The golden rules of B2B email marketing

 

There is no doubt that business-to-business marketers are increasing their investment in email marketing and sending more emails, more frequently than ever before.

However, as the medium grows, so do the problems of cutting through the clutter in a target customer’s inbox. To use this cost-effective medium successfully, it is vital to see it as part of your wider communication activities, and to integrate the insight obtained from email to build a better understanding of your customers and prospects generally.

1. Develop a clear data management strategy
It is all too easy to fall into the trap of looking at email in isolation from other data and communication channels. Although it is a valuable and cost-effective medium, it is the availability of data integrated across channels that will really enable companies to gain a better understanding of their customers. Companies need to stop thinking about emails as a list of contacts, and instead consider the data and intelligence that can be derived from them, creating meaningful contact and response histories over time and enabling trends to be identified. By structuring data in the right way, organisations can improve the timeliness and relevance of their marketing communications.

2. Develop clear rules of engagement for prospecting
As well as avoiding the dangers of over- solicitation and spamming, clear rules are necessary to ensure the capture of relevant data at appropriate stages in the customer or prospect life cycle. These rules should also make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to provide organisations with their information. This objective puts a premium on care in the design and pre-population of forms.

3. Let customers and prospects control the frequency of communications
The adoption of clear rules enables organisations to send monthly or weekly communications, depending on the timeliness of the content and the audience’s expectations. However, better results can be achieved by empowering the users to decide how often they want to receive emails, and to identify the topics, which are of interest to them. Many users unsubscribe because they are not interested in a specific communication they have received, although they may be interested in other things the organisation has to offer. By giving them the opportunity to manage the classes of subject matter they receive, the number of users opting out should be reduced, while the useful information received will increase.

4. Focus on what customers do, not who they are
Valuable data and information can be gained by concentrating on what customers do. By examining their behaviour, organsiations can understand the impact of how they interact with emails, what pages they view from click throughs’, what products interest them, how often they visit your website and which are the most effective marketing campaigns. By understanding these interactions, better products, promotions, offers and future email marketing communications can be developed.

5. Develop content strategies based on the content people want and respond to
The secret of successful email is to avoid wasting the customer’s or prospect’s time, and this can be achieved by ensuring that all content delivered has an excellent chance of providing benefit to the user. Through accurate data profiles, augmented with learned recipient behaviour, marketers can ensure that relevant and pertinent information is of interest and tailored accordingly. Emailing a catalogue of new products to a prospect is not as effective as understanding the recipients’ interest areas and sending details of only those latest new product offers that are of interest to them. Using test and learn strategies, it is possible to discover which content is most effective.

As email marketing continues to be an essential and growing part of the overall business-to-business marketing mix, marketers need to ensure that the foundations of good data management and ongoing profile building are maintained. An email content and distribution infrastructure is required which is aligned with the implementation of the rules listed above. Not only will this ensure that communications are relevant and appropriate, but a solid and consistent approach will provide an improved return on investment.

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