Breathing New Life In To Your Email Marketing Plan
Using email for marketing promotions is not a new
idea. But it is an idea that has had its "ups and downs". The surge
of "spam" emails obviously resulted in a lot of business for
internet merchants when it first was developed. But spam also became
one of the most despised examples of internet marketing abuse. And
it spawned an entire industry of software developers providing
shields to customers so they could stop the onslaught of incoming
email marketing messages. The outcome is that for many legitimate
businesses, email marketing as a way to gain new customers and
increase sales online died. It was abandoned in favor of other
online marketing techniques that were not so disliked but that
delivered satisfactory return on the investment in internet
marketing.
The last thing you want to do is to send a "spam" email that only
angers your current or prospective customers. That can produce the
opposite of the desired affect by building alienation between your
business and clients or customers. Those damaged relationships might
never be repaired. This is one reason that many respectable
businesses abandoned email marketing for a while.
But just as you can't keep a good man down, you can't keep a good
marketing idea down for very long. Smart internet businesses have
found a way to breathe new life into the old technique of email
promotions. That new life came through the development of business
to business (B2B) email marketing. The goal of this new approach is
to identify the ways that the previous wave of email marketing went
wrong and avoid those traps and pitfalls entirely. In doing so, the
development of B2B email marketing has evolved into a highly
efficient way to promote your business and realize the true
potential of email promotions while avoiding the abuses that drive
people off.
Avoiding the Spam Trap
The reason email marketing turned into "spam" is simple. The heart of
the old paradigm of email marketing was sending out many thousands of
emails to a huge email list of people or businesses that you never had
contact with before. B2B email campaigns are focused on existing
business relationships or potential clients that you develop through
contacts or referrals or by other means so you are not sending a "blind"
email to a random email inbox that may or may not exist or to a customer
who probably never heard of you and has no interest in your products or
services.
Under the old paradigm, you might send out 10,000 emails and feel
gratified if you get 100 responses and get business from 10 of those
responses. That is incredibly inefficient and it has a basis of
assumption that you don't mind offending and alienating 9900 other
people who you just sent "spam" to. It is also highly inefficient
because as spam filter software has become more effective, you may not
even get the 100 responses because very few of your emails actually get
through to the potential customers. That is a waste of everybody's time.
The heart of the success of any B2B email campaign is you start with a
valid and well established email list that are businesses who are ready
to respond to your inquiries. They may be clients who you have worked
for before but you have not had any business for them in a while. They
might be clients who you built a relationship with outside the internet
and you are bringing them into your cyber family through an email
contact. Or they might be prospective clients who contacted you through
your web site by signing up for a newsletter or sending you an inquiry.
Whatever the reason, you know each of those email addresses is a real
client who you have done business with or who has shown every indication
they will do business with you. That makes B2B email campaigns
tremendously efficient.
B2B Emailing Marketing is Effective
You already bypassed one of the biggest problems with email promotions
which is seeing your emails die in spam filters. You do that with
targeted email campaigns as we just discussed. Because most if not all
of your emails get through to your intended clients, your chances of
response and achieving the goals of the email skyrocket.
But there is another aspect of B2B email marketing that makes it more
effective than marketing to the general public and that is who you are
talking to. Business people speak a different language than the general
public. When you make an email contact "business to business", that
email has a high probability of getting through to your contact. That
business person is probably sitting in front of his or her computer and
the chances that your email will get opened and read are quite high
compared to traditional email promotions.
You write your email speaking business person to business person. You
write as through you are writing to a colleague, not just any old
customer. And because that business person already is aware of who you
are and is interested in your products or services, your chances or
redeeming each and every email for real business are high. That is far
more effective and cost justifiable than any other internet marketing
technique.
B2B Email Campaigns Just Fit
It takes more time and thought to develop a good B2B email campaign. But
that investment is well worth the effort. Much of the investment you
make in customizing each email campaign is made in tapping the power of
an email campaign so it delivers maximum value to your total marketing
program. Because B2B emailing marketing programs energize your existing
client base and generate new customer inquiries so reliably, this form
advertising is a potent way to supercharge your conventional marketing
campaign or your other internet business activities.
B2B email campaigns will deliver a higher measurable success rate that
will result in traffic either in the form or phone calls from your
business clients, visits to your retail locations or internet visitors
to your corporate web site. So before you "fire up" that email marketing
plan, take the time to review the current programs going on in your
conventional and internet marketing programs across the business. You
will find dozens of ways to use the energy of that B2B email campaign to
generate much better results in any internet marketing effort your
business is preparing to launch.
You can use B2B email campaigns to generate enthusiasm for promotions
that you want to use to increase your sales volume in every part of the
business. By including coupons or other appealing "come ons" with the
email, that assures a higher response rate even in marketing efforts
outside the internet. And by including links to targeted pages on your
web site, a well designed online business presence can translate the
increased interest in your business and the resultant internet traffic
into sales.
