How are B2B email marketing campaigns viewed by corporate customers in the business world? Well, business professionals either see them as a value-added service, or they disregard them entirely and view them as nothing more than annoying SPAM.
Surprisingly, that subtle difference all comes down to how you promote your marketing campaign, the message you deliver, and how you define your email marketing strategies in the eyes of your corporate customers.
In the end, you want your campaign to stand apart from your competition so it is ultimately about how well you sell it.
Email campaigns in a business-to-consumer (B2C) market are entirely different from a business-to-business (B2B) market. An argument can be made that a campaign’s success in a B2C consumer market all comes down to a numbers game. How many people can you send your campaign to? In a B2C market, the higher the number – the better the outcome, or so the saying goes.
However, this is not necessarily the case in a B2B market. Why? Because professionals don’t have time to read something they don’t want to read.
They don’t have time to decide whether your email is relevant or not. Most business professionals are just trying to get through the myriad of internal emails flooding their inboxes daily.
As a business professional myself, I can assure you that I delete every email I didn't want or expect to receive. I jettison them to the SPAM folder, forever condemning that address and its sender.
So, what do you need to do to make sure an incredibly busy business professional like myself doesn't reject your email outright?
1. Corporate Customers Must Opt-in
Your customers have to want to receive the message. Either you sent it out randomly and hope something sticks, or you give your customer a reason to want to receive that email campaign. It’s your choice. Annoy them, or incentivize them to want to be part of what you have to offer.
If you ask your sales team to follow up on a campaign most of your customers don’t want, or haven’t asked to receive, then not only are you wasting your customers’ time, but you’re wasting your sales team’s time as well.
2. Start With Existing Customers
Start your B2B email campaigns with your existing client list. These are the customers who have purchased your product or service. They are the ones who should have the first shot at any discounts, special offers, and or inventory clearances.
Your existing customers offer you a chance to optimize your campaign and make adjustments before going to a larger audience. More on this later on.
3. Don’t Promote it as an Email Campaign
Call it what you want inside your company, but when speaking to corporate customers, don’t refer to it as an email campaign, a newsletter, or anything else of the kind. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are. Your customers have been inundated with stuff they don’t want.
What should you call it? Call it a statement of account, or an update on their loyalty program, or an updated inventory count list. Think outside the box. You’re not misleading them – you’re making sure you distinguish your message from all the noise out there.
4. Build Loyalty First: Increase CTR
One of the best tools to increase B2B customer retention is to run a back-end rebate program. It’s nothing more than a reward program, one where your customer accrues a rebate for each unit they purchase. That rebate is provided to them as a credit on their account once they hit a predetermined volume threshold.
Get your customers onto this type of program. Afterward, you build your email campaign around their reward plan. Each month you update them on the number of units purchased, the size of their current rebate, and how long they have to reach their volume threshold and payout.
Alongside that statement of their accrued credit, you start to add your additional offers, your insight into current market trends, and or any insight that will help them as an organization. It could be market trends, best business practices, new product launches.
You can run the same type of strategy as outlined in the video above by going to Sample Back-End Rebate Excel Sheet for Customer Retention
- Optimize Your Campaign
There is a lot involved in optimizing a campaign. You have to make sure the email looks the same on different servers. Some of the things to consider include the following:
- How does the font look?
- Do the links work properly?
- Are the images clear?
- Is the text legible and well-written?
- Is your message clear and concise or cluttered and confusing?
- Have you used different sized fonts for certain eye-catching links and items you want to draw your customer’s attention to?
All of these aforementioned questions have to be answered before going live. However, all the information you need to optimize your campaign and increase your click-through rate (CTR) must come from reliable sources.
Those sources are your current corporate clients. That’s why you start with them. They are the ones you do the A/B split testing on. One email is your control test. The other is the one where you change the fonts, the images, the links, and the colors to see their effect on CTR. No more than one change is done at a time. You then assess the results of each change.
After you've come as close as you feel you can to an optimized and reliable campaign, you start to roll it out to new potential customers. However, you never just add them to the list. You don’t go to a trade show and add everyone you meet onto your monthly email campaign. If you want to reach those trade show attendees, do it through the trade show organizers. They always offer services on campaigns and your customers are more likely to open those because they are attending the show.
- Using a Controlled List
So, why is using a controlled list so important? First, you know these customers want to receive your monthly updates. Second, you won’t suddenly become frustrated when your CTR drops so drastically simply because you added a bunch of customers who don’t want any part of your campaign. Frustration leads to changing things you shouldn't need to. It’s human nature to think you need to correct things you actually don't have to. Third, you won’t be annoying your customers.
5. Expand and Tailor Your List: Customer Segments and Decision Makers
Now you want to expand your list to include potential new customers. After all, you want to grow sales right? If so, then promote your campaign with those aforementioned suggestions. Call it an “inventory update” or a “discounted inventory list”, anything that gives your corporate customer a reason to see it as an opportunity to get something of value.
This doesn't mean you don’t appeal to a wider audience. The intention isn't just to appeal to the lowest common denominator and sell on price. Instead, tailor your campaign to specific decision-makers, customer segments, and or markets. This could include engineering, project management, integrators, technicians, and or financial professionals.
Ultimately, success is best defined by how you position your message. That involves distinguishing how you deliver it and how your customers perceive it. If you lump your strategies with the rest of your competitors, then you'll never define a unique value proposition for your enterprise.
Comments