Business-to-Business (B2B) is arguably the most effective email marketing strategy to date. However, just as it is important to understand every other marketing campaign, it’s crucial for a business owner to learn the intricate facets of B2B email marketing before employing it.

Getting started, you will have to research the right company or person to contact. Don’t work your way to the top, asking a lesser staff about the higher-ups. Simply find the person who makes the call and decides for the company. If anything goes, contact the CEO directly. When dealing with larger companies, you will have to be more persistent so that your business concerns don’t end up in general email accounts.

Change your sender

B2B email marketing is effective, but only works when done properly. In essence, it’s a direct collaboration between two decision-makers. To make it work, your company’s business owner has to be the one to talk directly to the other business owner. If you belong with the marketing staff, or have lesser position, be sure to change your sender to make it look as if the message comes directly from the president or founder of the company.

Compared to sending an anonymous general account, this increases the urgency of your email. This makes your business concerns more pressing, and gives you more chance of having your proposals reviewed.

Compelling subject line

It doesn’t work if the subject line says a simple "Hi!" or reflects a timid greeting. It doesn’t work to exaggerate for attention and demand with "Urgent!" either. What works is creating a compelling, if not completely tactful subject line. It’s obvious you will have to keep it short, so you might feel a little limited. In any case, you will just have to make do with half a sentence to get your message across. The subject line, to be compelling, has to be a summary of your entire email.

One tactic to make an effective subject line is exactly that: write a summary of your email. Make the summary a short paragraph. Make it sell. Then edit it to skip fluff, until it’s only one sentence long. Edit it over until you have it half-sentence long.

B2B email marketing studies suggest that nearly a

third of all emails opened are opened with sheer curiosity. The reader, at first, isn’t interested in the email itself, but the subject line is so compelling he can’t resist opening it.

Keep content short and sweet

It’s equally important to write your email concisely. Typically, readers would click an email because of the subject line and skim the body. The readers subsequently reason with themselves why they should spend the next five minutes reading a positively spam email. Keeping your content concise and direct to the point relieves the reader of this decision. That makes it easier to decide for a reader to spare a few minutes reading your email. As a general rule, give the reader only a glimpse of the content body, but nothing longer than a few lines.