Introduction
A business to business (B2B) firm involves the exchange of goods, services and/or information between two or more businesses. The issue is how we, as marketers, can translate this into an email marketing strategy and campaign.
The difference between business to consumer (B2C) and a B2B marketing is in a B2C a marketer needs to understand the emotions of a consumer in order to convince them to buy your product. This is in contrast to a B2B environment where the professional relationship revolves around logical reasoning to persuade purchasing decisions. This, as a result, means a marketer must be more in-depth with their marketing initiatives and must focus on things that matter most to a business, such as time, money and resources.
Email marketing is an essential part of B2B marketing strategies. Email marketing campaigns build relationships with business prospects and gather important data. It is a cost effective, measurable method of marketing that can be highly personalised, and allows behaviour to be tracked and then future activity to be constructed to reflect this behaviour. However, this is only when it’s used effectively. Due to the fact that email marketing is viewed as “incredibly cost effective” (Nussey, B. 2004) there is a tendency for it to be used chaotically at times. If an email campaign sent to 1,000 individuals leads to 10 responses, why not just send out 10,000 emails? That generates more responses? Great. Let’s send out 50,000 more. It’s a slippery slope to slide down, where the saturation of sending emails out in bulk leads to a less targeted audience, undermining and endangering the integrity of the campaign. This coupled with the fact that some of the poorer quality email campaigns generate shocking bounce rates (King, K. 2015) highlights the importance of getting the campaign out in an effective and efficient manner.
5 Elements B2B firms should be focusing on
The elements suggested within this section loosely follow the customer marketing lifecycle suggested below by Gilligan, C (2012) where we are under the assumption that external market environments covered by elements 2 and 3 are already accounted for.
This leaves identifying target audience, attracting them, nurturing them and then optimising based off of data collected. Formulating the suggestions as follows:
- Ensure the campaign is targeted
As mentioned in the introduction section, a sporadic and untargeted approach is not an appropriate strategy. According to The Internet Marketing Academy (2011), email campaigns should be targeted to specific audience segments. This would be carried out by using behavioural data and the right selection criteria to ensure the activity is highly targeted and highly relevant, then marketers can use email to speak to a captive audience.
- Content needs to be varied and creative
As Nussey (2004) suggested, email is cost effective, yet this is no excuse to under budget your creative. Content needs to be engaging every time it is created, this is crucial in maintaining the interest in your market. Once you are segmenting and targeting your audience deliver them media that is engaging to each segment this way you don’t waste your audience’s attention. This means ensuring your data is absolutely accurate and acted upon.
- Have a back end data strategy and act on the findings
Having high quality email data is the foundation of building high engagement rates and thus greater return on investments. Enabling data that has real depth allows the marketer to be responsive to the findings they have at the end of each campaign. Constant optimisation leads to a refined strategy where people are seeing this varied and interesting content (as per point two), which is specific and targeted towards them as individuals. As with much in life it’s about quality not quantity and according to Buxton, M (2014) this has only become easier with technological advances in email service providers.
- Integration with other channels
As in the B2C world, email in the B2B environment is best used and works most effectively, as part of a multi-channel, multi-disciplinary marketing approach (Roberts, M. & Zahay, D, 2013). This involves links to social media channels and content marketing pieces such as blogs and videos. Once again this increases engagement with not only the marketing activity but the company as an entity.
- Nurturing current clients and prospects
Over time email marketing campaigns can build relationships. By checking in with clients every now and then, businesses keep the lines of communication open and gain helpful feedback (Janzer, A. 2015). It’s also a good way of making clients feel like there are real people behind the branded email messages and this more human element generates additional engagement. On the other side of the purchase lifecycle, nurturing the leads involves creating a emails that are sent out over a period of time that are specifically designed to get people who are on the fence to be interested in your business.
Problems with B2B email marketing
There has been significant development in the reliability of spam filters provided by email service providers meaning more and more B2B email marketing head straight to junk folders where they are rarely acted on, and are most definitely ineffective. Research conducted by email marketing consultants Return Path (2015) has found that deliverability rates have fallen to a record 83% since the second period of 2011. This suggests that it could be important to re-examine the utility of email marketing as an efficient marketing platform within modern B2B marketing.
Email marketing has a significant and often inherent association with spam due to the nature and growth of the platform, with the continual use of batch and blast methods of email campaigns by uninformed marketers. Businesses are sending too many emails and consumers don’t have the time to read them, whether they are other businesses or individuals. Ultimately this leads to diminishing effectiveness of reaching leads and current consumers in B2B email marketing as people simply ignore or junk these messages.
Conclusion and consideration
Email campaigns are fundamental to any B2B marketing strategies. Email marketing is a fantastic way to start conversations and build relationships over time, adding value across the customer lifecycle. However, there is a method and thought process that needs to go into them as a “batch and blast” method is not effective enough to compensate for the requirements of specific targetB2B markets. On top of this, the future has to be considered and a potential re-examination of how email as a marketing tool may have to be conducted. There needs to be an increase in sophistication and more focus if email is to survive as a marketing platform; without it email utility could decline.
References
Buxton, M & Walton, N (2014). E-commerce Platform Acceptance: Suppliers, Retailers, and Consumers. New York: Springer. p88.
Gilligan, C & Wilson, R (2012). Strategic Marketing Planning. London: Routledge.
Janzer, A (2015). Subscription Marketing: Strategies for Nurturing Customers in a World of Churn. New York: Cuesta Park Consulting
King, K. A (2015). My library My History Books on Google Play The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing: New Tactics, Tools, and Techniques to Compete in the Digital Economy. New Jersey: Pearson. p77.
Nussey, B (2004). The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing. New England: SMTP Press. p58.
Return Path. (2015). Deliverability Benchmark Report Analysis of Inbox Placement Rates in 2015. Available: https://returnpath.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-Deliverability-Benchmark-Report.pdf. Last accessed 20th April 2016.
Roberts, M. & Zahay, D (2013). Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies. 3rd ed. Mason, OH: South-Western. p175.
The Internet Marketing Academy (2011). Email Marketing. Online: The Internet Marketing Academy & Ventus Publishing. p19.