B2B Email Marketing — The Latest and Greatest

It’s official — Punxsutawney Phil came out yesterday and saw his shadow which means 6 more weeks of Winter.  This means that we are already into February and that this year is rolling right along.

So, what have we seen so far as the state of B2B email marketing?  Well, the news is definitely good.  2012 has already seen an uptick in marketing spending with more companies investing in both B2B marketing data and marketing automation tools.  It seems as though we are all finally getting back to the work of acquiring new customers and continuing to build relationships with our existing ones.

Thus far, the B2B email marketing trends that we are seeing at OMI are as follows:

1)  Huge interest in marketing to the SMB sector.  More of our Clients — across industries — are focusing in on the Small-to-Medium-sized Business sector.  While this segment was definitely top-of-mind over the past couple of years, we’ve seen an added sense of urgency of large B2B marketers vying for the SMB sectors’ business.  Clients from telecommunications, financial services, automotive and healthcare are all laser-focused on reaching these business executives and claiming victory in the SMB marketplace.  Email marketing is of particular interest for this market segment as many recent studies have shown that busy SMB execs prefer to be communicated with via the email channel.  This way, they can review and act on marketing messages when it is convenient for them to do so.  Additionally, research has shown that SMB’s have been found to be a bit resistant to both direct mail and telemarketing.  They tend to be extremely responsive to the email channel and interested in following businesses that they support via social media communities.

2) More interest in using multi-channel marketing via an integrated approach.  We have had much interest in our Integrated Channel Approach white paper as our Clients are interested in figuring out the right timing for campaigns and which channels to use for the best results.  A few of our Clients are really honing in on the right equation for using email with telemarketing follow up for better conversion rates.  For example, we’ve seen successful campaign strategies such as this one:

• Send B2B email message 1 announcing the new product on Day 1
• Follow up on all click-throughs with a phone call on Day 2
• Re-send Message 1 to all non-openers on Day 5
• Follow up on all click-throughs with a phone call on Day 6
• Send 2nd email Message on Day 7 — with a slightly different message with higher urgency
• Follow up via telephone on all click-throughs . . .

You get the idea.  The point is that when using direct marketing channels in tandem with each other in an intelligent (and respectful) way, you can really lift response and conversion rates.  We’ve seen clients increase conversions by 3-5% by using multiple channels and a similar formula to the one outlined above.

3)  Using Data with Analytics for more intelligent marketing.  Many of our Clients are using analytics to better understand who their existing customers are, then building a look-alike model to find those prospects who closely resemble their best customers.  For any of you that have followed by blogs over the last 8 years . . . you know that I am a big fan of this approach.  It makes so much more sense to select marketing data — for whatever direct marketing channel you decide to use — based upon the science and math of statistical modeling.  You can determine who will respond, convert, remain loyal, etc., just by integrating an analytical approach into your marketing strategy.  And now, many companies (ours included) offer some sort of an introductory customer profile analysis at little or no cost to you.  At this point it makes absolutely no sense not to do this work up front for better overall results.

We will keep our eye out for upcoming trends as 2012 progresses — but for now, these are the top three that I’ve seen that are kick-starting the year for the B2B marketers that we support.

Thanks to Rebecca Croucher for the suggestion of this topic!  I love to hear from my blog followers on what they’d like to see discussed here.  Keep the comments and suggestions coming!

TGIF — and Happy Superbowl to all!

 

More ideas on using Specialty Data Sources for Responsive Email Campaigns

In past posts, we’ve discussed the importance of using an intelligent approach to conducting your email campaigns — or any other channel campaigns for that matter.  For instance, I’ve noticed that our clients are once again interested in creating customer profiles to better understand their customer segments’ composition and, thus, really targeting the marketing message to identified preferences.  Additionally, by using specialty data, you can really hone in on customer preferences in a more exacting fashion.

Take this example . . . we have recently been working with a global skincare products company who has traditionally relied on infomercials to get the word out about its products.  Recently, they have announced a new line of anti-aging products (who doesn’t need that, right?) and they want to give direct marketing a try.  We’ve looked at a lot of different attributes for them to use in their direct mail and email campaigns — and, as you know,  you can  get some amazing data-points from our compiler friends.  I mean, think about it, if you were our client wouldn’t you like to know what brand cosmetic cream that the prospect is purchasing today?  That little piece of information will provide a wealth of information (an idea of what the prospect is willing to spend, if brand is important, etc.).  Now, what if you tied actual purchases transactions to that customer record — and selected out purchases made in the beauty area?  Yes, you can get this!  There are those data gurus who have made an arrangement with retailers to compile actual consumer purchases and we have married that information to our B2C database.  It is an extremely rich data source.  Now, you get a very specific understanding  of what your prospects are willing to spend, how often they spend money on these types of products, if they are online or brick-and-mortar shoppers, etc.

So, these are just a couple of ideas in how you can use specialty data in your campaigns.  There are literally thousands of specialty data elements on the B2C side, and hundreds on the B2B side.  As you plan your campaigns, it makes sense to use this data to make your campaigns more effective and responsive.  And, I’m a huge proponent of using analytics –profiling your customers first to see who is buying from you and what they are like.  Then, you can build a look-alike model to score prospects and market to those who look most like your buying customers.

None of this is new news — that’s for sure.  However, as marketing budgets increase this year, I suggest that you use those marketing dollars to do a deeper dive into your customer base, create some analytical models and take a look at specialty data to really make your response rates explode.  If you do it right, it doesn’t have to be any more costly that a shotgun approach.  It takes more thought and planning but will make a world of difference in how effective each and every campaign performs.