Email marketing is sending commercial messages by email to people who have agreed to receive them, such as customers, past buyers, event attendees and newsletter subscribers. In B2B it's good at keeping your company in mind with people who already know you, moving active deals forward and selling more to existing customers. It can't create demand among buyers who've never heard of you, because they aren't on your list, and in Australia you generally need their consent before you email them.

Email is one of the cheapest channels to run, so it often ends up carrying targets it can't meet, such as new pipeline from new accounts. It works best when it's used for the people it can reach and judged on results it can actually influence.

What Email Does Well in B2B

• Keeping customers: onboarding, product updates, renewal reminders and offers for related products.
• Moving active deals forward: follow-up after a sales meeting, an event or a demo.
• Staying in mind between purchases: a newsletter that subscribers find useful keeps your company familiar until they next need what you sell.
• Prompting people who are already interested: invitations to webinars and events, and reminders during a trial.

Emailed discount offers raised average spending by 37.2 per cent across 70 randomised experiments at an online ticket resale platform, according to Navdeep Sahni, Dan Zou and Pradeep Chintagunta in Management Science (2017). 90 per cent of that gain didn't come from people using the offer. Recipients simply bought more, including tickets the email didn't promote. The study was in consumer ticket sales, but the same effect is likely in B2B: an email to someone who already knows you reminds them your company exists, even when they don't act on the email itself.

What Email Can't Do

Email only reaches people on your list. Most of the buyers who'll purchase in your category over the next few years aren't buying now, and most aren't on your list either. The 95:5 rule explains why those future buyers matter, and why you need channels that reach them before they're ready to buy.

Buying lists or emailing addresses scraped from the web doesn't solve this. It risks breaching the Spam Act, and spam complaints push your future emails into junk folders. Gmail, for example, requires anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to its users to keep their spam complaint rate below 0.3 per cent.

An email also reaches one person, while a B2B purchase is decided by a group. The person on your list may need to pass your message on to the rest of the buying committee, so write emails that are easy to forward.

Why Open Rates Mislead

Apple Mail's Mail Privacy Protection loads remote content in the background when a message arrives, rather than when the reader opens it. The tracking image that records an open loads at the same time, so the email is recorded as opened whether or not anyone read it. Security filters at many companies also scan the links in incoming email, which can record clicks nobody made.

Measure email on what happens after it's read:

• Replies and meetings booked from the people who received it.
• Pipeline and revenue from contacts who received email, compared with similar contacts who didn't.
• Unsubscribe and spam complaint rates, which show whether the list still wants to hear from you.
• A holdout test: leave a random part of the list out of a campaign and compare what each group goes on to do.

What Makes B2B Email Work

• Send it to people who asked for it. A smaller list of people who want your emails beats a larger list of people who don't.
• Make each email useful to the reader in their role. A finance director and an IT manager at the same company need different things from you.
• Personalise where it helps. Adding the recipient's name to the subject line lifted opens from 9.05 per cent to 10.80 per cent and sales leads from 0.39 per cent to 0.51 per cent, and cut unsubscribes from 1.2 per cent to 1.0 per cent, in field experiments by Navdeep Sahni, Christian Wheeler and Pradeep Chintagunta in Marketing Science (2018).
• Write for forwarding. Put the point in the first lines, and make sure the email makes sense to someone who didn't receive the earlier ones.
• Keep the list clean. Remove people who haven't engaged for a long time, and remove bounced addresses straight away.
• Agree who emails whom. Sales and marketing should agree which contacts get marketing email and which are handled by sales, so buyers don't get both.

Email and the Spam Act

Australia's Spam Act 2003 applies to commercial email, including B2B email. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) enforces it. The main rules are:

• Consent: you need consent to send each person commercial messages, and you must be able to show evidence of it.
• Identification: each message must clearly identify the business that sent it.
• Unsubscribe: each message needs a free, working unsubscribe option with clear instructions. It must work for at least 30 days after the message is sent and can't require the person to log in or give more personal information.
• Timing: unsubscribe requests must be actioned within 5 working days.

The Commonwealth Bank paid a $7.5 million penalty in 2024 for Spam Act breaches. It sent more than 170 million marketing messages, 34.8 million of them to people who hadn't consented or had withdrawn consent, and some had no working unsubscribe option. Check your obligations with your legal team, along with the rules of every country you send to.

FAQ

Is email marketing effective for B2B? For people who already know you, yes. It's a low-cost way to keep customers, follow up on active deals and stay in mind between purchases. It doesn't reach buyers who aren't on your list.

Can I email B2B contacts without their consent in Australia? Generally no. Consent can be inferred in limited cases, such as an existing business relationship, or a work email address that's conspicuously published where your message relates to the person's role and there's no statement saying they don't want commercial messages.

What should I measure instead of open rate? Replies, meetings booked, pipeline and revenue from contacts who received email, unsubscribe and spam complaint rates, and holdout tests that compare people who got the email with people who didn't.

How often should a B2B company send email? As often as you have something useful to say to that reader. Watch unsubscribe and complaint rates. If they rise, send less or send something more useful.

Use Email for the People Who Already Know You

Email keeps customers, moves active deals forward and keeps your company in mind with people who've asked to hear from you. It can't reach the buyers who don't know you yet, so it can't do the job of the channels that do. B2B Marketing Fundamentals covers how to choose channels based on the job each one can do, and ends with a one-page growth strategy for your own business.

Sources

• Navdeep Sahni, Dan Zou and Pradeep Chintagunta, "Do Targeted Discount Offers Serve as Advertising? Evidence from 70 Field Experiments", Management Science, 2017. Source of the 37.2 per cent spending increase and the finding that 90 per cent of the gain didn't come from redemptions. pubsonline.informs.org
• Navdeep Sahni, Christian Wheeler and Pradeep Chintagunta, "Personalization in Email Marketing: The Role of Noninformative Advertising Content", Marketing Science, 2018. Source of the subject-line personalisation results. gsb.stanford.edu
• Apple, "Mail Privacy Protection" (Mail User Guide). Source of how Apple Mail loads remote content in the background. support.apple.com
• Google, "Email sender guidelines". Source of the spam rate requirement for senders of more than 5,000 messages a day. support.google.com
• Australian Communications and Media Authority, "Email and SMS unsubscribe rules" fact sheet. Source of the consent and unsubscribe rules. acma.gov.au
• Australian Communications and Media Authority, "Commonwealth Bank pays $7.5m for more spam breaches", 2024. Source of the penalty example. acma.gov.au