What is B2B email marketing?

Let's first clarify how B2B is different & similar to B2C.  B2B means business-to-business, while b2c means business-to-customer.

While ROI (Return on Investment) is the main goal of both these marketing strategies, in B2C communication focuses on emotions, whereas in B2B communication focuses on information, facts, and profit.

So B2B email marketing, basically is a specific category of email marketing strategy where your target audience are businesses and not individual customers. Makes sense?

Businesses don’t need you to play your charming tricks on them. They’re probably ahead of you in that game. All they want is MORE; more profit, more info, more facts, more numbers, etc.

Why B2B email marketing?

Just gonna give you some numbers here.

  • According to research, the number of email users worldwide reached 2.9 billion in 2019. That is over one-third of the planet’s population. So, we know that emails are here to stay.
  • 99firms published some B2B email marketing statistics, one of which said, “Email marketing was the most implemented B2B marketing tactic in 2019.”

Since people are on their systems, and emails already for their business, it makes sense to target them with emails.  

Now, only knowing something won’t bring you more sales or boost your business. You need to take actions to execute it. So here are the 8 best ESPs for your B2B biz.

Pricing Structure

But before making any choices, it’s important to see if the price of the services match your budget. To make things easier for you, the pricing structure and the pros and cons for all the selected ESPs is listed below:

ESP Monthly starting price Pros Cons Trial
SendX $7.49 Unlimited Email Campaigns, Sign Up forms Limited Workflows 14-day free trial
Brevo $25 List Management, Automation, FB Ads Difficult set up, Basic plan lacks features Forever free with unlimited subscribers, 300 emails per day
Mailchimp $10.49 Templates, Reporting, A/B testing Complicated Pricing Structure Forever free upto 2k subscribers
AWeber $16.15 Autoresponders, Customer Support Limited Segmentation Forever free upto 500 subscribers
HubSpot $45 Personalisation, CRM Expensive Forever free
Drip $19 Automation, Reporting Ecommerce Integration, Workflow 14-day free trial
Constant Contact $20 Event Management, Deliverability CRM, Difficult to use 60-day free trial
Moosend $8 Subscription forms, Segmentation Integration Forever free

The 8 Best B2B Email Marketing Software

1. SendX

SendX is an easy-to-use email marketing software at affordable costs.

Features:

  • SendX has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) email editor, using which you can create beautiful emails, experiment with colours and layouts, and add images from the pre-built library. You can choose the pre-designed responsive templates or design your own. You can also get an instant preview of the emails on both mobile and laptop screens, so that you know how it’s going to look to your audience.
  • With SendX, your marketing goes into auto-pilot mode. You can segment the customers on the basis of demography, subscriber behavior and more than 25+ other parameters. You can increase revenue with transactional emails and reach the target customers at the appropriate time through scheduling. You can also auto tag subscribers into segments, based on the popups they subscribe to and the data they fill.
  • Unlike other ESPs, with SendX you can send unlimited emails everyday to your audience. If someone has not opened your emails, you can use the Resend feature to send the emails again, therefore ensuring that nobody misses the updates. You can also embed videos in your emails, to capture more attention of your audience.
  • You can create signup forms on SendX and embed it on your website so that people visiting your page can directly get added to your email list. You can also create beautiful pop up forms using the editor and trigger them at the right time to boost sales. You can even collect subscribers from Medium, by simple integration and grow your email list.
SendX email editor
SendX editor
SendX automation
SendX automation

2. Brevo

Brevo is an email marketing platform for transactional emails and automated email campaigns.

Features:

  • The drag-and-drop editor is faster and has a very simple way to create and edit email campaigns. The best part is you can go back to the older versions which comes in handy quite often.
Sendinblue drag and drop editor
Source: Brevo
  • Brevo offers email marketing services in a variety of languages like English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese & German. That’s super cool if you need to operate in your local language.
  • With Brevo’s Email Send Time Optimisation feature you can schedule a campaign, using which, the emails will be automatically sent at the most suitable time for each individual, based on their past activity. It will boost your open rates, and therefore resulting in more engagement by the users.
  • Brevo is known for its automation features, supports advanced automation triggers which are based on email engagement, web activity, etc. You can automate sending emails and SMS messages, updating information in your database and more. The platform has a commendable transactional email feature which is great for ecommerce.

3. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that is famous for its vast variety of features, templates and UI.

Features:

  • Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop editor offers an array of options. You can click on the selected part of the content and simply move it to the desired location. You can select themes, add elements like logos, images, links, buttons and more. You have the privilege to preview your email before you send it out and save your designs for later.
  • Mailchimp offers a library of pre-designed beautiful templates. You can personalise them as per your requirements. You can also use HTML, CSS to code your own template from scratch and save it for future use.
  • Mailchimp’s reporting is extremely extensive with additional features like geo-tracking, social media reports and click maps. And a detailed, comprehensive report definitely helps B2B marketers make actionable decisions.
Mailchimp integrations
Source: Mailchimp
  • Mailchimp allows you to integrate apps and web services like Calendly, Stripe, etc, to use extra features on the same platform. You can embed your Canva designs and also centralize your data from Google Analytics.

4. AWeber

AWeber is a simple email marketing platform for small businesses.

Features:

  • AWeber has three options for editors to build your emails - Drag & Drop Email Builder, Plain Text Messages, HTML Editor. You can either use the classic drag and drop editor with the usual features or simply send text messages or add your own HTML code to any of the blocks like headlines, paragraphs, etc.
  • Other than the normal email blocks available in every platform, there is a "Video" block in AWeber which saves a lot of time by creating an image of your YouTube or Vimeo video and hyperlinking that image with the actual video.
  • AWeber launched a Smart Designer for your emails. You put your website URL in a form field & it analyzes your website or social media account for logos, image, and color palettes. Then it automatically builds ready-to-use, custom email templates for your business.
Smart designer
Source: Aweber
  • AWeber has a simple-yet-effective autoresponder that sends well-timed emails to your audience. You can create tags for people and assign triggers and flows to your emails which saves you a lot of time. You can customise the content, audience, time and so on.

5. HubSpot

Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing and sales platform, usually preferred by B2B companies.

Features:

  • HubSpot’s drag-and-drop editor lets you create responsive emails which are also mobile-friendly. You can either create your own templates or choose from a gallery of pre-built templates.
HubSpot's drag and drop editor
Source: HubSpot
  • HubSpot is great if you need unusual but useful features. One such feature is the unsubscription feature, using which the subscriber can unsubscribe to some selected email topics or lists, instead of permanently unsubscribing to the whole package. You can also personalise your content based on specific criterias for different readers.
  • You can create different segments on the basis of email interactions plus their activity on your website or landing pages.
  • HubSpot analytics dashboards are much detailed. You get data on the performance of either the individual emails or the entire email campaign. It also shows the performance of your recent emails vs your past emails.

6. Drip

Drip is an email marketing and CRM email platform for ecommerce.

Features:

  • Similar to AWeber, Drip’s email builder offers multiple options like Visual Builder, HTML Builder, Text Builder. Using the visual builder, you can insert heavy elements in your emails to make it visually appealing. Using the HTML builder, you can control every aspect of layout and formatting. And if the highlight of your campaign is the write-up, text builder is best for you.
  • Drip offers an advanced visual automation workflow builder, allowing you to set multiple triggers for a specific automation workflow. You can add triggers from other apps like Zapier, etc., as well.
  • Unlike other ESPs, Drip provides two choices- campaigns and broadcasts. Campaigns are a collection of emails that set off when a trigger is fired, as per the automation rules. On the other hand, Broadcasts are single emails that are sent when you need to make announcements or send email newsletters.
Drip software segmented workflow
Source: Drip
  • Drip has a close integration with Facebook, which lets you create segmented audiences directly from Facebook. It also allows you to make automation workflows for Facebook ads and integrate emails with it.

7. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing solution for nonprofits.

Features:

  • The drag and drop editor’s smooth drag and drop experience makes creating an email faster and easier. And the Smart Columns feature gives you the flexibility to fine tune column sizes. Using the undo and redo options, you can go back and forth while editing.
Constant contact email editor
Source: Constant Contact
  • With Constant Contact, importing your contact list from Excel, Outlook, your e-commerce platform ​or​ literally anywhere is cake. Then, you can assign tags to all your contacts, which is very useful if you need extra details about your top customers or just want a deep dive into the data, in general. You can also create segments of your contacts based on different categories like location, behaviour, contact tags, etc.
  • You can also promote all kinds of events, like webinars, fundraisers, surveys and more, on Constant Contact. You can manage event registrations, tickets, invitations, etc, on the same platform itself, so that you can manage your events like a pro.
  • As per EmailToolTester, Constant Contact has a deliverability rate of around 89%, which ensures that most of the times your emails will not end up in the spam tab of your contacts.

8. Moosend

Moosend is a full fledged email marketing and automation tool.

Features:

  • Moosend has a drag-and-drop editor for creating emails, including an easy to use designer for creating landing pages builder. There are pre-built templates for both of these, which are fully customisable and responsive.
  • Moosend offers a visual automation builder which allows you to create various sequences like cart abandonment, welcome emails, thank-you emails etc, which saves a lot of time and energy. If you are new to this, you can select one of the pre-built automations and personalise it for yourself.
Moosend visual automation
Source: Moosend
  • With Moosend, you can create customised subscription forms with the advanced styling options or choose from a variety of ready-made forms, which is best for all industries and purposes. The forms can be pop-ups, floating boxes/bars, full page, etc. Using this you can grab the attention of the people visiting your website and convert them into a subscriber to send them emails. You can even decide who, when and where sees the form by setting your own visibility options.
  • You can also create conditional blocks that show unique content to every user based on their user profile. Maximize the revenue per user by sending the relevant product recommendations only.

Conclusion

How to choose the right B2B email marketing software

Choosing the right B2B email marketing software entails several key considerations. Firstly, assess your specific business needs and goals, such as automation capabilities, CRM integration, and scalability. Look for platforms with robust analytics and reporting features to track campaign performance and ROI effectively. Consider user-friendliness and customer support quality for seamless implementation and troubleshooting. Evaluate pricing structures and scalability to ensure alignment with your budget and growth projections. Additionally, prioritize platforms that offer advanced segmentation and personalization options for targeted B2B outreach. Ultimately, select a solution that aligns with your business objectives and facilitates efficient, results-driven email marketing campaigns.

All the selected ESPs are the best picks in this category. But if you are someone who also runs a B2C biz or you are a creator, then I suggest giving SendX a shot. It includes the best features of email marketing automation platforms like A/B Testing, Integrations, Popup banners and MORE. Plus this is the MOST AFFORDABLE plan out there, literally.

Also, SendX offers a 14-day free trial if you want to try it out first. You can sign up without any credit card jargon and get access to everything from day one. How awesome is that!!