I am continuing my discussion about Email Marketing for B2B. In my earlier post we read that B2B segments can use Email marketing as a tool to determine new business, generate leads and acquire repeat sales and new businesses. In this part let’s discuss 4 main ways of effective use of email marketing in B2B sectors.
Customer retention: The prime objective of email marketing in B2B is customer retention. B2B email campaigns are majorly directed at existing customers for retention purpose and all communications are necessarily permission based. Check this Net Promoter Score (NPS) (from Hubspot) to know customer loyalty metric that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a company’s customer relations.
Customer engagement: As part of the customer acquisition and retention process, email marketing in B2B context is highly useful as an engagement tool. With relevant content and focused communication in a B2B email campaign, customers can remain engaged with your brand and maintain brand recall, even without buying something for some time. “Spending the time to categorize customers and understand their purchase history and sending them a targeted email offering a discount on a complementary product to their recent purchase will pay dividends in conversion return.” Said Jon Nace, Associate Partner, Rosetta while talking about ‘Customer Engagement in B2B Marketing’ with Direct Marketing News.
Educating Customers: A B2B customer seeks information and solutions to her business problems. Any source that can offer a ready solution or can facilitate development of a feasible solution is seen as a potential strategic partner. Hence, B2B email marketing focuses heavily on educating customers and making their business decisions easier, especially when it comes to associating with you or choosing your service.
White papers or case studies about technical innovations, trending topics in business and best practices can be shared via email campaigns. Industry benchmark reports and market trends analysis can also be shared at a regular frequency with B2B customers to keep them engaged and informed. If yours is a service that provides professional assistance or acumen for proper usage, then user manuals, webinars, podcasts, e-learning based training modules and invitations to web events can be shared with B2B customers via email marketing campaigns. You can even encourage your B2B customers to subscribe to your newsletter to access such informative material at an on-going basis. Marketing Sherpas sharing a case-study with their B2B customers.
Brand Building: Last but not the least; brand building is the ultimate goal for all B2B email marketing campaigns. Carefully designed email marketing campaigns can communicate your brand values to the customer and create a brand image which is relevant to your service offerings. While you may organize various other promotional activities to build your brand image, email marketing can be a highly cost efficient and consistent way to maintain brand presence in your B2B customer’s mindscape. A perfect B2B branding example from ‘bizo’.
Thus while email marketing in B2B context is a different ball-game altogether, it works with the same logic of keeping your customer engaged and aware about your company and your services.
A quick summary of benefits of Email Marketing for B2B sector:
1) Determining new business areas
2) Generate leads
3) New sales, repeat sales, agreement renewals and new business
4) Customer retention
5) Customer engagement
6) Educating customers
7) Brand building
Feel free to add in more Email Marketing usage for B2B sectors in the comment box below.
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About the Author:
Vikas Raina is Vice President Business Development at Niche Software Solutions. He has more than 10 years of exhaustive experience in Digital Marketing Industry.