email

For any B2B company effective marketing is about building long standing client relationships, relationships that are built on trust and an understanding of the products and services you can provide.

So how can email with its fleeting messages and spam hangover be something that can help this? For SME business who are in the B2B or industrial sector, email may not seem like a particularly useful tool, after all you rarely have special offers or sell from your website. Yet as a relationship building tool, when used effectively, email can be extremely powerful. Keeping in contact with prospects through a lengthy sales pipeline. Keeping clients informed about the full range of services and products provided. Above all, keeping your business ‘font of mind’.

So if we accept that email can be extremely useful for B2B companies, I thought it would be useful to look at some specific pitfalls that B2B email marketers can fall into, plus a few reminders of best practice that apply to all.

reminders of best practice for all emailers.

#1       Blanket Coverage

Email is just a marketing platform for your messages. Like any marketing activity it is more effective when it is relevant, targeted and timely. Because email is cheap and fast it tends to get used in a blanket fashion ‘Oh I might as well send it to everyone’ attitude. In the days when I worked heavily on direct mail, we would spend a great deal of time and effort on trying to be as targeted as possible.

The reason? Well with direct mail costing hundreds of pounds per thousand, you needed to make sure you minimised your wastage. When email started to really take off I saw the same companies who had so diligently targeted their direct mail activity take a blanket, ‘gung ho’ approach. Just because it is cheap doesn’t mean it will not benefit from being targeted.

It can see counter intuitive to send an email to only 10% of your database when it would cost no more to send to 100%. After all, the logic goes, it will still be hitting our 10% and we may even get a few more sales from the other 90%’. This logic is flawed as it doesn’t take into account the damage caused by sending untargeted and ‘irrelevant’ emails to that 90%. And if you do that every time, you may find that when you do send emails to those who should be interested, they are so fed up with receiving ‘junk’ they won’t respond, or worse may have unsubscribed already.

#2       Forgetting your sales pipeline

In consumer marketing is perfectly acceptable to push out sales messages. Send an email and click to buy or link through to a website to buy. For most B2B products or services, the sales process is far more complex. In high-value relationships businesses need to drip feed through relevant information to help the prospects make their own mind.

Ideally you should link into your sales strategy. If you have a quoting process for new enquiries, that would be an ideal opportunity to send out a series of triggered emails to new prospects highlighting key benefits or areas of your business. The combination of these email messages with the contact from the sales team may well enhance and support their efforts.

#3       Not focussing on capturing the lead

How do you decide on the success of an email campaign? Open rates, click throughs? Requests for information? Sign ups? Quote requests? It will depend on the objectives of the campaign, but it can be a weakness in B2B email that not enough is doen to capture a lead.

So think about where they are landing. Has this page been optimised to capture a lead? If you are asking people to sign up for a white paper or request more information, or a demo is it very clear and easy to do. Don’t make them go and search for another page on the site, ideally have it all there on the page they land on, even if this means building a dedicated landing page.

#4       Forgetting the basics of best practice email marketing

Whether you are B2C or B2B there are best practice rules of email marketing that should be ingrained and used to evaluate every email. These include –

  • Know your audience – match imagery, tone of voice and offers to your audience. Maybe they don’t even need a fancy graphic laden HTML email when a more text based email would have more credibility
  • Make good use of subject lines – make them short and to the point. Take out ‘weasel words’ and make sure it tells people why they should open and read it
  • Main messages above the fold – many people view emails through preview windows or on mobile phones, so make sure you get your main message across in the top area of the email.
  • Mix up your email formats -don’t bore them with the same format –and make them relevant to different types of information. Longer newsletter style emails mixed with short bulletins or stop press type emails. Promotional graphic heavy emails with text only. Sometimes people get preoccupied with everything looking the same, as if this will automatically gain brand recognition. Whilst there is a need for some consistency this does not mean duplication and people will soon get bored and stop noticing your emails if they always look the same.

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