Congratulations! Your message not only got through, but it was read!
That’s great, but what’s next? For any B2B company, marketing is about building long-lasting relationships, forging a solid reputation and creating a niche as a trusted partner.
Outflanking your competitors requires you to use email to do more than simply push messages; it has to be the spark that generates a relationship. That’s only going to happen if what you’re saying is targeted and relevant.
Email is part of the fabric of our working lives, so much so that it is taken for granted. This is equally true in B2B marketing.
Cheap and cheerful?
The old argument about email trumping direct mail is well worn, but justifies re-examination. For starters, on what basis is email considered better? For many, the unfortunate truth is that it’s simply cheaper and easier to produce.
The caveat is that it’s cheaper and easier to produce poor and ineffective email campaigns. Truly successful email marketing requires proper budgets, adequate time and real thought.
The low cost of delivering messages by email clouded the judgement of some marketers. Before email, the idea of hitting the entire database with a generic communication would have been unheard of.
Because of the time and money involved in producing a mailshot, the focus was on targeting messages to maximise returns. The relative ease with which we hit ‘send’ has caused such scrutiny to ebb away.
Whoa there
Don’t send every message each communication from all departments within your business to your entire database!
Your customers and your prospects will fast become sick of hearing from you. Not every message will be relevant to every person. Take a step back and think about who will really benefit from this communication.
It can be hard to send a campaign to just 10 per cent of your database, when it costs nothing more to whack it out to 100 per cent. After all, the logic goes, “if we send to everyone we will still be hitting the core 10 per cent and it won’t cost us anything extra… we may even grab some extra business from an unlikely source”.
Potentially, yes, but if every department applies the same logic, it’s likely that you will eventually alienate 100 per cent of your database as a result of sending an endless stream of largely irrelevant emails.
Don’t be wooed by initially high open rates. You may start by achieving open rates of 35 per cent, but this doesn’t mean you can start hitting them with ever more frequent communication. Neither does 35 per cent open rate mean you are achieving your long-term goals, growing as a business or improving sales. What are the conversion rates? Are more customers from your database coming back to your business more satisfied, or are they feeling bombarded by emails from all of your departments?
If you send out email campaigns indiscriminately, recipients will feel fatigued and eventually stop reading. Or worse: they will opt out altogether, meaning you won’t get that contact back on your list.
The sales trap
Another common problem with B2B email marketing is that businesses forget it isn’t appropriate to sell. It might be permissible to do so in B2C; click to purchase is fine if you’re selling gig tickets. However, in high-value relationships businesses have to take the view that they are drip-feeding an audience with relevant information, so that audience can – in time – work their own way to purchase. This is why it is essential that email marketing is not only aligned with a marketing strategy but a sales strategy too.
In short, don’t be too pushy! Take your time, refine your communication and build your relationship.
Integration
The risks don’t end with too much communication, or overly pushy messaging. There is also a real danger of incoherent marketing.
Email should be just one strand of the marketing mix. As a channel, email does not stand alone, and viewing it in such isolationist terms is to ignore the customer experience.
Good marketers view email as something that works in synergy with other channels. They regard it as another tool in the marketing box, not as a separate toolbox altogether that they reach into when in need of a quick fix.
Your business will communicate with its customer in a variety of ways, through all manner of customer touch points. Many businesses seem to forget this.
Consider how your customer interacts with your brand. One department may be emailing, but another may have been talking over the phone, or face-to-face at an event.
If your communication isn’t well co-ordinated the brand can really suffer. Picture the scene: a strong lead from your database receives an email from the marketing department that pushes all the right buttons. It is relevant, personalised and timely. The individual is warmed up and things look good for conversion. The following day, the same individual receives a cold call from the sales team. This time the message is untimely, irrelevant and the caller doesn’t seem aware that the marketing team sent an alluring message one day earlier. From one day to the next, the brand has gone from on point to clueless. All because of a lack of integration.
The real nirvana here – as it has been for the past decade and beyond – is to properly integrate email with CRM systems. Getting this right allows the business to have a 360-degree view of where each customer is within the lifecycle of a transaction, avoiding the dangers of messy and ill-informed communication.
The golden rules
1. Integrate with other channels, integrate with CRM
2. Interrogate the data you have and think smartly about who is being sent what
3. Make it relevant – is that contact interested in this communication? Is it relevant to them? If not, don’t clutter their inbox. If you’re not sure, you need to refine your analytics.
4. Respect your database. Target on the 10 per cent and avoid losing 90 per cent in friendly fire. Better to have meaningful messages, less often.
