Lead generation

• Agencies

  18 Proven Ways to Reach B-to-B Customers with Email

  Business-to-business communications are fundamentally different from business-to-consumer. With B-to-B, there is usually a long sales cycle. Your goal is to engage, to establish your company as a valuable source of information. You want to get your messages opened and read often, making you the authority buyers turn to when they are deciding where to purchase. Here are 18 steps to consider when planning a B-to-B email marketing campaign:

• Agencies

  Unified Databases, E-mail Hygiene Pay Out For Eldorado Resorts

  At Eldorado Resorts, databases talk to each other before talking to guests. These conversations keep members of its loyalty program from being bombarded with too many solicitations—or, even worse, with inappropriate messages.

  This quantity control effort is relatively new. Up through the summer of 2010, Eldorado’s various business departments, including its restaurants, casinos, showrooms, concert venues and hotels, maintained unlinked databases. Because of this, individual properties—like the Eldorado and Silver Legacy Casinos in Nevada, and an Eldorado in Shreveport—didn’t have a complete view of the value of their customers.

• Agencies

  Search Tips: How You Can Reach a Shifting B-to-B Mindset

  While it is true a great B-to-B salesperson is invaluable, Google and other prominent search engines have made finding new and/or unique suppliers much more efficient, thus altering the way many B-to-B buyers purchase items in their private lives

• Data & Analytics

  What to Consider When Creating B-to-B Lead Evaluation Models

  Modeling business-to-business data can be tricky business. There are considerations consumer marketers don’t have to worry about, such as how a given industry indicates propensity to purchase, or the impact of multiple decision makers within an organization.

  Chief Marketer spoke with Matt Fulk, senior manager of database marketing at SAS, about the challenges of creating B-to-B prospect lead analysis models.

• Email

  Data Helps Indiana Tourism Org Boost E-mail Relevancy

  Killing the print edition of its visitors guide may have been the best database-augmenting action Indiana’s South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority ever took. In doing so, the group put itself in a position to deliver better-qualified leads to its member organizations by focusing on online communication.

• Agencies

  Why Marketing Should Control the Marketing Database, Not IT

  I have been a direct and database marketing consultant since 1984. In all that time, one consistent verity is that most internal information technology departments think they can – and should – be responsible for the marketing database. In many instances, the IT department has no idea what it is talking about.

• Maternity Marketing Media

  In reaching new moms, postal mail may be the best delivery channel for those who’ve recently delivered

• Agencies

  Outsider’s Perspective Helps Hoover’s Refine Brand

  Navel gazing doesn’t come intuitively to business-to-business firms, but perhaps it should: A good, hard, introspective look at itself – augmented by voice of customers and prospects research – was key in Hoover’s Inc.’s refining its marketing message.

  This was not a feel-good exercise. “With everything going into social media, the world is becoming more outside in than inside out,” says James Rogers, vice president of marketing at Hoover’s. “It used to be you could design what you wanted your brand to be, and then you’d promote it.”

  No longer.

• Agencies

  Five Tips for Successful B-to-B Paid Search Campaigns

  Many best practices across B-to-C and B-to-B paid search campaigns are similar. However, B-to-B marketers face some unique challenges

• Email

  Tailor Your B-to-B Newsletter to the Reader, Not the Company

  Chief Marketer recently talked with Craig Fitzgerald, editorial director of Waltham, MA-based e-newsletter firm IMN, to get his thoughts on what types of content work best in B-to-B newsletters, best practices, and what to avoid if you want to keep your audience opted-in and reading.