ClickZ – 8 B2B Email Marketing Tricks of the Trade
By: ClickZ
After sharing email best practices for small and medium-sized businesses, I thought the underrepresented B2B email community deserved a spotlight on it.
B2B (business to business) email marketing doesn’t get nearly the attention as big consumer email programs but it is often where the most innovation is taking place. In a two-part series, I will look at eight ways to make a real impact on the bottom line. After all, that’s what exceptional B2B email programs are all about.
1. Email Subscribers Spend More Than Your Other Customers
Well, they should. After you leverage email and marketing automation, you hopefully are touching your customers more frequently and in a more strategic fashion. We have helped most of our clients not just get more incremental revenue from email subscribers but measure that. Most CMOs and CFOs really like the measuring part.
2. Ensure Your Creative Doesn’t Suck – $1M Lift
Most B2B email programs typically have a lot to be desired when it comes to creative. In fact, even smart business-to-business email campaigns I see fail on the creative. They are often long direct mail look-alikes that place the call to action at the email’s bottom – the part that no one will read. B2B email creative isn’t like B2C. In B2B, the goal isn’t to sell the widget via email but to keep the relationship moving forward, stay top of mind, and differentiate your product or service.
One of my agency’s clients will see over one million in additional sales by optimizing templates that we made. These weren’t just front-end tweaks to make it look cute. Changes were driven by better coding as well as data-driven decision making and testing.
I like how Cisco WebEx trial conversion series (with a sample below) highlights different features over the course of several emails or so rather than try to cram all of them in one email. This email is clean yet provides a nice tip, some actionable items, as well as pricing and buying info. The casual note at the end (“BTW, have you downloaded the ‘Getting Started Guide?’”) makes it seem less like an automated message and more like a personalized and (more importantly) helpful tip.
Want to check out the who’s who and what’s what of email marketing?
Read The Buzz.
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