Insider Tips for a Successful B2B Email Marketing Campaign
B2B email marketing has been proven to be a great
innovation on a well established internet marketing technique. It
has delivered a higher level of success than traditional email
marketing strategies because by working directly with business
clients to generate sales, you can more easily avoid problems of
"spam". In this way, you stay away from the abuses of mass mailing
email marketing campaigns that have become so disliked in the
internet community in the last ten years.
When you base your strategy for using email as a marketing tool on a
B2B relationship model, the paradigm changes dramatically. You are
now working with a mailing list of known business contacts. While
you might send some emails to prospective clients that you have not
done business with before, the process of building your email
contact list uses a permission based approach to marketing. As a
result, you know you are working with real business contacts of
possible clients that have already been validated as real and active
in the business world.
The days of creating "spam" and trying to "trick" the recipient into
accepting your email or opening it are over. Sure, you still get
those kinds of emails. But for a serious business marketing plan to
not only increase sales but to build a long term customer base, the
B2B model avoids any appearance of the abusive emails tactics of the
past. In order to increase the odds that your B2B emails will reach
the maximum client penetration and reap the most new business, there
are some tips that insiders in this type of marketing know about
that can be of help…
Tip #1 - Subject Lines Matter
While a B2B marketing email is more direct and to the point than some of
the marketing you see online, one thing remains true about email and
that is your subject line is important. You know this from how you react
to the emails you get, particularly if they are unsolicited. When you
check your email, you might get a dozen more new emails at a time.
Skilled internet citizens are capable of sizing up an email from the
subject line in a snap to determine if that email deserves to be opened.
How you construct that subject line is driven to a large extent by your
objective of the email and your relationship with the business you are
contacting. If you already have an existing business relationship with
that client, you can utilize that history to remind the client of the
success you have shared with him or her. That will make your email
compelling and interesting so the addressee will want to see what you
have do say.
Use the nature of the mailing list to fine tune the subject line of each
email. You may have mailing list of inquiries that came in from the web
page. That interest that the prospective client showed in your business
that prompted the contact can be the springboard for your email.
Above all, try to avoid any subject line that causes your email to get
lumped in with spam. Make that opening statement in the subject line
sincere, genuine and to the point because that shows you respect the
client's time. You have a good reason to contact these perspective
clients. Let that reason shine out in your subject line. If you write a
god subject line, your emails will get opened rather than see the email
trash bin along with the spam that the client gets each day.
Tip #2 - Tone Down the Marketing Tricks
There are methods that people who write marketing copy use to "hook"
customers. These tricks include the overuse of exclamation points,
heavily formatted emails with very short phrases and lots of use of
color and even graphics right in the email. The problem is that just as
you may know some ways to "supercharge" your emails, so do the people
you are contacting with a B2B marketing campaign.
If your prospect recognizes tried and true marketing "ploys" in how your
email is structured and presented, that will cause your email to be
taken less seriously and possibly deleted. So tone down the excessive
use of marketing tricks. Allow your email to look like a business letter
so that when the customer opens it, he or she sees it as a serious
business contact. That is the kind of business relationship you are
trying to build so construct your email accordingly.
Tip #3 - Learn as You Go
Being aggressive in your pursuit of success is admirable. But becoming
too aggressive when sending out B2B emails can damage your program and
hurt your relationship with your customers or prospective customers. Be
selective in who you send your marketing emails to. B2B email campaigns
are all about targeting a specific type of business based on the kind of
response you want and the nature of your existing relationship with
them.
Most of your emails will go to a select subset of your marketing email
contact list. That is because you are focusing on the goals of the email
and addressing that small group of clients or future clients with
specific, targeted language. If B2B email marketing works correctly, a
typical email might go out to a hundred contacts rather than thousands.
But because you targeted your email carefully, your return on that
investment in terms of responses and eventual sales will be dramatically
higher than the "blanket email" (e.g. spam) approach to email marketing
that used to be the law of the land.
In addition to focused email campaigns, don't be so enthusiastic in your
goals for your internet marketing that you flood your contact's email in
boxes with marketing copy. That is a fast way to be tagged as a
"spammer" and your emails become blocked. Instead, put all of that
ambition into preparation for a targeted campaign. Then, once your first
emails to that specific group of businesses has been sent, give them
time to produce results before you send out a follow-up email or start a
new marketing campaign.
Tip #4 - Treat Your Clients with Respect
If you have received and/or read very many marketing emails, the tone
and layout can be overly slick and quirky. Either the writer attempts to
be too familiar or the "pitch" is so clearly created with a marketing
emphasis that it shouts out "spam". The business person you are sending
your email to is just as skilled at spotting slick marketing copy as you
and I are. So every effort should be made to write email copy that is
genuine, direct and effective.
Try to write a B2B email as though you were sitting in a conference room
at your client or prospective client's office presenting a great new
idea that will benefit for both businesses. Treat the business person
you are addressing with respect and dignity and let your email text
reflect that. While it is good to use any existing relationship and
reaffirm that bond that came from previous successful dealings, make
your presentation brief and to the point. Let the contact know what you
are offering and what is "in it for them" to respond to this email.
By treating business contacts with the same respect you would if you
were face to face and by approaching your B2B emails with a completely
new approach than have used in other internet marketing programs, you
can sidestep the perils of "spam" emailing and see a much greater
response and conversion rate to the B2B marketing emails you send out.
