B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

March 8th, 2009

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I am a great fan of Simms Jenkins, a nationally known email marketing expert. I have finished reading his book The Truth About Email Marketing. The book reveals 49 proven Email Marketing Best Practices. It is a must reader for all marketers. Simms also discussed about the best practices for B2B email marketing. Please read and enrich your understanding of email marketing.

According to Simms

Know your audience: If you are mailing to IT network administrators, an image-heavy newsletter probably will not be well received. Instead, send a text-only message. Follow the cues of what your audience is like and don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach

Mobile email triage is real: Escape the mobile email gauntlet. An increasing number of business executives use their mobile devices/PDAs to perform email triage. This means that if you have a weak message or lack something compelling or of immediate value to your email, you may have the busy exec delete your email while in a meeting. On the flip side, a unique email with a relevant purpose may get saved for the executive to read in the office.

Make it easy for the mobile audience: Click here to read on your mobile phone is becoming more commonplace on B2B emails and may help you escape mobile email rendering snafus.

From & Subject lines: Emails from a CEO to a fellow executive tend to resonate. Ensure your From line is from someone who matters. Combine this with a short Subject line that can break through the clutter while demonstrating a reason for the user to read this email.

Short and sweet: Whether read on an iPhone or laptop, make your message count. That means make sure it gets read. Long emails without clear calls to action will get skimmed and deleted. Make your value proposition above the fold and obvious to the people that will browse over your email looking for a reason to read (or delete).

Don’t oversell: Too many promises, customer raves or pricing information may overwhelm your audience and diminish your opportunity to have people click on a link where they can find the details of the service or product being offered.

Respect the audience’s time: Frequency is a significant issue for all mailings, but if a business subscriber doesn’t respond to the first two messages, it doesn’t mean you should send to him even more frequently.

Test: I received seven different emails from a lead generation company in the span of five minutes this morning. The emails actually contained decent messaging and links to at least one relevant case study. They had me until hello occurred seven times. Someone was asleep at the wheel when the campaigns were segmented and set. Do your due diligence before an email is sent as these campaigns did more damage than good.

Offer something unique: A white paper can often work, but they are everywhere, aren’t they? Provide access and perks that are gold to the C-suite audience. For example, one client attempting to register business executives for an annual event tested pricing breaks versus admission to a VIP event. Remember, the B2B audience usually isn’t spending its own money so you can guess which offer performed better.

Remarket: We had major success with one client recently by creating follow-up campaigns based on how each user responded (or didn’t) to the initial campaign. Using your metrics can guide you to a better and more relevant strategy. (You can find the case study of how this client generated $120,000 from remarketing here.)

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