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Tips to Boost B2B Email Success
A well-managed email marketing program is one of the most cost-effective tools that B2B marketers have to generate leads and nurture prospects. If your company isn’t running a concerted email effort, or if you need to improve ROI, here are some ideas:
- Purchase a program: do NOT run your email marketing out of Outlook! You need a good program from a reputable ESP (Email Service Provider). I personally use and recommend Listrak. There are many others to consider. Look at the features and benefits of each to ensure they meet your needs. Be careful: don’t go with the least expensive solution—you may be disappointed.
- Capture emails: it’s surprising to me that so many B2B companies maintain a prospect database that lacks emails of key decision-makers. Regardless of the prevalence of spam-filters, Web 2.0, and other factors, email is still the preferred method for B2B buyers to receive information. Be certain that every touch-point with prospects makes email addresses a requirement.
- Build the database: do you have multiple databases in multiple places around your company? Excel spreadsheets, Outlook accounts, boxes of tradeshow lead cards, drawers full of napkins. There should be one database—even if the prospects are in various territories, market segments, sizes, and so on. Maintaining one database allows you to compare trends across segments, and cross-sell / up-sell. Today’s email marketing programs provide powerful profiling tools based on demographics, buying behaviors, sales cycle, and more.
- Segment aggressively: you may look at your prospect database as one large pot, but each prospect sees them self as an individual. Of course, you can’t ask a prospect for too much information up front—you’ll scare them off. Just get email, name, title and company. But put actions in place to fill out the details. The simple stuff can be delegated to staff or an intern—address, phone, website, and so on. When your sales team speaks with a prospect, be sure they capture the details you need to define that lead further: buying cycle, decision-making power, other influencers (and all THEIR details), pain points, and so on. Surveys are also a good tool to use—which also provides important market data. Just be certain this important information isn’t lost in a file. Put it to use in your database.
- Define the segments: get agreement between marketing and sales on what is important. I realize that’s a challenge, but it’s critical. Everyone must capture the same key information, since it all goes into one database.
- Define a lead: does sales view a sales-ready lead the same as marketing? Your sales team will be far more successful if they work a smaller list of sales-ready leads, as opposed to nurturing a warm or cool prospect. Create an agreed-upon rating system that is easy to use. A 10-point system makes no sense – what’s the big difference between a 7 and an 8? No more than 5 points. In fact, Hot/Warm/Cold may be enough.
- 100% Follow-up: this needs to be a measurable must-have. At no time should there be even a single lead that isn’t clearly acted upon. Define when a lead should be dropped from a list, then do it. Many marketers are fearful of deleting a lead forever, but if they aren’t opening your emails after X number of sends, you must purge them from your list. If you don’t, you risk being labeled a spammer.
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