B2B Email Marketing Tips: How to Reach Both Prospective and Current Customers
With the economy in recession, many companies are cutting corners in their usual marketing campaigns in favor of more email-based marketing campaigns. Email is easy, inexpensive, and effective, so for many companies it?s a simple decision to make. But for the companies who rely on email as their sole marketing tool, there?s a need now more than ever for email that distinguishes itself from the scores of other emails arriving in inboxes daily.
Your email marketing campaign needs to be a reading experience for the reader, not just another email with ad copy only slightly variant from spam. Remember that businesspeople are constantly bombarded with both emails from clients and other businesses. Target messages to your audience, carefully recording results from segmentation, send frequency, time and date sent, etc.
Customize a landing page for email click-throughs. Include a specific call to action on this page, including other unique features to compel the visitor to continue clicking around your site. Creative examples might include a video tutorial or commercial about a product or service your business offers, insider reviews, tips and tricks of your specific trade, or a code providing exclusive access to a special ?members only? section of your site. The good news is that if they?ve arrived on your landing page, the client is already interested enough to have opened your email, read some or part of it, and clicked on a link. Keep their attention with an optimized landing page.
Email recipients like to think that the email they receive is tailored specifically for their inbox. This personalization can be difficult to simulate, but you can start by segmenting your email campaign into 2 components?prospective customers and existing customers. Optimizing for each set is ideal because both will naturally have different perspectives about your products and services. And you don?t want to risk talking down to existing customers or grazing over important information and losing potential ones.
As always, keep the trust of your recipients and your company's integrity as a sender by sending emails that are high quality, well written with no typos or broken links. Also remember that the quality of your email marketing campaign is more important than the quantity of emails sent.
B2B Marketing: How to Promote Your Business to Other Local Businesses
Pitching your business to other businesses is typically more difficult than marketing it to consumers. This is because other businesses know your game, so be prepared to back up your business and its products and services with facts and research.
First, work with your business?s marketing and advertising team to put together a promotional package for your business. This should include materials that, once assembled, will be sent via snail mail. In this technological age, sending out hard copy promotional materials will help your business to stand out?and many still appreciate having something in their hands to look over instead of clicking through emails, pdfs, and spreadsheets. Address the promo packet or portfolio to the person in charge of the products or services your business offers. Include a brief letter with thorough contact information (name, title, physical address, phone, FAX, email) so that they can reach you with any questions or comments. It can be a challenge to sum up your business in a brief, yet thorough way so that the appropriate decision makers will have the information they need to act, but a well planned promotional plan can do just that.
Network for your business by becoming a fixture in your city?s business community. Attend events where you can meet with other local businesspeople and exchange business cards. Also, consider joining a local business organization?s Board of Directors. Choose an organization that is related to the products and services your business provides, such a group of business owners and professionals in your field. Serving on the Board of Directors will be beneficial for you and your business. You?ll learn from other businesspeople and gain valuable networking contacts. Having one of its employees as a sort of figurehead in the community will help your business to receive maximum exposure and, even better, it?s absolutely free advertising!
Advertise your business in local newspapers and business directories, the telephone book, billboards, and as many other venues where your business can afford space. Another great way to advertise your business is to sponsor local events in the community. This will gain exposure for your business and will also foster a good reputation as a business that cares about the community.
It?s a valuable consequence that businesses who see your success in the local business and consumer community will want to be affiliated with you; the greater your promotion of your business, the more support and patronage you can expect from them.
B2B Email Marketing: Make a Good First Impression
When putting together your B2B email marketing campaign, it's helpful to keep a few factors in mind. First, email communication is the first impression many businesses will have of you, so your emails should be brief yet informative, and professional yet easy to read and understand quickly. You should also expect your email to be passed around inside the businesses you send them to, so you should remember this when using certain terms or when referring to certain products and services. Be sure that anyone in the company could read your email and quickly grasp what's going on, but be careful not to talk down to your recipients. Include a very specific signature in your email, including your name, title, multiple phone numbers and email addresses, fax, physical address, and website links. People like choices, and businesspeople are no different, so give them a variety of ways where they may contact you.
It's wise to consider your competition when planning your B2B email marketing campaign. Subscribe to other email lists so that you can read their emails, analyze them, and determine how your company can distinguish itself from the competition. Also, be mindful of when you send your B2B email. Many businesses spend all of Monday morning or longer replying to backlogged email and phone calls from the weekend. For this reason, avoiding sending your email past lunchtime on Friday or on Monday. Thursdays and Tuesdays are all good alternatives.
Carefully choose the contents of your email, from the subject line to the body of the email. After the sender's address, the subject line is the second place recipients will look before opening your email. Make use of this prime real estate by including your company's name and a superior service or product your company offers. Avoid using capital letters or exclamation points in the subject line, though; it looks like spam to recipients and spam filters often pick up on this combination, too. Don't risk an otherwise carefully composed email immediately being delivered to the junk folder or a recipient automatically clicking "delete" by running your subject line and message copy through a spam filtering program before sending it. Revise any highlighted words or phrases the program finds.
Finally, remember that while content is king, brevity and precision are just as important in your web writing. Include all the important information in the opening paragraph of your email. Give recipients enough specific information so that they will be compelled to respond to your call to action. Avoid including images or other files (Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, etc.) that will bog down the initial message and may just frustrate if the reader can't open them. An alternative is to provide web links to the documents you'd like them to view. Make sure you've tested all links before sending the email; broken links are unprofessional and could cost you valuable business.