B2B Email Marketing: Strategies and Best Practices 2025

Check out the full guide to learn more about automation in email marketing. Using company names, job titles, or tailored content increases engagement and strengthens relationships. Personalization increases engagement and builds trust by providing relevant and useful content to the reader.

If you want more resources and more support from your organization, you’ve got to prove to leadership that email works. You already know that email is one of the best tools for B2B marketers—but if you’re not connecting your email marketing campaigns to your KPIs, no one else on the team will believe you. With the help of progressive profiling, you can create a more robust profile more organically and continue to refine your email personalization strategy with every send. Be sure your subject line and preview text are compelling and complement each other for maximum effectiveness, and address why the reader should open your email. Also, consider where the reader is in their journey to make sure the action aligns with their goals at that point, rather than trying to force them to take the next step before they’re ready.

Dive into the State of Email Reports for the latest trends, innovations, and best practices across the email marketing industry. For B2B or high-consideration purchases, an email’s influence may not materialize for weeks or months,” says Ling Zhang, Principal Product Manager at Oracle CX. You’re engaging with decision makers individually, and collectively, who are making purchase decisions on behalf of their place of business through work email.

Optimized email subject lines can improve deliverability and boost open rates. Avoid spam words that trigger spam filters, personalize where possible, and focus on the value you’re providing to the reader. Check out the full guide to learn more about how email marketing strategies for B2B differ from traditional, B2C email marketing. With the strategies and best practices outlined in this guide, you’ll have the foundation to create campaigns that stand out in crowded inboxes and convert prospects into loyal customers! When done right, email remains one of the most cost-effective and impactful ways to connect with decision-makers and influence purchasing decisions.

Current events: created by Semrush

Make sure your messages are mobile optimized, for images and texts. It’s up to you whether you take a plain text approach or a more designed send, but either way, make it so your audience understands your message right away. Remember, business decision-makers are still people, and helping them involves an empathetic yet direct approach. And the job of email marketing campaigns is to engage every step of the way. Get an assessment of your email program performance and see where we can take it. Unlike the campaign types above, an ABM play has to be super tailored to the target’s company, pain points, problems, and likes and dislikes.

• Our database of over 180 million global B2B contacts is built on first-party, consented data.
• Use that intel to send when your readers are mentally present.
• Gone are the days when basic demographic segmentation was enough.
• Millennials expect personalization, modern design, and messaging that reflects authenticity and value.

This example is an outreach email that we sent to new contacts after Salesforce Connections. Of course, we’d love to send you our next Litmus News newsletter, where you can find our regular news and #emailgeek tidbits! Use the data you have on hand to figure out what content types are most popular and play those up for your newsletter. We reserve some of our best email designs for our events. These automated email campaigns at a set cadence can be an email marketer’s superweapon for building relationships. Think about introducing several different flows based on behavioral triggers like downloading an asset, attending an event, or making a purchase.

Many ESPs have built-in email builders or WYSYWYG editors that you can drag-and-drop elements into. DIY design tools like Canva, and more intuitive UX design tools like Figma have also become more popular in recent years. The same reason that Adobe tools are great to work with—the amount of customization and control you have as a designer—makes it difficult for someone else to pop in and add their feedback.

70% of email marketers we talked to for this year’s State of Email report say that up to half of their email marketing operations will be AI-driven by the end of 2026. With so many stakeholders involved in an email send, you need timely responses from everyone and a single place where you can gather feedback, which is why we created Litmus Proof. With Litmus Personalize, you don’t have to code to be able to use it. But if you’re dead set on building an email within your ESP, we also offer Litmus Extension, which allows you to get Litmus features while you’re coding in your ESP.

Open Rate: The Deliverability and Relevance Proxy

B2B email marketing is the use of email campaigns to promote products, services, or insights from one business to another business. HubSpot’s email marketing tools and AI-powered email writer enable teams to create, personalize, and optimize these campaigns at scale. Effective B2B email marketing focuses on relevance, timing, and usefulness across the entire customer journey. We've been surveying marketers for years about their email best practices, including their email ROI. Litmus is here to help with every stage of the B2B email marketing workflow. Email geeks report using artificial intelligence in nearly every stage of the email marketing workflow, from copywriting to analytics.

The most popular graphic design programs email marketers use continue to be dominated by Adobe programs like Photoshop (37%), Illustrator (22%), and InDesign (14%). Zapier leveraged Litmus to introduce a formalized email creation and testing process across the team. Our goal was to introduce a process that gives clear guidance on what to do and what to check b2b email marketing for before hitting send,” says Sean Kennedy, Product Marketer at Zapier. Now, their start-to-finish email production time is only 4 days. Their testing and approval process used to take an hour and now only takes ten minutes, saving 50 minutes on each email—so their marketing efforts can move forward more smoothly.

In this post, we’re nerding out on all things B2B email marketing. While preferences and price points may vary, there’s no shortage of stuff people want and need—shoes, snacks, gadgets, toys. Cold emailing is a time-tested marketing strategy and can be very effective.