According to the recent B2B Marketing Insight Report, email marketing is the one medium being used to target companies of all sizes, from micro businesses through to large corporates. It’s been widely lauded as the saviour of direct marketing and its place at the top of the B2B marketer’s direct marketing toolkit would seem to be secure. Or is it?
Emarketing sounds like the marketers dream (not to mention the finance director’s delight). It’s cost-effective, measurable, can be personalised and allows behaviour to be tracked and future activity to be constructed to reflect this behaviour. Brilliant. That’s when it’s done well. But because email is cost-effective, there’s a tendency for it to be used indiscriminately. If an email campaign sent to 5000 targets results in 25 responses, why not send 50,000 emails? That generates more responses? Great. Let’s send out a few more. It’s a dangerous path to follow. This ‘throw enough mud…’ approach is in danger of undermining the real benefit of email marketing and coupled with the fact that some of the poorer quality email data exhibits shocking bounce back rates, risks toppling email from its perch.
So what should marketers be doing with email campaigns? Essentially, there are five areas to focus on to use email as part of a successful direct marketing strategy.
1. Drive more relevance
There’s simply no excuse for mud slinging. Email campaigns should be segmented in the same way that offline activity is. By using the right selection criteria and ensuring the activity is highly targeted and highly relevant, marketers can use email to speak to a captive audience.
To this end, there’s ongoing debate about the relative merits of specific contact versus generic email addresses in terms of targeting. What is essential is the ability to target multiple contacts within an organisation. Specific contact data, so the argument goes, is more valuable than a generic info@ or admin@ address. The problem is that this contact data degrades extremely quickly as people move out of the business or move into different roles. Contact email data is extremely powerful, but for certain sectors and particular offers such as corporate hospitality, ticket offers and mobile telephony contact emails supported by generic emails can be very effective.
2. Vary content and tell stories
Email may be cost-effective, but that’s no excuse to pump out the same content over and over again and scrimp on your creative approach. If you’ve got point one right and you are segmenting and targeting, then repeating creative is simply a waste of a captive audience. And when targeting the C-suite in large corporates CEOs, CFOs CMOs personalisation is absolutely paramount, but that also means ensuring your data must be spot on.
3. Don’t forget back-end data
Above all, you want your email data to be high quality, clean and with low bounce-back rates. It also needs to be responsive data and have real depth. As with much in life it’s about quality, not quantity.
To this end marketers should increasingly concern themselves with the origin of the email data they use. What are the capture trails and how has the email data been constructed? For instance, email databases constructed using a ‘ping’ process to gather data from an IP address by establishing the domain names and topology, typically demonstrate very low bounce back rates. Data captured via telephone can also be extremely accurate, but to get this information highly skilled operatives are needed. Online activity is a frequently used capture device, but you can only be 100 per cent sure of those addresses you’ve captured yourself, in terms of both quality and opt-in.
4. Integration, integration, integration
It’s been said before, but it’s worth saying again. As in the B2C world, email in the B2B environment is best used and works most effectively as part of a multi-channel, multi-disciplinary marketing approach.
5. Transactional email marketing
One area to watch is transactional email marketing selling products directly via email. Again, this is well-established in the B2C world, but so far has had little impact in B2B perhaps because the purchasing cycle in the business world take longer. But it’s a trend that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Transactional tracking is a powerful indicator of how an email campaign is performing and should feed back through to point one, delivering relevance from email. Like any successful marketing activity, behaviours and responses should shape the campaign and drive even more relevance through tailored and targeted email marketing activity. It’s a virtuous circle that done properly, will boost the success of the email channel significantly.
