B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

Marketing Business Series | Issue 4

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

The needs of business-to-business (B2B) marketers may be different

role of email marketing is equally important to both.

than those found in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, but there is no longer any question that the
This guide takes a look into strategies and tactics that matter most in the B2B world. It provides an assessment of the email marketing opportunities and challenges presented to B2B marketers today, and tips and insights for managing them effectively. Youll learn how to: Deliver more relevant content Drive new leads Improve deliverability Nurture leads Retain customers Leverage social media and mobile marketing Calculate and improve your ROI

Which is Best: Hosted or On-premise Email Marketing Platforms?

The answer is neither and both. The key is to find a balance between both delivery models and adapt according to your business needs. Simply put: choose what makes business, security and technical sense. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of each: Software-as-a-service (SaaS) Advantages: No large upfront cash outlay Infrastructure costs pushed to provider Painless upgrades Access to expert support (in lieu of an IT department) Improved security and reliability, and likely increased uptime Disadvantages: Reduced control of systems and ability to customize Internet connection required at all times

Client leases rather than owns the software May be difficult to integrate with thirdparty applications Data stored outside the organization On-premise software Advantages: Increased customization and control of systems No monthly subscription fees Hardware can be shared between other internal systems Data is stored inside the organization Dedicated IT staff for maintenance and support Disadvantages: Large initial investment Hardware upgrades and maintenance required In-house IT management required Physical space required Software upgrades must be handled on the client end

This simplified apples-to-apples comparison provides another perspective for getting the conversation started within your organization: Consider SaaS if your company has: An expense budget that is larger than its capital budget Limited IT support A distributed sales force A sales- or service-oriented business Consider on-premise software if: The software requires a great deal of customization The application is tied to a core function of your business You have already invested significantly in internal IT Your company requires that data remain behind your firewall

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

The state of the B2B market

The B2B market is on the upswing, and data indicates that B2B marketers are increasing their spending. According to the B2B Outlook 2011 Report, nearly 79 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their online marketing spending in 2011, and one-third say that over 50 percent of their overall budget will be allocated to online initiatives. B2B marketers have definitely become savvy to the power of the email channel and the returns that it consistently delivers. So its not surprising that they are reporting planned increases in marketing spending against their email programs. According to a survey conducted by eMarketer, 68 percent of B2B marketers reported an increase on email marketing. Thats a sizable growth rate for a well-established online channel email has been around for a long time.

The Unique Importance of Email for B2B Marketers

Despite the proliferation of social media and other emerging online channels, email continues to hold its share in the marketing budget. Why? Because it performs: Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads through the buying cycle. The nature of the B2B world dictates that not all generated leads are sales-ready. In fact, its estimated that on average a B2B company will find that 25 percent of leads are sales ready at inception, 25 percent are disqualified immediately and a full 50 percent will require nurturing to migrate them to conversion. Email marketing is also a critical tool for customer retention. Done right, an email lifecycle campaign can significantly extend customers commitment to your brand and increase lifetime value. Because its such a flexible and cost effective medium, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing consistently outperforms other channels. What this means for B2B marketers is that you can reap great rewards through leveraging email throughout the customer lifecycle from acquisition through nurturing to conversion and beyond.

B2B Email marketing opportunities and challenges

While email marketing is important to B2B marketers, there are unique challenges and considerations associated with executing email campaigns as well: Following is a summary of these challenges and what you can do to address them.

February 2011 B2B Intelligence Center Study.

Most significant challenges B2B marketers face with their email marketing campaigns: Incorporating social media Expanding email opt-in list Deliverability Measuring ROI Delivering relevant content 28% 31% 34% 44% 56%

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

Delivering relevant content

What matters to B2B marketers the most is delivering relevant content. Relevancy is really the mesh of what you offer with what your prospects need. It starts with lead acquisition do the leads in your database align with what you offer? Can you deliver real value? Here are nine tips for making sure your emails are relevant and have value: 1. Clearly define the internal goals of every campaign. If youre blasting out emails because theyre on the schedule, its highly likely that youre missing your target. Whether its lead generation, lead nurture, brand awareness or public relations, establish an internal goal and stay on track with your own metrics. 2. Make sure every campaign includes a solid value proposition. What are you delivering that creates an opportunity or solves a problem for your prospect? 3. Communicate your value proposition effectively with your subject line. If you fail to create intrigue within mere seconds, your prospect will never open or interact with your content. Answer the question, Whats in it for me? Promise a benefit, solve a problem, raise a concern or offer valuable tips. Convey a sense of urgency. When a time limit is specified, its much more likely that your prospect will open and interact with your content right away. 4. Connect with subscribers by personalizing the communication. Use an easily recognizable from address. For most B2B marketers the from line will feature the company name. Once established, dont change it without a very compelling reason, because if your subscribers have white-listed your from address, youll lose all that equity. Send from real people. Use the names of actual employees when possible emails from one person to another are far more likely to be opened than generic messages from a faceless company. 5. Humanize the message. When you do business in the B2B space, closing the sale is all about the relationship. If your prospect doesnt feel connected to you on a personal level, youre not going to close. Put a face to your brand. Use photos or even an engaging mascot to build a connection. Pay attention to tone. If your offer feels mass produced its just not going to resonate. 6. Be concise. You have only about five seconds to hook your prospects, so you need to get them to notice your message immediately. Make sure that they clearly understand what youre offering. If you survive the subject line review, make sure that your core benefit is clearly stated upfront dont bury it under the fold. Prospects arent going to scroll to find your message. When designing your call to action, make sure that its readily obvious and accessible.

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

And finally, keep in mind that more is not better. Avoid content overload and keep the messages clear and uncluttered. 7. Deliver value on a personal level. In terms of what you offer to entice your prospects, keep in mind that the B2B audience isnt typically spending its own money. So when you think about what to offer, focus on perks and relationship management. Consider VIP events, free upgrades, enhanced access and valuable content. 8. Leverage segmentation. To get started with segmentation, make sure that youre gathering the right information during the opt-in process. You can capture data through landing pages, preference centers and ongoing short surveys. Once you have gathered information on your subscribers, you can group them according to important commonalities, such as: Position in the buying cycle: As subscribers move along the spectrum, their needs, interests and motivators change. Its important to pay close attention to helping them successfully migrate to conversion. Role in the organization: What youre really looking at is whos informing the purchase and whos making the final purchasing decision. Industry, stated interests and demonstrated behavior. Remember, when your segmentation is better, improved results will follow. 9. Create a content roadmap. While its easy to get excited about growing your list and building your segments, dont take your eye off the ball on content production its no small feat. Its important to manage a rolling content production schedule. By staying ahead of the ball, you ensure that you maintain your momentum and your subscribers experience with your brand: Plan out at least three months ahead. Create a detailed schedule with assigned responsibilities and review cycles.

Align your content production schedule with whats happening with other marketing programs upcoming events, new product announcements, upgrades and other special offers.

Driving new leads

Another key challenge that B2B marketers report is driving new leads continually feeding the opt-in list with quality new subscribers. A robust and well-organized content creation program can help considerably, because new content offerings provide a wealth of additional opt-in touch points. Each time you provide a valuable content piece, you are expanding your lead capture net. Educative content can be a great tool for driving new leads and nurturing existing ones. Map your content to your audience needs by first identifying knowledge gaps: talk to your sales people, support representatives, account managers and customers to identify pain points and whats missing in your resources portfolio. Then, continually evaluate new mediums and formats to ensure that youre maximizing the reach of your development efforts. Heres an example of what kinds of content pieces you can consider building: Newsletters White papers and guides Case studies Tutorials and blogs Videos Webinars Social media pages Website content Delivering content through email campaigns is a tried and true winner. To make the most of your content offers delivered via email, make sure to:

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

Feature the title of the piece in the subject line and headline. Embed a call-to-action that drives the prospect to a landing page with a form field. Place content access behind a lead capture form.

Send a welcome message within one hour of when a new subscriber signs up. Acknowledge the new subscriber by name, express your gratitude and provide links to promised incentives. Remind subscribers of where they chose to opt-in to your list. If they signed up via your Facebook page, for instance, you can mention that theres new and exciting content on Facebook. Focus on the business challenges that your customers and prospects face. Show that you understand them and can help. Your goal is to become a trusted advisor and resource. Create segments and personalize the content. For instance, if a subset of subscribers accesses a white paper on your website, create a segment and deliver an offer about a Webinar on the same topic. Take the time to express your gratitude each and every time a subscriber provides you with feedback. Avoid direct promotion under the guise of news. If you get overly focused on conversion, it will become transparent to your subscriber and sour the relationship. Make sure any promotions are value-based.

Reaching your audience

Deliverability isnt a new and exciting topic, but it is one of those foundational elements that can make or break your campaigns. While proactive management on the back-end is a critical component of strong deliverability, you can also implement some customer-facing strategies to support what youre doing behind the scenes. Back-end deliverability best practices: Authenticate messages to manage and optimize your sender reputation. Leverage free reputation management tools from ISPs. Register cousin domain names things that look and sound like your name and also domains that could be used against you. Provide real value and a positive experience so that people want to interact with your content. Customer-facing deliverability strategies: Use a double opt-in process to ensure that youre capturing a lead that actually wants to receive content from you. Adhere to client expectation settings if your subscriber has signed up to receive a monthly newsletter, dont start sending content weekly or daily. Optimize your sending infrastructure by making sure that youre complying with established technical standards.

Extending lifetime value

Once youve mastered lead nurturing, its time to turn to customer retention. Increasing the average lifetime value of your subscribers starts with some number-crunching, but is fairly simple to maintain from there. Calculate your baseline metric by taking a look at: Acquisition costs what have you spent on media, events and other investments designed to acquire customers? Retention tail how long do subscribers stay with you and how much does each additional month impact the lifetime value ratio? Churn if your list is shrinking faster than you can add new subscribers, your total value is eroding overall.

Building relationships
Developing and executing effective email nurturing campaigns will help you migrate those leads that are not yet sales ready on average, about 50 percent of those that enter your pipeline. Leveraging the following tactics is critically important in nurturing new leads along the path to conversion:

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

Set up a touch point program to successfully shepherd your subscribers through the conversion funnel and extend their relationship with your brand for as long as possible: Look at all points of entry where your target experiences your brand. Identify what your customers need and how and where those needs will be met. Develop a roadmap based on your customers position in the lifecycle. Set up an automated trigger campaign to simplify and systemize execution. Implement a manage your profile link that allows subscribers to select the type and frequency of communication they would like to receive. This is also a great place to capture additional demographic and business-specific data, and an important way for subscribers to update their contact information.

Develop Email Campaigns for Mobile Users

Keep in mind when youre designing your email campaigns that its highly likely that your subscribers are accessing your content on a mobile device. That means that if youre sending email, youre a mobile marketer. The challenge for marketers is making sure your messages dont get lost in the shuffle in 2010, roughly 70 million people sent emails from their phone every month, and over half that sent emails from their phone every day. In designing email campaigns, remember that the mobile screen is small, so you dont have space for extra copy or images stick to the core benefit and the call-to-action. Also make sure to offer upfront compelling value that doesnt require scrolling, and always include a click here to read on your mobile phone link to avoid rendering issues. Mobile makes sense for marketers on another level, too as a means of staying connected to their email campaigns. Lyris developed a mobile application for iPhone, iPad and iTouch after hearing from customers that they are increasingly working remotely or on-the-go. The mobile app enables them to actively monitor and manage email campaigns, regardless of geographical location or time zone.

Leveraging social and mobile channels

According to a January 2011 eMarketer report, Website and Critical Investments, 63 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their social spending in 2011. This means that if youre not paying attention to social media, its highly likely that your competitors are. At the same time, nine out of 10 Americans have a mobile phone, and 45 percent of the mobile user-base is using Web mobility to check email.

Specifying measurement and ROI

Another significant concern facing B2B marketers is measurement metrics and calculating ROI.

Embed Social Media Links into Emails

One of the simplest, easiest and most effective tactics that you can implement right away is embedding links to social media networks into your email campaigns. Then, once you have fans and followers, you can leverage social media resources to support your marketing objectives. LinkedIn is a very powerful resource for B2B marketers use this vehicle to drive group membership, distribute newsletters and keep in touch with key contacts. Twitter can also be very effective in the B2B space use this outlet to distribute and share links and follow the chatter stream. And finally, Facebook is an excellent tool to build your opt-in list and create a community.

Metrics that Matter to B2B Marketers

The key performance indicators you should be looking at include: Cost per acquisition how much does it cost you on average to acquire and convert a prospect? Revenue make sure youre focusing your efforts on your specified targets. Breakeven if you spend on media for instance, how many conversions do you need to break even, and how long do you think it will take to make it happen? Lifetime value, the best indicator of overall success this is essentially defined as total contribution less associated acquisition costs over the lifetime of a subscriber.

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

Calculating ROI
ROI is a universally important metric and it helps inform and justify marketing decisions. Here is a basic calculation model that can help you get started with systemizing ROI analysis into your campaign evaluation process: ROI analysis starts with specifying your investment inputs things like sourced creative development and media buys. By way of example, your total cost for these elements is $40,000. Take an educated guess at what your expected output might be for instance, how many new subscriptions you project that the program will deliver and the associated value of that bump. If you expect to garner 1,000 new subscriptions valued at $75.00 each, and the value of your total gross increase is $75,000, ROI analysis is calculated through subtracting your total cost in this case $40,000 from your total gross increase in this case $75,000. So your net return totals $35,000, reflecting an 88 percent return on your initial investment (ROI) of $40,000.

Conclusion
As the U.S. economy turns the corner, B2B marketers are stepping up their game almost 79 percent plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2011 and one-third indicate that half of their budget will be spent on online marketing tactics. At the same time, B2B email marketing is unique, and a myriad of challenges exist. To be successful at email marketing and realize the returns that it consistently delivers B2B marketers need a strong foundation in all these areas: Delivering relevant content Driving lead generation Reaching audiences with improved deliverability Building relationships through lead nurturing Retaining and extending the lifetime value of customers Leveraging social and mobile channels Measuring and calculating ROI The good news is, once these skills have been mastered and decisions made, B2B marketers are fully equipped to meet the unique challenges of their businesses and leverage the many opportunities email provides to build and maintain customer connections that enhance and improve overall marketing performance.

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

The B2B Marketing Report ROI B2B Email Tactics to Drive

RESOURCES
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About Lyris, Inc.

Lyris, Inc. is the online marketing expert delivering the right mix of software technology and industry knowledge to help its customers simplify their marketing efforts and optimize campaign ROI. Through its on-demand integrated marketing suite, Lyris HQ, and reliable on-premise solutions, including Lyris ListManager, Lyris provides customers the right tools to optimize their online and mobile marketing initiatives.

B2B Email Tactics to Drive ROI

Copyright 2011 Lyris, Inc. All rights reserved.

May/2011

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