Business-to-business email is no longer about quick promotional blasts. Today’s savvy B-to-B marketers are using email to nurture customers through the sales cycle and build relationships for the future. Chief Marketer recently talked with Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations for digital marketing firm Silverpop, and Matt Blumberg, CEO of email deliverability company ReturnPath, to get their thoughts on what types of content works best, timing of messages, list growth and sharing to social.
Content: The More the Merrier
Today, B-to-B professionals are starving for content that helps them do their jobs better and solve their problems, says McDonald. As marketers move away from the old-fashioned monthly promotional emails to sequential nurturing programs with multiple tracks, targeting prospects based where they are in the buying cycle, this creates a need for “pounds and pounds” of content to feed those emails.
What works best? Not surprisingly, articles with lots of numbers and words like “tips” still perform off the charts. “You need content which quickly resonates that it might help solve the prospect’s problem,” says McDonald.
“Promotion is much less engaging to a target than content,” adds Blumberg. “The challenge is that creating engaging content is difficult, and not something that B-to-B marketers have historically had to do a lot of — they have to shift from being a marketer to being a publisher.”
Timing and Deliverability: No Silver Bullet
There’s no perfect time of the day or week that will guarantee your messages will get opened, says McDonald. “The reality is that it is different for every individual. Everyone has different personal habits regarding how they look at email.”
McDonald suggests testing different times of day and seeing what works best on average for your clientele and industry. “There could be concentrations of time when the majority of people are opening and clicking,” he says, adding that you should also consider when your competitors are sending their messages.
Naturally, getting your messages into in boxes at any time is an ongoing challenge. And for B-to-B marketers, it can be even more difficult because they must deal with numerous different corporate filtering guidelines, as opposed to the maybe five to 10 major ISPs a consumer marketer contends with, notes Blumberg.
According to Silverpop research, in the first quarter of 2010, about 13% of B-to-B email didn’t get through to its intended target. And close to another 4% went straight into junk mail folders.
Of course, many people use their personal address rather than their corporate one when signing up for things like webinars and whitepapers, which means B-to-B marketers contend with the consumer ISP challenges as well, points out McDonald. This means an increasing need to focus on relevance and engagement, the latter of which is becoming a more important filtering metric for the big ISPs.
“Most folks with corporate addresses are using filtering systems mimicking what the big ISPs are doing,” he says. “But if a third of the people in your database are using their personal addresses, you need to do all the same things B-to-C marketers do.”
List Growth: Many Cooks in the B-to-B Buying Kitchen
“All marketers get pressure from the corner office to grow their email list,” says McDonald. But in B-to-B, there are often multiple people involved in the purchase process. This means not only keeping up with personnel changes but also keeping on top of who in an organization has a say in the buying cycle.
“You have to figure out how to work with both the functional head and the IT people and often the C-level exec too,” says Blumberg. “If I'm sending accounting software that is Web-based, the controller is a target (customer). But even if they are making the decision, I likely need to get the attention of the CTO and the CFO during the buying cycle.”
To get deeper into a company—and reach more potential influencers/buyers—with your messages, make sure all your emails have prominent "forward to" or "share with a friend" buttons recipients can easily click on.
Sharing to Social: Turning your Customers into Marketers
A big trend for social/email integration is incorporating lead scoring into their nurturing strategy, looking at the demographics and psychographics of people who sign up for things like webinars via email, and identifying what their influence might be in social networks, notes McDonald.
Another part of that is incorporating social content — like testimonials and comments — into emails. Smart B-to-B marketers are capturing what people are saying about them in social communities and pulling that back to repurpose as email content.
B-to-B marketers should focus on creating content that resonates with the 1% of their audience who will share it out into their social networks and help it go viral, says McDonald. “If someone else is going to make a $100,000 investment, they will talk to their peers.”
Takeaway Tip:
Don’t think about email in a siloed environment.
Email doesn’t work alone, says McDonald. To perform at top strength, your content across all platforms should work together. Repurpose content created for social media platforms as content for your email communications — and use those emails to refer customers back to your social media presence. “Everything works together. For the first time ever, we’re achieving that nirvana of true channel integration.”
