Beyond B2B email marketing

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A marketo ebook

Beyond B2B Email Marketing

Turbo-charging your email strategies and campaigns

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Beyond B2B email Marketing

Email is still the engine of B2B marketing

Outbound marketing has been getting a lot of bad press these days. In the era of content, social and inbound, actually reaching out to promote your business can feel almost, well, dirty.

But in the very best B2B marketing departments ? especially the ones pioneering the latest inbound marketing strategies ? outbound is still a hugely important part of the mix.

And the king of outbound is still email.

In this short eBook, we'll look at email with fresh eyes and present the next natural progression for every B2B marketer who still values the power of email.

It's a step that thousands of progressive B2B marketers have already taken ? with results that add up to a business case that writes itself.

We'll also hear from some experienced email marketers, sharing their insights into best practice (thanks, folks).

By the end of this eBook, we hope you resolve to step up your email efforts to increase their contribution to revenue. We also hope you'll see the value of this next generation of email marketing.

Most importantly, we hope you'll see that the move from traditional email platforms isn't a leap at all. It's just the next logical step in the development and professionalisation of every B2B marketing department.

Let's get started.

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Beyond B2B email Marketing

Email works

70% of B2B marketers still regard email as either `critical' or `very important' (and only 4% think it's `not very important').

B2B Marketing Magazine Email Benchmarking Report March 2012

Deployed with even a modicum of intelligence and sensitivity, email marketing delivers the goods.

? It's the most cost-effective way to reach all of your known prospects and customers.

? It's valued by your audience ? that's why people opt in (and opt out if they no longer find them relevant).

? It's versatile ? you can use email for simple alerts and updates, offer new content and deliver anything from discounts and promotions to thought leadership.

? It's immediate, personal and eminently trackable.



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"Email is the glue that ties people's cross channel behaviour together." Riaz Kanani Consultant and DMA Email Marketing Council Member

70% of digital marketers see email as the top medium for ROI. Econsultancy Email Census 2012

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Beyond B2B email Marketing

When email doesn't work

"Many email systems don't

In the wrong hands, email marketing is just

have any link to the content

spam with content sauce.

assets on a site. While retailers

like Amazon will trigger a related ? If you don't segment your campaigns,

product email following a category relevance suffers.

or product browse, I don't think

I've ever received an equivalent ? If you never target email according to the

B2B communication."

prospect's behaviour, you're missing one

of the most powerful conversion drivers.

Dave Chaffey

Smart Insights

? If you can't tie your email activities to

website visits, social media interactions and

offline activity, you're only getting a tiny part

of the picture.

? If your email is still in a silo, the `leads' you hand over to sales won't reflect everything you know about each prospect (so they'll be harder to close).

Unfortunately, for many B2B marketers, email marketing is still stuck in the dark ages of `batch and blast'. It's a low-cost medium so it gets away with it. But more and more marketers have moved their email marketing to the next level and are multiplying their ROI.

The challenge is to harness the power of the new email strategies and tactics and release the true potential of B2B email ? without getting bogged down in complexity.

"This email maturity gap, as I call it, will only get bigger and bigger. But for the marketer who has the ambition, it has never been easier to get on the right side of that gap."

Jordie van Rijn Email Monday

"Email services tend to limit your insight to open and click rates. For true conversion analytics and deeper insights you need the integration that marketing automation brings."

Carl Fredrik W?llgren (a Marketo customer)



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"Email is core to the way that we communicate in business. As a Channel it is right at the top of the pile for

marketers."

Philip Storey, Email marketing consultant

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Five Ways

Five ways your email platform is holding you back

If you're stuck in an old-school approach to email marketing, it's probably not your fault. It's your technology. Today's email platforms and services were designed for a simpler time, when digital marketing was itself a fairly new discipline. They brought some fantastic new things to the table ? like instant (if basic) analytics ? and did a good job of automating some of the manual processes behind standard email blasts. But B2B marketing has moved on ? and email platforms simply haven't. Here's why their limitations have become yours:

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Five Ways

Five ways your email platform is holding you back

1. The email silo Email platforms treat email as a separate silo, divorced from all the other customer interaction channels. So you can't merge a prospect's email activities with his or her website visits, content downloads, social media engagements and offline interactions.

This single, unified view of the prospect is essential for deciding how to target each prospect ? and when to hand them over to the sales team.

"You would never walk up to somebody and act like the conversation you had on the phone last week never happened. Why would you do the same with email?"

Riaz Kanani Consultant and DMA Email Marketing Council Member



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Five Ways

Five ways your email platform is holding you back

2. One-off campaigns Email platforms are good for sending out oneoff campaigns and email blasts. They're not so good at designing and delivering multi-step `drip campaigns' that, over time, move prospects along the purchase journey.

Without automation, you're forced to send your emails based on your timetable, ignoring the buyer's. With it, you can nurture prospects as they progress through your drip campaign.

Multi-step campaigns need an automated marketing platform that can take each prospect along at their own pace and nurture longer-cycle sales.

"The standard email service providers out there have not embraced lead scoring and nurturing to deliver effective solutions."

Michael Leander Direct and Digital Marketing Consultant

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