There is simply no way to match the value that business to business email marketing provides for communicating with prospects and customers.
The amazing thing is most of us are not actively engaged in any form of email marketing yet. At best, we send an occasional email blast to our customer base to introduce a new product or announce an event.
Many of us have NEVER sent a single promotional email to a list of prospects or customers. So if you are among the few who have, reach right back and give yourself a hearty slap on the back.
I have my theories about why most of us do not use business to business email marketing to its greatest advantage, which I will not go into here, but I suspect it is heavily related to the following barriers:
1) We must frequently rely on IT and/or our Web team to provide the enabling infrastructure and we are low on their priority list.
2) We do not have direct access to the mailing and tracking tools and have to rely on outside resources to put our strategies into play.
3) We do not know exactly how to implement an effective business to business email marketing strategy.
4) We fear being branded as a spammer at the slightest indiscretion.
Regardless of why business to business email marketing is not more widely accepted, the fact remains that it is a marketing tool that we must have in our toolbox.
Those marketers who jump on the bandwagon now will have a decided advantage versus the competition when they deploy their ‘secret weapon’.
Benefits of Business to Business Email Marketing
1) Low cost
Compared to any other form of direct marketing, business to business email marketing is fantastically cheap. When you cultivate and mail to your own opt-in email list, the cost per message is so low, you can almost call it free.
You do need to invest in some kind of infrastructure, but if you are smart and careful, you can keep your costs below $1,000 a year.
If you only send 10 messages to a list of 2,000 subscribers, your cost is just $.05 per message. You can see how a serious business to business email marketing program could cost just a fraction of a penny per message.
2) Metrics Galore
With business to business email marketing, almost every step in the buying process can be measured and tracked on an ongoing basis. You can easily track the total clicks on every link in each message, the conversion of clicks to sales or clicks to leads, and with some programs you can measure opens (how many people opened your message) and forwards (how many people forwarded your message) You can take what you learn from one campaign and apply it to future campaigns with a high degree of precision.
3) Permission based
Unless you are spamming (sending unsolicited emails), all effective business to business email marketing is conducted to an opt-in list. This means that every subscriber requested to be on your list, they want to receive emails from you. Because of this, business to business email marketing is one of the purest forms of permission-based direct marketing. Very few direct mail or telemarketing campaigns can claim the same.
4) Easy to implement
If you aren’t implementing business to business email marketing in your business right now, it may seem a daunting technical challenge to build the infrastructure and tools required to pull it off. But rest assured that adding business to business email marketing to your mix is not as difficult as it sounds.
There are many great tools available on a subscription basis that allow you to outsource the complete infrastructure required for effective business to business email marketing. You will find two great tools listed at the bottom of this article.
5)A gile Marketing Tool
All marketers and business owners are painfully aware of the fact that the speed of doing business continues to steadily increase. This relentless acceleration drives the need to be supremely responsive to new trends and opportunities in your market.
There is no more responsive tool available to marketers than business to business email marketing. You can literally deploy the tactical elements of a campaign moments after the strategic and messaging elements have been developed. In other words, you can decide on a new strategic direction in the morning, develop your message and offer in the afternoon, and have a message waiting in your prospect’s inbox the next morning.
