Online Marketing Plan

What is the difference between business to business marketing and business to consumer marketing using email?  Answer: there is no difference. If you are approaching a client via email you must treat them as you would a potential consumer. This article Highlights 4 important notes that should stay fresh in the minds of all B2b marketers.

What can b2b marketers learn from the b-to-c world? A lot, according to Ryan Phelan VP-strategic services at BlueHornet Networks, an email service provider that caters to retailers and other b2b and b-to-c clients.

Phelan's company earlier this month released a new report that focuses on consumers' views of email marketing. The report, “Consumer Views of Email Marketing: A Revealing Look at How Consumers Use Email,” is based on video interviews of more than 1,000 consumers in the U.S. conducted  in February. Though it is a consumer-based survey,  many of the findings have implications for b2b marketers, he said.

“I always start a discussion about b2b marketing with a discussion about how email applies to the consumer,” he said. “That's how we all learn to be online—as consumers—and we take that behavior with us into the business world.” Here are four key takeaways from the report and how b2b marketers can use them in their campaign planning.

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An emarketing strategy is something that every company needs to move forward in this technology and social media driven market. Budgets are tight in this economy and every company is trying to leverage online marketing techniques for the lowest cost. Even though budgets are tight, businesses are finally realizing that they need to loosen the purse strings on their marketing and learning to embrace what can be gained from email marketing in 2012.

via Small Biz: The world’s economic future in 2012 seems bleak, and could become even bleaker.

The debt crisis in Europe still has not been fully resolved. Greece is getting it’s financial affairs in order, but there are other problems within the European Union.

Image: Kookkai_nak / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In this day and age, most people check their email on their iPads, cellphones, and smartphones - because of this all of our clients want to know what they can do to make their emails mobile friendly. We work with each client to taylor their email campaigns to look fantastic across all email platforms, including mobile devices. In lieu of a personal consultation with an email marketing agency, check out some basic tips to help make your emails more mobile friendly. 

Via WebTraffic ROI: E-mail marketing, with 92% of the U.S. internet users sending and reading e-mail, according to Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s a no brainer.

Right? Yes and no. E-mail marketing no longer reaches your audience the way it used to. People used to sit at their Gateway desktops every night, dial into their Netscape and check e-mails while watching Family Matters.

The story is now a bit different. One in five marketing e-mails is opened on a smart phone. This changes a few things for your e-mail marketing campaign. Though you may have to modify a bit, you can and should make it work in your favor.

Give Your Newsletter a Mobile Lift

More than ever, it’s now important that you design your newsletter in a way that can be read easily on a smart phone.

As more people get into smart phones, studies show it has become the predominant way to check e-mail. Comscore said that 70.1 million U.S. users check their e-mail via smart phone every year.

Luckily for you, as smart phone technology grows, so does the phone’s ability to properly display a regular e-mail. Simply changing the coding and creating a narrower design may be enough.

Provide Interesting Snippets

There is a certain amount of scan and move on that happens when the e-mail immediately pops into someone’s inbox. People are most likely to read your business newsletters while they wait to get their hair cut or meet with someone. Thus, by getting your most important information into the intro clip, you can avoid the immediate deletion.

Then later, while they are watching TV on the couch, or sitting in traffic, they’ll take the time to click through the full article.

Offer Discounts, Coupons, Etc

Now that you know you’re readers are often out and about while checking e-mail, take this opportunity to get them shopping. Offering coupons that can be used right off the smart phone will make their decision to buy your product much easier.

This in turn gives them more incentive to buy. Scoutmob, a growing mobile application, offers their deals directly off the smart phone, giving users easy access to the coupons. I once went to a restaurant simply because Scoutmob offered a deal I couldn’t pass up. With easy access I was in and out.

Make it Convenient to Complete Online Transactions Later

When someone is lazily reading through your e-mail before a meeting, it isn’t likely that they’ll make a purchase from their phone. Online purchasing holds a large spot in the e-commerce world, 80% of people in their early thirties to mid forties make frequent online purchases, according to FifthGear.

However, this has yet to take hold on the mobile platform. On the newsletter, provide your customer care phone number in a click to call manner, give them access to their “shopping cart” to buy later, or allow a sharing feature to make it easy for them to share products.

E-mail marketing still holds an important spot in every company’s business marketing plan, as it should. We are seeing, though, that it’s time to shift the model a bit.

As with everything, technology is changing the way your customers function, which means you must make a slight shift as well.

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Our platform has implemented an amazing new A/B Testing feature in each account in the past year. This feature has helped our clients decide which email campaigns are doing the best - from subject line comparison to send time, this feature gives tracking information you can use. In addition to testing your email campaigns, it's also a great idea to test out your landing pages. B2C.com has compiled a short list of the top tips for effective testing---

A/B testing is one of the best ways to raise your landing page conversion rates and overall online marketing ROI.  A/B testing or split testing is a testing method where a control landing page is compared to a variety of test pages.  Testing landing page experiences against one another with A/B testing offers the opportunity to create and test wildly different things – think in terms of testing apples and oranges.

Here are five tips to help you effectively plan and run landing page A/B tests:

It’s always great to get “press” but when 2010′s #1 Most Influential Person in Sales Lead Management, Mac McIntosh looks to you for advice, tips, and insight — and then shares your thoughts on his blog, well, then that’s just awesome!

Recently, Mac approached me to give my Top 3 Tips for Email in this modern age of emarketing, social media, and new media. You can read my responses, here on his blog: http://www.sales-lead-insights.com/2011/b2b-email-tips/

Do you have any additional thoughts that you would add? Have you found these to be true, or do you have other “tried and true” secrets you’re willing to share? Let us know, and I hope that this post can be a resource to you as you plan out your email and online marketing efforts now, and in the future.

Thanks,

Altaf

To learn more about Mac McIntosh, visit his website here.