full episode.

We created a podcast episode on our podcast, ‘HubSpot RevUp’, to talk about this in more detail:

Step 4: Data and Personalisation

This is the slightly sticky bit when it comes to B2B email marketing because if you don’t have adequate data, then how can you push your content out?

The first step to this is building a list of contacts. If you’re starting from scratch, there are a couple of ways to do this quickly:

• Create high-value gated content - offer downloadable assets (e.g., whitepapers, templates, eBooks) in exchange for business email addresses via forms on your website or landing pages.
• Add opt-ins across key website touchpoints - embed email sign-up CTAs within blog posts, resource hubs, pricing pages, and chatbots to capture interest when engagement is highest.
• Use event sign-ups and webinar registrations - host or co-host virtual events and collect attendee details through registration. These contacts are often high-intent and primed for nurture.
• Offer exclusive email-only insights or access - promote a regular insights email, industry digest, or early access to tools as a subscriber benefit. Position it as must-have content, not just a newsletter.
• Create a newsletter - treat your newsletter as a valuable product in its own right - share consistently high-quality, insight-led content that encourages subscribers to forward it to peers. Include a clear “subscribe here” link in every edition to turn readers into referrers and grow your list organically.

Following these methods should enable you to build a contact list pretty fast, provided you’re giving valuable content out and sharing your previously decided opinion with your target audience.

After this, make sure you have your contacts segmented into specific lists for enhanced targeting through email, as you want to ensure your emails resonate and engage your target audience based on their pain points. You can organise this by:

• Type of company (Industry, size, etc.)
• Job Title
• Job Function
• Product Interest
• Pain Points

You get the point. Personalisation in B2B email marketing goes beyond just putting their first name in the title - it’s about really ‘calling’ to your audience and making sure you’re addressing and solving their challenges within their job. Ensure you’re not just sending out generic, broad emails, but rather send those that engage with a specific sub-segment of your contact base.

Step 5: Automation and Lead Nurturing

An often misunderstood step of our B2B email marketing strategy is what you do after you’ve obtained your prospect’s contact details.

Lead nurturing and inbound marketing automation are essential parts of any B2B email marketing strategy - but probably not in the way you have been taught.

You see, traditional lead nurturing follows this process:

• Prospect downloads gated asset
• They receive a thank-you email with the eBook
• A week later, they receive a case study from you
• They then receive a pricing guide or a request for consultation
• Finally, they receive a break-up email

This, in theory, follows the traditional marketing funnel. However, the reality is that this doesn’t follow the way B2B buyers want to buy.

According to Gartner, B2B buyers complete up to 70% of their decision-making process before engaging with a salesperson, spending only 17% of their time meeting potential suppliers, and engaging with 5-7 touchpoints before making a decision.

What does this mean for B2B email marketing, though?

It means that you need to be in the mind of your potential buyer before they even enter the market.

To nurture your leads effectively, therefore, you need to be in your prospect’s mind and stay there. This means continuous lead nurturing, delivering valuable, zero-click, informative content to your prospects so they know that you know what you’re talking about.

There is no set number as to how many emails you should create as part of an email nurturing plan. It could be 4 emails, it could be 40. What we would suggest is to formulate a nurturing strategy that helps them at every stage of the buying journey, including downloadables like eBooks, case studies, blog content - you name it.

Just make sure you’re not bombarding the recipient’s emails. Do this by leaving enough of a delay between emails to give your recipients time to breathe, consume your content, and engage with you.

Email Marketing vs Marketing Automation

It’s not a matter of choosing between email marketing and marketing automation - it’s about using both in tandem. In truth, they both achieve very different things.

Email marketing allows you to send targeted, personalised messages that build trust, nurture leads, and position your brand as a helpful expert. As we’ve said, it’s ideal for sharing valuable content, promoting events, and staying top-of-mind with your audience.

Marketing automation, on the other hand, brings scalability and intelligence to your efforts. It enables you to trigger timely emails based on user behaviour, segment contacts by interest or lifecycle stage, and nurture leads automatically through a defined journey.

Used together, email marketing and automation create a powerful system that combines human insight with operational efficiency, helping you engage prospects at the right time, with the right message, and ultimately converting more leads into customers.

Step 6: Track B2B Email Marketing Metrics and Optimise

The final step as part of your B2B email marketing guide is to continually optimise and track metrics.

As an agency, we track these email marketing metrics for our clients:

• Emails Delivered - This tracks the number of emails that were meant to be sent against the number that were delivered. This metric gives a clear indication of how optimal your data set is and if you need to clean out your database.
• Open Rate - This KPI tracks the number of times your email was opened. The metric helps you optimise your subject lines and overall subject of your emails, and whether it entices your database to open them or not.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) - CTR helps you track how many people clicked somewhere on your email to take them through to your website. It’s an especially useful metric for engagement and understanding what piqued the interest of your audience.
• Action Rate - Action rate helps you see, out of those who clicked, who completed the action you wanted them to complete. This can be measured by seeing who clicked on what link in your email.
• Bounce Rate - This stat measures how many email addresses you gave sent an email to, but couldn’t be delivered for one reason or another.
• Unsubscribe Rate - This tracks how many recipients opted out of your mailing list after receiving a particular email. It helps identify content or frequencies that may be turning your audience away, providing insight into where you might need to adjust your strategy.
• Time spent viewing email - This measures how long recipients are spending with your email open. It helps determine whether your content is being read or simply skimmed over, and can inform design and copy decisions to better retain attention.

Email Works Harder Paired with Inbound

So, to answer the question we posed earlier, B2B email marketing in 2025 isn’t dead.

It’s just evolved.

While inboxes are more crowded than ever, the brands cutting through the noise are those anchoring email within a wider inbound strategy. They're not just pushing content, they’re solving problems, building trust, and showing up where their buyers are, before they're even in-market.

As always, it’s not about more emails. It’s about better, more relevant ones. And that means leaning into the principles of inbound: helpful content, delivered with purpose, to the right people, at the right time.

To make it a part of your inbound marketing strategy, read our ‘Introduction to Inbound Marketing’ article and steal our strategy to tie your channels together.