B2B Email Marketing Tools, Campaign Ideas, and Examples

B2C, they have it so easy. While preferences and price points may vary, there’s no shortage of stuff people want and need—shoes, snacks, gadgets, toys. Things people covet, save up for, or impulse buy.

But B2B marketers…well, if only selling cloud computing or point-of-sale systems were as easy as a pair of shoes. An impulse buyer in B2B-land is rare. It’s not like prospects walk around their daily lives thinking, “If only I had a best-in-class tool that would streamline my workflow so I could circle back…” 🙃

Email marketing for B2B may be more serious, but if there’s anything we’ve learned at Litmus, it’s that email is anything but boring. Since potential customers are already 57% of the way to making a decision before they actively engage with sales, it’s important to be intentional with how and when you communicate your message by tapping into B2B email campaign ideas with proven success.

In this post, we’re nerding out on all things B2B email marketing. It’s based on our team’s deep experience in marketing and our favorite B2B campaigns we’ve seen in the wild that prove B2B marketers can have a little fun while chasing leads.

Table of contents

Email is the highest ROI channel for B2B—are you making the most of it?

B2B marketers continue to rely on their most effective channel—email—due to its proven performance and a 36:1 return on investment (ROI). We have been arguing about whether email is dead since the early aughts, but it’s still (still!) one of the best ways to connect with your audience.

Why is email so impactful for B2B audiences? Because it remains one of the few personal areas that your subscribers voluntarily ask for your messaging. Marketers have two kinds of modalities to work with when vying for their audiences’ attention: interruption or permission. Email requires a subscriber’s permission—meaning that subscriber wants to hear from you because they’re interested in what you have to say.

This gets even more powerful when you think about the mountains of data you have access to about your B2B audience: where they work, what they do, what they click, what problems you can solve. By combining a relationship-focused, human-to-human messaging style with data-driven, personalized marketing tactics, you can position your product as something they need for their organization.

B2B email isn’t just B2C with a longer sales cycle

The average B2B sales cycle is between one and three months, according to data analytics company Databox. That’s much longer than the scroll-purchase-scroll-purchase cycle that retail enjoys. But B2B email marketing isn’t just B2C tactics stretched out over time. Your emphasis as a B2B marketer should be much more on relationship-building and education than B2C’s sales drumbeat and new drops.

A B2B email campaign addresses the company’s challenges or pain points, working to educate them and correspond with their place in the journey from awareness, consideration, decision making, and finally, loyalty and advocacy. You’re engaging with decision makers individually, and collectively, who are making purchase decisions on behalf of their place of business through work email. Use email to facilitate direct communication and get to the root of their purpose for connecting with you so you can help them find solutions.

“Email is just one touchpoint in complex customer journeys, making its specific contribution difficult to isolate. 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.

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Essential B2B email campaign types and examples

What makes a great B2B email? The most popular email type that B2B marketers send is a customer engagement email.

Let’s take a look at the most common campaign types and some great examples we’ve seen in the wild.

Welcome emails for B2B onboarding

First thing’s first: introducing who you are, what you do, and how you can help solve their problems in a dedicated welcome email. This is your best chance to make a good first impression, so make it count!

You can keep it high level, like this one:

Or start with a quick to-do list as they get started in the product, like this one:

No matter what, keep it super simple. What’s great about this Shopify email is that it points them back into the product, where your in-app welcome flow can do the rest. The faster they get value from your product, the better:

Lead nurturing drip campaigns

The thing about marketing to a B2B audience is that they’re looking at your emails with a business lens. You can’t just bang the buy, buy, buy drum and expect to see an uptick in anything but unsubscribes (or maybe even spam complaints.) That’s why dropping someone into a nurture flow has to be intentionally mapped out so you’re not overloading them with product-y info too quickly. A good flow looks something like this:

Start with a flagship piece of content that hits on their pain points and offers detailed suggestions on how to fix them:

An email that introduces the product:

A light-touch case study email like this one:

Finish with an invitation for a free trial, if that’s something you offer. If not, make a pitch:

This is just a basic nurture flow. Think about introducing several different flows based on behavioral triggers like downloading an asset, attending an event, or making a purchase. These automated email campaigns at a set cadence can be an email marketer’s superweapon for building relationships.

Webinar and event promotion emails

We reserve some of our best email designs for our events. Partially because there’s already a great theme going, and partially because we want our fellow #emailgeeks to feel like they’re already immersed in the experience of the event.

For big-ticket events, your speakers are everything. This newspaper-style email is such a fun way to make that announcement:

For smaller events or meetups, consider adding a layer of personalization so you’re only sending your invitation to those subscribers whose offices are in a certain radius. If you don’t have access to that data, this newsletter from Zendesk does a great job offering up the options without overwhelming the reader:

And if you have a booth at a big-name tradeshow, make sure your audience knows. This is a great quick email to event attendees. Work with the main event sponsor for the email list.

And don’t forget to send a recap to all of your new leads:

Newsletters

Newsletters are the backbone of B2B email marketing. What so many people are missing right now with AI-everything is that your audience signed up for your emails to hear your brand’s unique POV in the market. Which means they want to read your blog posts, listen to your podcast, or watch your webinars, depending on the audience and the topic. Use the data you have on hand to figure out what content types are most popular and play those up for your newsletter.

This one from Figma looks straight out of a magazine (very on brand):

And we love a good vintage-y moment:

This is a nice way of sending a meaty newsletter that adds value without needing to click something else:

Of course, we’d love to send you our next Litmus News newsletter, where you can find our regular news and #emailgeek tidbits! Sign up for Litmus News here.

Product announcements or feature launches

With product announcements, you want to go big. Your email should be part of a much larger campaign that hits every possible touchpoint for your audience.

This email looks like a newsletter, but is really a product-driven campaign, leading with with a newscaster-style video at the top before diving into the more detailed feature launches:

You can go with a more designed email, like this one that goes over features and benefits in a classic z-design:

Or a more heartfelt letter-style email like this one from Airtable:

What’s great about this style is that it really gives you space to tell your broader brand story. Here, Airtable’s CEO is talking about where this product sits in their portfolio, how it changes their existing features, and why it matters to them personally. For next steps, they include an invitation to a demo, which is a great product CTA for prospects or existing customers.

Customer retention and advocacy campaigns

So much of our efforts as email marketers goes into acquisition, when it’s not your only growth lever to pull. Locking in a great customer retention strategy means targeted emails that help nudge your customers further into your product, making it more essential to their workday (and helping them get more value from the product so they can shout from the rooftops about how great it is.)

First, think through a retention version of your other nurture flows based on customer behavior. If they haven’t used a certain feature in 90 days, for example, or you know it’s a little hidden in the UI, send them a campaign like this:

Another way to get your customers more excited about your product is to give them a rundown of product information. This is a well-designed, newsletter-style email that’s pleasing to the eye:

But you can also keep it simple, focusing on a single core action for your product:

ABM email campaigns

If you’re running an account-based marketing play, then you’ll want to mix in hyperpersonalized, plain-text style emails that are simple and sound like they come from an account manager. This is sometimes done directly through your sales CRM instead of marketing—but whoever is in charge of email should be collaborating with sales on these campaigns.

This example is an outreach email that we sent to new contacts after Salesforce Connections.

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. You’re going to want to get as much data as possible to fuel this—but remember, you don’t need a creepy hook like, “I saw you checking out xyz…” to make someone read your email. Instead, lead with a flagship piece of content, a swag giveaway, an event invitation, or other soft sell.

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B2B email design and content best practices

The purpose of B2B emails is to familiarize another business or organization with your company, how you can help them, and nurture them to become a customer through email correspondence. While this sounds like a natural progression, the road is not straight and narrow from beginning to end. And the job of email marketing campaigns is to engage every step of the way.

Remember, business decision-makers are still people, and helping them involves an empathetic yet direct approach.

1. Use conversational language

Just because you’re sending a B2B email campaign doesn’t mean it needs to sound corporate and stuffy. You can still incorporate personal, conversational language without sounding unprofessional. Doing so can feel much more authentic and real for your subscriber.

Audiences appreciate authenticity and relatability. Staying human with your communication—especially in the age of AI—makes your business more genuine and trustworthy. A great brand experience builds trust quickly. Communicate with empathy for their problems and encourage continued engagement with your brand to learn how you can address obstacles they or their teams are facing.

2. Make sure the content is accessible and scannable

B2B email subscribers are busy and likely have a full inbox. Use short, concise sentences in your email copy to quickly convey your message. 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.

If you’re not sure how to optimize by client, your subscribers’ email client market share breakout can tell you. B2B has a reputation for being mostly Outlook users (which brings its own set of challenges, woof!), but you’d be surprised to see how many people check their work email on mobile more often than not.

On average, 61.9% of email users read messages on mobile devices and the clock is ticking for those messages to render. Make sure your messages are mobile optimized, for images and texts. Using responsive email designs will allow your emails to show properly. Emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are deleted in just three seconds.

The biggest mistake we see? Emails with too many CTAs (calls-to-action). Focus your message on only the most important steps you want readers to take, and make them easy to find and follow. 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.

3. Write engaging subject lines and test them

Your subject line and preview text are your chance to entice your audience and tease your content. Customizing both for every B2B email campaign lets you stand out from the competition, before your email even gets opened.

Tips for writing engaging subject lines and preview text include:

• Don’t scream at your subscribers with all-caps or tricky tactics like FWD: or RE:. That gives us the ick.
• Use emojis, but do so sparingly and dependent on email clients used by your audience.
• Incorporate action words to increase interest and urgency.
• Always test and adjust, including your triggered email campaigns.

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.

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4. Personalize the emails you’re sending

To create effective B2B email marketing campaigns, it’s important to understand your audience. This is age-old marketing advice that we continue to ignore. You don’t just need to have buyer personas and demographic data; you need to map out the behavioral touchpoints a typical buyer goes through and understand where your emails can help—and what information your audience needs to know when.

Then, you can apply segmentation and personalization to create more customized messages through automation that resonate with your reader.

B2B subscribers always look for solutions and measurable results, mainly the return on investment (ROI) of using a product or service. They want advice and to hear from their peers as often as possible. This should be clearly articulated as it pertains to their position in the company or role in the decision-making process to capture attention quickly and effectively.

Most of all, you should talk to your audience as much as possible through ride-along sales calls, at events, or through surveys and interactive content so you can have a finger on the pulse of what they care about.

5. Use email content to build progressive profiles

Every interaction audiences have with your brand is an opportunity to learn more about them and their pain points. This is especially true with email due to direct connection with subscribers who have raised their hands to learn more about your company or product.

B2B emails give your business the perfect opportunity to build your CRM data based on engagement over time. 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.

How progressive profiling enhances B2B email strategy ideas:

• Initial information can help create segmentation to develop lead-nurture campaigns based on high-level information like job title, company size, and industry.
• Profile information helps you communicate more effectively, addressing pain points sooner, and shortening the sales cycle.
• Personalized email messages build trust and loyalty between brands and subscribers.

Crafting a careful B2B email strategy that incorporates a human approach helps build long-term relationships with the business and the decision maker—and that’s something they will remember.

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How to measure B2B email campaign success

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. When we asked email marketers about their ROI in the State of Email Report, 21% said they do not know how to measure it for their email program. 🤯

Most companies have less than 25% of their marketing personnel dedicated to email, and that means it’s a scramble to get things done. If you want more resources and more support from your organization, you’ve got to prove to leadership that email works. Track important email marketing metrics like:

• Revenue per email (RPE): how much your campaigns actually generate, at least for BOFU emails. Litmus users are 65% more likely to use this as their #1 email marketing metric, compared to non-Litmus users.
• Marketing-qualified leads (MQL): the subsection of your subscribers who are ready to be handed off for a sales inquiry/touchpoint, based on their engagement.
• Open rate: The percentage of subscribers who open your email. The average B2B email marketing rate is around 40%, according to our friends at Klaviyo. 
• Click-through rate (CTR): the number of emails that receive at least one click, from which you can then calculate conversions.
• Subscriber lifetime value (LTV): revenue per subscriber, averaged over the duration of the time they subscribe to your emails. This shows why your list is one of your best assets as a marketing team.

These metrics matter to your team. But you should also track more email-focused metrics to improve your own operations, like:

• Email production time: how fast your team puts together an email from idea to send. When we asked email marketers about their email processes for our annual State of Email survey in 2024, 62% of teams said they needed two weeks or more to produce a single email. In 2025, AI-powered processes dropped that number to only 6%.
• Unsubscribe rate: the number of people who ask to be removed from your emails. Nobody likes an unsubscribe, but it’s much better than being continuously ignored or reported as spam.
• Deliverability rate: the percentage of emails that arrive in subscribers’ inboxes. (Deliverability rate is different than delivery rate, which just tracks how many emails get to the mailbox, and doesn’t differentiate between inbox or spam filter placement.)
• Error rate: The number of rendering errors, typos, or other errors that get sent out to your audience. Typos happen to the best of us, but the cleaner your emails can be, the better your message will get across.

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Case study snapshot: Optimizing your entire B2B email campaign workflow

B2B teams are under more pressure than ever to produce email campaigns that generate revenue and build a brand at the same time. Here’s how three B2B teams get it all done:

1. How an email team of one doubled their click-through rate at Zen Internet

When we asked email marketers about their email cadence, 58% send emails weekly or several times a week. That’s a lot to ask a team of one, but Lucy Schofield, CRM Marketing Manager at Zen Internet, an ISP, was up for the challenge. Like many small-but-mighty B2B teams, over 80% of their marketing efforts relied on an email marketing campaign.

Lucy and her team turned to Litmus to streamline and enhance their email marketing operations, focusing on an area of the email workflow that created the most bottlenecks with the broader marketing team: testing.

They chose the integrated Litmus Email Previews within Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Litmus Extension to thoroughly test every email, including those with dynamic content, ensuring a flawless experience for every subscriber. Then, Litmus Email Guardian protects their emails by monitoring them 24/7, catching errors before emails are sent.

Zen Internet now sends 500 emails per year with complete confidence, knowing each version is flawless and representative of their brand’s high standards.

“Litmus Email Guardian helped us find and fix a broken link before it reached our subscribers which was brilliant. It helped us get ahead of an issue that would have otherwise resulted in a poor customer experience and potentially a loss of trust in our brand.“

Lucy Schofield
CRM Marketing Manager at Zen Internet

On top of the time saved building and testing emails, the email team has consistently maintained high open rates of ~60% and click-to-open rate of ~12% since implementing Litmus. 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.

“As a CRM Marketing Manager, it’s my responsibility to be a trailblazer when it comes to finding and implementing best practices that help us save time while maintaining high levels of email quality so we can maximize email revenue,” says Schofield.

2. How iZotope juggles multi-stakeholder feedback

iZotope supplies musicians, producers, and audio engineers with intelligent audio technology. iZotope sends an average of 16 campaigns per month across over one million subscribers—but it’s not their email volume that makes it a challenge for their email team of four. It’s the fact that nearly 20 different stakeholders need to review every campaign before it goes live, taking almost a week just for their review process.

“It felt like we were playing whack-a-mole with issues and feedback that came through during our QA and review process,” says Chanel Friedman, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at iZotope. “Our team needed a better way to test emails and for all reviewing stakeholders to collaboratively leave feedback so we could incorporate it all efficiently, reducing the amount of review cycles per email.”

With Litmus Proof, the multitude of stakeholders are able to enjoy a more organized review process in a single, consolidated place to conversationally leave feedback—eliminating the hassle of having to comb through email threads, Google Sheets, and Slack chats to aggregate everyone’s input.

Now, their start-to-finish email production time is only 4 days. Says Friedman, “Litmus has been a game-changer for our email workflow. The ability for stakeholders to leave collaborative, specific, easy-to-understand feedback has been invaluable.”

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3. How Zapier keeps their emails error-free across a non-technical team

Productivity tool (and all-around lifesaver) Zapier’s email marketing team of three relied on the rest of their marketing team members to send and execute emails to achieve their segmentation and cadence strategy. But copying-and-pasting template elements led to errors and a time-consuming QA process that ended up making more work for everyone.

“We have great marketers on our team—but not everyone is an email expert. Our goal was to introduce a process that gives clear guidance on what to do and what to check for before hitting send,” says Sean Kennedy, Product Marketer at Zapier.

Zapier leveraged Litmus to introduce a formalized email creation and testing process across the team. Rather than a manual testing process that is prone to errors, Zapier’s team now relies on Litmus Testing to walk step-by-step through the most critical elements that can affect email performance.

With automated pre-send checks in Litmus Test as the core of Zapier’s email testing and quality assurance process, the email team can rest assured that every email is thoroughly tested before it is sent—without the email team having to manually fiddle with every element. Says Kennedy, “Litmus allows us to catch errors more easily, and helps us be more aware of how our emails look to our subscribers—insights we did not have before.”

A typical B2B email marketing workflow looks like this:

1. A request comes in for an email. If it fits into the overall email marketing strategy, the email moves forward. A goal, KPIs, and segmentation are chosen.
2. A designer chooses the layout and imagery (or a template.) Then a copywriter writes the subject line, preheader text, email body, and CTAs.
3. The email is built by a developer or other team members, such as as Email Marketing Manager.
4. Stakeholders go around and around with approvals. Finally, the email is ready for final QA and testing, with edits on copy, design, or coding as needed.
5. The email is scheduled and sent, with an email strategist following up on performance after a certain timeframe.

To make this workflow happen, B2B marketers need one core tool: an email service provider (ESP). A good one handles segmentation and email list management with the building and execution of the email.

When we asked email geeks their favorite, B2B marketers overwhelmingly chose MailChimp. Can you do it all with just your ESP and some Google spreadsheets? Sure. But for your email marketing program to be successful, you’ll also need a few other email marketing tools:

Tools for designing your emails consistently across multiple teams

The most popular graphic design programs email marketers use continue to be dominated by Adobe programs like Photoshop (37%), Illustrator (22%), and InDesign (14%). But it’s no longer the only kind of tool that designers use to get emails out the door. 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.

DIY design tools like Canva, and more intuitive UX design tools like Figma have also become more popular in recent years. They’re great for many reasons, but especially because email designs are changing from perfectly curated, magazine-spread designs to more zine-y, blocky designs that anyone can create.

Tools for intuitively building an email with bulletproof code

Many ESPs have built-in email builders or WYSYWYG editors that you can drag-and-drop elements into. But some email developers may want to code it themselves, or design more intricate emails that require coding from scratch or a snippet library instead of pre-selected elements. For that, may we humbly recommend Litmus Builder?

Tools for personalizing your emails with dynamic content

Email personalization can mean “first name” merge tags that are often handled by your ESP. But more successful campaigns go beyond that to include dynamic content that engages your subscriber—think live polls, countdown timers, progress bars, and weather reports. With Litmus Personalize, you don’t have to code to be able to use it.

Tools for pre-send email testing

When we talk about email testing, we’re talking about two kinds of testing: A/B testing, which often occurs after an email is sent, and pre-send testing, which previews how your email will appear in different email clients before you send.

We got our start at Litmus with our testing and preview tools, and now that email is more complex—there are potentially 300,000+ ways an email could render—it’s nice to have peace of mind that you won’t have to send another apology email.

Tools for managing the review process

Hands up if your review process is the part of the email workflow you dread the most? 🙋‍♀️

That’s because the typical tools for a B2B email review are the same productivity tools you’re already managing—Slack, Google Docs, ad hoc meetings. 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.

This eliminates the random stream of feedback from multiple communication channels so you’re not making edits until moments before the final send. Instead, it’s all in one place, and you can easily nudge someone to leave their stamp of approval.

Analytical tools for monitoring your performance

Most ESPs have built-in analytical tools, but you may want to add to those by using a third-party analytics tool that digs deeper into your performance.

With Litmus Analytics, you don’t need to wrangle a data analyst to get an in-depth look at how your email marketing campaigns are performing. Pull in data from multiple sources to get a better picture of how your campaigns contribute to the bottom line.

Deliverability tools to optimize for the inbox

If your emails never reach the inbox, all that work is for nothing. If you’re seeing an unexplained dip in your other email marketing metrics, it may be time to take a look at your deliverability—a mix of your subscriber behavior, your sending behavior, and your infrastructure.

Double check your email campaigns against common spam filters before you send with Litmus Spam Filter Testing, and then go deeper into diagnosing any deliverability issues with Validity Everest.

Where does AI fit into your email marketing workflow?

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. Email geeks report using artificial intelligence in nearly every stage of the email marketing workflow, from copywriting to analytics.

AI can do a lot for your email marketing workflow—it’s one of the reasons we released Litmus Assistant in the first place—but remember, your email should still add value to your subscriber, be accessible to all users, and have something to say. Instead of approaching AI as a replacement for certain tasks on your to-do list, think of AI as an extension of the automation that speeds up your workflow overall.

“As an email marketer, you’re already doing so much that, for many of us, adding AI feels like one more thing to make you overwhelmed. With AI, I think the idea is not to use it so you can create more new campaigns every day, but so you can manage more personalized, dynamic, or detailed email campaigns that perform better,” says Rafael Viana, Sr. Email Marketing Strategist at Validity.

B2B Workflow Stage	Key Questions	Tools List
Strategy	Who will receive this email? What are our goals for its performance?	ESPs like Salesforce, MailChimp, Klaviyo, and Campaign Monitor
Design	What will the email look like (front-end)?	Design tools like Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Canva
Build	What will the email look like (back-end)?	Litmus Builder, Litmus Extension, and AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot
Personalize	Can we add more engaging elements to the email?	Litmus Personalize
Test	How does the email appear in every device and email client?	Litmus Test, Litmus Guardian
Review	Does the team approve this email?	Communication tools like Slack, Google Drive, and Litmus Proof
Analyze	How did the email perform against our goals?	Litmus Analytics
Deliver	Did our email reach the inbox?	Litmus Spam Filter Testing, Validity Everest

Transform your B2B emails with Litmus

B2B emails have a reputation for being boring. But they don’t have to be.

Part of why B2B marketers send boring, “safe” emails is because the sheer volume of emails they send can overwhelm a small team. You’re stuck doing more with less, trying to stay on top of complex segmentation, triggered emails, never-ending sales team requests, and a review process that makes you want to throw your computer out the window.

Litmus is here to help with every stage of the B2B email marketing workflow. From easy, no-code personalization tactics to an approvals process that’s easy for everyone, Litmus helps you breathe easy so you can focus on crafting high-quality email marketing campaigns that convert. (And let yourself be more creative.)

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