Gone are the days when B2B marketers can keep their strategies boring and would still stay successful. Today, more and more businesses are opting for inbound marketing techniques where the objective is to provide something of interesting value and generate inbound interest (as opposed to cold calling and visiting your prospects to push for a sale).
A typical inbound marketing strategy works like this:
Step 1: Provide something of great value (blog, ebook, video, etc.).
Step 2: Build traffic to content through social media, SEO, etc. Build an email list of prospects who have seen your content.
Step 3: Engage with prospects periodically through newsletters with occasional call to action pointing to your service
Most businesses do a good job in steps 1 and 2. Where B2B businesses typically falter is in the final step where you need to engage with your prospects (and stop your prospects from hitting the dreaded ‘Unsubscribe’ button). So how do you do that? Here are some ways you can keep your engagement interesting and fruitful:
Tell A Story:Kinaxis is a supply management company based in Ontario, Canada. This is an industry that is intensely competitive. Yet, Kinaxis wanted to find a way to stand out from the crowd and be seen. As the marketers were deciding on the best way to spread the word about the simplicity of their product, an idea struck – isn’t finding the right solution similar to dating? So the marketers went ahead and created an ad that told the story by using this very comparison. That instantly got them recognition from their target market and set them apart from the crowd. Do you realize how this very paragraph was made interesting by being told in the form of a story? Doing that in a newsletter is a great way to energize the content and increase your engagement with the audience.
Customize & Personalize: Yes, you have a dozen products that you want to talk about. But your subscribers only want to hear about the products they are interested in. The best way to go about this is to personalize and customize your newsletters as much as you can. For example, GetResponse’s autoresponder tool enables you to study subscriber behavior and click-through history on various types of newsletter content and only sends the mailer to subscribers who are likely to be interested. The tool is powerful for personalizing subscriber experience as it delivers content based on the user’s preferences, behavior and proven responses. An alternative to this is to create multiple newsletters for different product categories and sending out newsletters to these subscribers separately. This may, however, be not as efficient since subscribers are not likely to take the effort to tick all their product interests individually.
Be Topical & Not Evergreen: This is one of the most common mistakes that B2B marketers commit – most B2B industries do not evolve as much as their B2C counterparts. As a result, these marketers create content that are seen as ‘evergreen‘. For instance, if you are a supplier of rubber to tennis ball manufacturers, there are only so many things to talk about the rubber itself. However, you can make the topic interesting by tying your content up with the latest from the world of tennis.
By giving your subscribers a reason to open the email and read your content, you are setting yourself up to find greater engagement and loyalty. But this is only possible if the subscriber finds your content interesting and worth opening. And this is something that boring content won’t help achieve.
What are some ways in which you make your B2B newsletters interesting? Tell us in the comments.
(Image courtesy : http://pixabay.com/en/news-headlines-newsletter-226931/ )
