Disillusionment to Delight: Changing Facades of B2B Email Marketing!!

Email marketing has been the crusader of marketing campaigns for countless B2B marketers. It has been used extensively to communicate and build relationships with prospects, gather important data and help boost marketing ROI. Email has time and again been crowned the king of the digital channels with an installed base of email accounts growing to 3.1 billion in 2011 and expected to grow to nearly 4.1 billion accounts by 2015.
The “Delights”:
Speaking of which let’s catch up with some intriguing figures, study by Radicati revealed that corporate email accounts will increase faster than consumer email accounts because of the growth of affordable cloud-based email services. These allow businesses to extend email services to workers who did not have access to corporate email.
Flourishing trends: The year 2011, saw B2B email marketers segmenting their lists beyond traditional categories (geography, industry, and company size) rather social media reaction and behavioral trends are reigning high on their palate. This behavior-driven approach has driven three to five times the return in revenue per email.
For a B2B email marketing to be a success, there are six basic areas in which marketers need to succeed for campaigns to have the desired effect:
• Relevance
• Engagement
• Accessibility
• Spam filters
• Skepticism
• Trust
Pouring strict confidence on the above factors will not only ensure an impactful effect of the campaigns but would also be a great source of lead generation.
The “Disappointments”:
The disappointment factors combine basically the assumptions and presumptions that sum up some of the most commonly committed mistakes. Most of the B2B marketers did not move away from the assumed opt-in in favor of explicit permissions as the minimum requirement.
Traditionally most of the B2B marketers make this common mistake of assuming that anyone who attends an event where their brand was present or is on a list they purchased is eligible to receive their marketing emails.
While it remains true that B2B emails are generally exempt from the "permission" requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act, meeting the legal minimum requirement for your B2B email campaigns is still not the optimal email marketing strategy. Most of the B2B marketer put their brand and your email program at risk when they send email campaigns without recipients' explicit consent. Your subscribers are becoming more selective about what email they want to receive. They will opt out or file spam complaints if you violate their expectations.
But if you want to save your emails before they end up in spam’s email, here are few tips that can come handy:
• Make your email sound as a ‘Dialogue’.
• Do not let subscribers send an email reply.
• Stand guarded with Personalization feature.
• Keep the email frequency low and content relevant.
• Include image with good quality displaying the context of the content.
• Never forget a ‘Call to action’.
• Always include the option of ‘Unsubscribe’.
Not the end of the Tale:
The era of email marketing is definitely not going deemer anytime soon, there’s alot for it to hope. Marketers began focusing on customer centricity, lifecycle programs, and data-driven, multi-channel marketing strategies to drive their email campaigns. This approach allowed them to begin to know their audience beyond just their film-o-graphic profiles. Behavioral data offered more insight into their concerns, business problems and needs, and which channels they prefer for communication. So, let’s cheer for the evergreen favorite of B2B marketer “Email Marketing”.
Resources:
http://www.clickz.com
http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk
http://www.esalesdata.com
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