Anthony Green on B2B email marketing
We hear a lot about life on the B2C email front line, but what about B2B?
To redress the balance, I put a few questions to Anthony Green, author of a best practice guide for B2B email marketing. Green is President of specialist ESP and agency Concep New York, who number such names as Ernst & Young, Capgemini and Clifford Chance among their clients. Here's what he told me...
B2B email budgets
B2B marketing budgets are among the early victims of the downturn. Given the need for accountability, it's no surprise to learn that we'll likely see a greater share of the remaining budget invested in online channels.
Green says the downturn is a timely opportunity for those companies who aren't using email significantly to discover the channel and invest appropriately. He says of law firms, for example...
"Marketing spend is being decreased a little bit across the board, but more of it is being shifted into digital. And part of that obviously is email."
But he also warns that more investment in email shouldn't just mean sending more messages...
"Increasing the volume of email doesn't necessarily equate to more business being developed...you don't want to be sending out too much email and being labelled a spammer."
Part of the problem is the 'cheap' label applied to email marketing, which, says Green, can lead people to blast emails out without too much thought, "...and we all know what that can do to brand reputation."
CRM insights are the big benefit
While its speed, effectiveness and relatively low cost are an attraction, Green says the real benefit for B2B marketers is in the customer or prospect insights email gives you...
"It has metrics, reports and analytics that you just don't get with other channels, right down to the individual person and what they're doing."
This is critical in those sectors, like professional and financial services, where there are really high-value relationships to nurture.
Green says, "Law firms aren't 'selling' services via email: they're sending out thought leadership, setting up crisis centers in response to the economic downturn, and advising their clients on what's going on."
The campaign numbers you then get back let you, "...tweak what you're sending out and make sure you're targeting content for particular people or domains (companies and clients) based on what they're clicking on and reading."
Unfortunately, many B2B companies are failing to exploit that potential:
"The stats are there, but it still requires marketers to look at that information and make some subjective decisions based on it."
This isn't just about fine tuning content. The intelligence gleaned from reports is crucial for managing customer and prospect relationships.
"If you think of a big law firm or a big accountancy firm, there's probably a few hundred people in the world they really care about. So they're sending emails out to a number of people, but what they really want to know is what's the general counsel at Bank of America reading?"
"It's about making sure you're engaging with the important people in your mail and getting that info in the hands of 'sales' people (who could be lawyers, accountants, or consultants), and making sure that they understand when they go into meetings how they can cross sell and upsell more services."
Information flows important
Inevitably, integration with CRM systems is vital: email marketing metrics need to feedback automatically into a central data pool that those going face-to-face with (potential) clients can access directly.
"You've got marketing people around the world using the email marketing tool and generating all these metrics. But a partner or an attorney, for example, clearly wouldn't be using that tool and the information needs to get back to them."
The CRM system draws on email data to reveal what individual clients or company domains have been reading about or downloading in terms of, for example, topics and white papers.
"When I meet that guy, when I play golf with that woman, I can bring these topics up in conversation. That can mean million dollar deals..."
Ensure brand control in a decentralized organization
Another organizational challenge with large companies is keeping control of the brand without having to send every marketing email through a central department.
"If the Hong Kong office is having an event, they don't want to have to call the London head office and say, hey, could you send out an event invitation to our list for us."
But if you let local offices build their own emails, they may produce email templates that look good to them, but conflict with corporate guidelines.
A solution, says Green, is to build in different levels of access to the email marketing system. This allows local groups to send email independently, but only using pre-approved templates.
"The Hong Kong marketing team has been trained on how to use that tool. So they login to their own account and they've got their own template sitting in there that's been signed off by marketing in London."
"They put in the details of their event, upload their mailing list from the CRM and send it out. They're managing things locally, but everything is brand consistent."
But watch frequency
However, can such decentralization lead to a frequency problem? If different parts of the organization send email independently, what's to stop recipients getting on different international, national and regional lists and drowning in mail?
Where that's a risk, Green says it's a simple matter of setting frequency limits within the email marketing system...
"Say we don't want to send more than two emails to our client base per week. If someone's added inadvertently to a send on Thursday and emails are going out Monday and Wednesday, then that would be flagged by the system."
He notes that determining the right frequency is itself one of the great challenges of B2B email: finding the right balance between sending too often and not sending enough.
Unfortunately, says Green, "...that balance is specific to each individual company and their client base. There's no golden rule in terms of what you send out."
Instead, B2B marketers need to apply their "marketing nous" to reports and analytics to, "...make sure that the amount of content and the amount of email being sent out is the right amount for your client and prospect base."
Email and Web 2.0
Since we're talking challenges, what are Green's thoughts on Web 2.0? A hot theme in the B2C world, how should B2B marketers react?
He notes that social networks and similar are yet to penetrate the B2B environment as much as B2C equivalents like Facebook. This will likely change, but "...it's going to take a long time for a lot of these technologies to really be a major force."
He suggests our experiences with RSS will likely repeat with social media.
"People said RSS would knock email out of the water and it didn't. They all complement each other and it's about having a combination of these channels, integrating channels, and working out who wants to receive your content in what format."
"Some people still want stuff printed and sent to them in the mail...some people like RSS, some prefer email."
"Again, it depends on the nature of your business and the requirements of the people you're communicating with, as to which particular channel you use. And I still see email as being a real leader."
Even within email, adds Green, you need to offer people a choice of format or at least access (via a link in a standard email) to alternative formats that might better suit the reader or the device they use.
Offer format choices
Most B2B email marketers are sending out multipart email with HTML and plain text versions. A relatively common third alternative is the "online version", as in "if you cannot view this email correctly, follow this link."
Green suggests this web version is becoming less and less needed, a relic from the days when, "...we had old versions of Lotus Notes and email clients that didn't really render HTML so well."
"But," he says, "it's still important to have it there as an option. And some Blackberries and PDAs will see that first so it's handy for them and they can click and go to their browser to read it."
In that context, a fourth format can also be useful, what Green calls a combination of print and mobile friendly:
"It's a non-formatted edition of the whole email so the copy can be printed out very easily. It doubles as a mobile phone version. It depends on the setup of the mobile device and how it configures HTML but it can be another version for people to read more succinctly on a mobile device."
Again, Green speculates that mobile-friendly emails may soon be unnecessary.
"The handheld PDAs are getting far better at rendering HTML. I think and hope that within 12-18 months the technology is good enough that our handhelds are rendering HTML as well as our (desktop) inbox does. That version will slowly become less important."
Finally, you can link to a .pdf version of your email available online for download.
"You can upload it to the server and link to it. It's not affecting the file size and it won't register as an attachment. So there's no risk of that being blocked."
Domain management for deliverability
Blocking and deliverability is, of course, another important issue.
Green is a firm believer in keeping the sending infrastructure for marketing emails separate from that for a company's day-to-day emails. He recommends using a dedicated domain and external server for the former, with access to the expertise required to manage the reputation of that sending infrastructure.
"If you're a company sending a hundred emails a month it's probably not a big deal. But if you're a big international accounting firm and you're sending a lot of emails out, maybe in the millions a year, you want to keep that (for want of a much better term) "mass marketing" separate from the day-to-day email."
The danger of sending both marketing and day-to-day email from the same source is that your marketing messages can get you on blocklists and blacklists that then affect your normal email.
This isn't because your marketing email is inherently bad or spammy. But it is bulk. And bulk email, however legitimate, can sometimes run into problems. Green cites an example:
"A lot of the law firms have really increased the volume of their communications lately. With what's going on in the economy they need to communicate with clients more regularly."
The trouble is that a sudden spike in volume can lead to blacklisting problems with internet security companies and at the corporate level.
Green says, "They're going to have a problem when the managing partner can't email a key corporate counsel because some mass mail went out this morning from their domain and that company decided to blacklist them."
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