Email Marketing to Businesses

If you are in the B to B space and using email as a tool in your marketing mix, you likely have a database full of contacts (permission based of course) that do not have purchasing authority.

When you put together a campaign and articulate your services or products, who are you actually sending your message to?  The authority, who is probably not in your database or the messenger who is actually receiving your message?  Consider the messenger as a filter for the authority and expect that your email isn’t simply forwarded on to the correct eyeballs.

You are, in essence, playing a game of telephone.  Telling the messenger to then tell the authority.  Does the story you’re trying to tell come across as something that is:
A: Important enough to re-tell
B: Simple enough to re-tell properly?

Think about who you are actually mailing to next time you draft your message.

Tip: Send your finished template to a friend outside of your office and have them re-tell you the story you just told them in your email.

Email as a player in your marketing mix

If you are a direct marketer, you are mailing your lead list at the mercy of regulatory costs (postage) and printing costs (paper and ink).  While DM may work very well for you, incorporating email as a part of an integrated marketing strategy may show a nice boost in sales.

Integrated marketing?  Yes, incorportating many touch points through different advertising medium.  For a fraction of the cost of direct mail, you can follow up your postcard piece with a similar email marketing message that touches on the points the postcard did not.  That’s two touch points giving your customer more exposure to your services and your brand hopefully at a prospective buying time.  What if you purchased a banner ad in a well-read trade publication that your contacts will surely be reading.  That’s three touch points.  Did you swap a newsletter text link with a non-competiting business development partner?  That’s four touch points.

Now this may seem like brand overload to some contacts, but if thought about intelligently and delivered just as the last placement was forgetten about, an integrated marketing strategy very well may boost business.

So, I told you email should be a part of these multi touch strategies.  Why?

Direct, pertinent information to your customers and instant feedback as to what customers are interested in what products/services.  Start with email, send to your entire list with a few differentiating links.  Track who is clicking on what and form groups based on this information.  Next, send a Direct Mail piece to each group that has information that pertains only to that group.  Follow up by negotiating advertsing real-estate in the trade publications that each group may be reading.

Email makes the cast-a-wide-net marketing approach into a sharpshooter approach.  It focuses your messaging and makes very clear who your groups of contacts are.  It is a waste of your money to send me information regarding watches when I really wanted to know about digital cameras.  Email will help solve this problem in an inexpensive way.

5 Tips for Testing Your Email Marketing Messages

Form sub-groups out of your groups – This is the first and most important step in testing and applies to the other four tips.  You may be grouping your list into distinct groups based on customer profile and are sending them messages that pertain only to them.  This is terrific!  Now split each group into two or three sub-groups and send the same message with slight tweaks to measure what works and what doesn’t.

Subject Lines – Send email campaigns with very different subject lines, but with the same content in the email body to each sub-group.  This will help you learn what drives higher open rates.

Imagery – Have you every thought about what effect it might have on an action decision if you included a picture of a dog or a picture of a tree in your email template?  Keeping all else the same, send one graphical design to one sub-group and entirely different design to another.

Link Positioning – Positioning both in regards to physical positioning within the email and whether to include banner links or text links.  It’s worth experimenting.  After all, don’t most of you links lead to an action decision?

Timing – Are your customer’s weekend warriors and would rather plow through email on Saturday and Sunday?  Or are most of them in a different time zone?  It’s worth testing different days and different times of day for send activity.  Maybe you’ll find out that the normal Tuesday mid-morning send isn’t right for your contacts.

The Core

It seems as though roughly 500 people do a mojority of the posting, moderating, and editing of wikipedia - The worlds largest encylopedia with over 6 billion articles written since it’s conception 4 years ago.
Who is your core?  Who are the 5-15% of your customers that contribute the most to your product development?  How much more pasisonate are these customers than the majority?  Do you listen to them?  What if you made a suggestion to a company who makes a product that you use and they actually made the change!  How much more evangelistic would you be?

5 easy steps to further qualification

I know I sound like a squeaky wheel ranting about contact qualification, but feel it is important as you are bold enough to move into higher touch contact outreach.

The reason I am writing this post is because I keep hearing about the return of direct mail as a marketing communication medium.  So with another arrow in our quiver of drip marketing tools, how can we be the most effective with a DM piece?

You guessed it - Qualification and Relevancy

Take advantage of the rising effectiveness of this medium by providing the proper data to the proper people.  How do you do this?

5 easy steps to further qualification for content delivery in any medium -

Track referring URL’s
Build different landing pages for different products/services
Store contact data
Use Email Marketing Campaigns that track on the individual level
Survey existing contacts to gather valuable segmenting data

A Little Luck

Seth intrigues us with a good discussion on the luck factor of your business/product/campaign taking off or failing miserably.  It often does seem like a crapshoot whether or not your next big idea will in fact be the next big idea.

With such a volatile variable as luck, what steps can you take to ensure email marketing success?

2 Main Factors:

Subject Lines - Write subject lines with these traits:

Trust - Include your company/organization name
Applicable content - Give the three to four word abstract of internal content
No special characters - (!?&@) Have to get through the ISP’s first

Content Relevancy - Segment your database to the point where you can provide exactly the content that your customer will be looking for.  Don’t send printer related content to your customers that are looking for a phone service and vice versa.

Long Tail

So, how do you reach your long tail (what’s this?) customers? First off, classify which customers fall in this category, now, how do you reach them?

The long tail is where the masses lie, the bottom 80%-90%, or so, of your business. What if you generated an extra $100 dollars from each member of the long tail? You’d surpass the entire 20%. Don’t brush off the bottom majority.

Image compliments of Flickr user alexmuse