B2B Marketing Blog

Sending out newsletters and other information about your company is a great way to keep both your customers and potential customers in the loop. They can also help with getting your message across in a timely manner and help with promotional items. But have you ever wondered why they started subscribing to your emails?

EmailStatCenter.com is reporting that, “67% of US internet users say the motivation behind giving their email address to a company is to receive discounts and promotions. -ExactTarget “Email X-Factor Study” (2010).” If this is the case for your subscribers, you got over the first hurdle which is to get them to subscribe, but then you have to keep them engaging.

Segmenting Your Audience
Another key point in email marketing is making your readers feel like you didn’t send out a mass email. They probably know you are sending out a mass email, but the more targeted you can make the email, the more you can make them feel like they are getting a private email from you.

BtoB Online points out, “Understanding the status of the subscriber is critical in crafting your copy. Are they customers, prospects, lapsed customers or lapsed prospects? Imagine the different messages you could convey just on that knowledge alone.” If you don’t already have a few different emails drafted to send to these different categories of subscribers, test it out see if you see better conversion rates.

Call to Action
Having a call to action can be very beneficial—not to mention a great way to measure how many people are reading your emails. Most email programs have metrics for how many people are reading your emails, but what you may not know is if people don’t scroll down far enough in the email then many email software programs don’t count that open rate.

Setting up specific landing pages for your readers is a great way to measure not only the people opening your emails, but the number of readers who are actively engaging in your brand. If you already do this, see if moving your link from the middle or bottom of the email to the top has a better response. The more you change things up, the better you can see what works and what works better.

Scheduling
Scheduling your email is just as important as the copy and who you are sending it to. Daily tips or emails can be a great idea, but who is going to take the time to actually read and click through your email every day—probably not many. Instead try and keep it to monthly or even bi-monthly. It saves you time, and your customers can get more information in each email—which could make them more eager to read it.
Email marketing is a great tactic to utilize, and “according to the Direct Marketing Association, every dollar spent on e-mail marketing generates $43.62 in revenue,” reports DM News. Keep in mind this is just an average, being able to hone your skills and get more organized can produce even better results. What have you found useful?

Shannon Suetos is an expert writer on phone systems based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as VoIP service at Resource Nation.

Marketers are shifting to digital for a variety of reasons, chief among them are the results.  While social media gets all the hype, it’s two tried and true workhorses, email and search marketing, that come out on top of effectiveness.  From a post over at Marketing Profs:

Most marketing executives cite email or search marketing as their company’s top-performing advertising channel in 2009—39.4% and 23.6%, respectively—and over nine in ten (93.6%) say they plan to increase their budget allocation to digital marketing in the next five years, according to the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Just 9.4% of marketers cited offline channels as their most effective response channel last year. Another 4.7% cited social media, while mobile marketing, still in its early stages, was cited by 0.8% of marketers.

Crucially I’d argue that all these pieces need to work together.  Search so they find you, content to convert them, email to nurture them.

ActiveConversion recently published an “eHow To” guide to Lead Nurturing that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

In October ActiveConversion co-hosted with VerticalResponse a webinar called “Boosting Sales with Continuous & Qualified Leads“. Due to popular demand, we’re providing a recorded version of this webinar for those who couldn’t make it.  The webinar covered:

• Overview of Email Marketing Best Practices
• Post-Campaign Marketing Campaign Tracking With ActiveConversion
• Re-engaging Prospects with Nurturing Campaigns

This webinar had a great turn-out and the Q&A afterwards was lively; SMBs are hungry for email marketing best practices.  Feel free to pass the link to this webinar around, the more the merrier.

My colleagues and I are immersed in the world of web marketing and take a lot of our skill sets for granted. One such skill is email marketing, the sending of an email to a list. While it is simple to do, and something we do at least every other day, 4 out of 5 companies I talk to are not doing it, and a good percentage of those who are doing it are doing it wrong, harmfully wrong. So here in four easy steps, is how to do email marketing.

Step 1: Gather your list.
Seems commonsensical, but most companies struggle when asked to produce a basic “house list”, let alone lists delineated by variables such as how old the contact information is, how it was received, if a product or service was bought by the contact, and so on. Short of setting up a Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system, put out an “all points bulletin” to your company and collect all the names into a spread sheet. Simple as that, put them into an excel spreadsheet, have a company name, contact name, mailing address, phone number, and of course, an email address. You need more than just the email address, spammers have just an email address, legitimate emailers have contact information.

Step 2: Join an Email Service Provider (ESP).
ESPs are different from Internet Service Providers (ISPs); ESPs are a new element in the ever evolving arms race against spammers. If you are going to send an email to a list, you want to send that email through an ESP or you are likely going to end up in a spam filter (they are free to join, and they charge about a penny an email). Invariably receivers of emails sent to a list will click the spam button, and the ISP will ask “who sent this?” If no one replies the ISP black lists the Internet Protocol (IP) address, automatically getting your emails dumped into spam folders. When you use an ESP they reply to the ISP; “We sent that, we have full contact information including name, address, phone number, this is not spam,” and the ISP relents. There are many ESPs to choose from, I’ll make it simple and suggest this one: VerticalResponse.

Step 3: Email your list with valuable content.
Arguably this is the easiest to state, but the hardest to do. Pick an interval, say once a month, and send a meaningful email that contains something of value. This is where you either win or lose; send nothing of value and you are spamming, send something of value and you are building your tribe. If you are having trouble coming up with something of value you can send in an email, email me and after I find out what your company does I’ll let you know what others in your industry are offering.

Step 4: Keep building your list, keep emailing your list.
Create a quota for everyone in your company; each needs to contribute three new contacts to the list each month. Start keeping segmented lists; in addition to the master “house list”, build lists that are finer grained. Stick to your emailing schedule, it must be a high priority. Keep sending emails that contain something of value.

There are steps beyond these, such as adding Marketing Automation to the mix, but email marketing is so simple, and virtually free, that if your company is not doing it, you are missing out on a powerful tool.