Brand Building in the Inbox With Pitney Bowes

For B-to-B marketer Pitney Bowes, on a corporate level e-mail isn’t about selling, it’s about awareness.

In a recent chat Dan Kohn, vice president of marketing, noted that the goal is to stay on message and keep communications integrated across media. Testing is continual, although with a branding focus, it’s hard to test things like subject lines, because you’re not plugging offers or products.

And as in B-to-B in general, getting your message to the right person can be a challenge, he said. “Obviously with e-mail, you don’t get the forwarding that you’d get with direct mail.”

While customer awareness of the company’s products is typically over 70% when it comes to Pitney’s direct mail offerings like good old fashioned postage meters, it can be less than half that when it comes to other products and services.

Kohn describes the corporate e-mail strategy as sort of “warming up the audience,” so customers are primed for when the individual divisions send messages relating to specific products.

The company’s business units e-mail customers several times a month, while corporate sends quarterly e-newsletters promoting the core mailing business customers, targeting both end users and decision makers. The Mailstream Matters newsletter goes to about 750,000 names, while “Your Messaging Works” goes out to around 10,000.

The ROI is gauged based on customer and prospect perception of the brand, and how willing they would be to consider Pitney Bowes for new products and services.

“We track that data annually by all the different audience segments,” said Kohn, noting the company is working on a model to relate the change in brand awareness to actual revenue.

For a profile of Pitney Bowes CMO Juanita James, see the February/March issue of Chief Marketer.