5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers

As you are wrapping up details of your 2011 planning, take a moment to make these resolutions for the new marketing year:
1. Think about your audience.
We often tend to think about our own needs first, such as more leads or more revenue. This is especially true when economic times are tough. However, driving success in the digital channels depends heavily on building the relationship with your subscribers and then delivering relevant content to them.
The key is to identify the natural segments in your contact base and then create content that is meaningful to these different segments but which also meets your business objectives.

2. Think beyond your product.
We also tend to tout how great our products are rather than focusing on how we can provide a solution to our customer’s business problem.
Think about your answer to the subscriber’s question: “What’s in it for me?” Communicating an effective answer to your audience will help you establish a solution-provider leadership position beyond just the product you’re selling.

3. Think about the customer lifecycle.
Traditionally, e-mail campaigns were sent out on the marketer’s schedule. The newsletter is mailed in the second week of the month. We need leads, so we send out another e-mail to the base.
Today, marketers are starting to realize that the secret to executing high-performing campaigns is to map critical programs to the customer lifecycle. Identify key milestones and barriers to purchase along the lifecycle and build automated programs to address the subscriber’s specific needs.

4. Think multichannel.
It’s new, it’s got the buzz, and it works. Several recent reports are showing that social media and mobile use by B2B sales and marketing professionals is evolving in a similar fashion to that of consumers.
B2B users are now accessing mobile and social channels slightly more often than e-mail. Reinforcing your message across multiple digital channels will extend your reach, identify more leads, and drive more sales.

5. Think quality over quantity.
Marketers often focus on quantity (“How many total e-mail addresses do I have on my list?”) rather than the quality of those contacts. All too often, they tend to blast the entire list with the same message over and over again in hopes that the good leads will raise their hands.
This is the e-mail marketing equivalent of telemarketers harassing you at dinnertime to switch your long-distance carrier. Resolve to focus on boosting your opt-in permission for key segments, and focus on leads or revenue per e-mail as a key metric for the success and efficiency of your e-mail campaigns.

The Final Word: Lack of B2B email market awareness is “unforgiveable”

Cordell Brewer wrote in a post for Biz Community that the impressive results that can be achieved through B2B email marketing speak for themselves and, as such, to be unaware of this growing marketing area is to be behind the times.

He noted: “For a professional marketer or advertising person to be blissfully unaware of a tool that routinely provides a 48-times return on investment is just unforgiveable.”

Mr Brewer added that increasingly creative uses of the medium are likely to come to the fore as more marketing professionals embrace B2B email marketing.

Reference:
Lack of B2B email market awareness is “unforgiveable”
5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers