How to Optimize Your B2B Email Campaigns

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In part 1, I discussed why creative and landing pages are so important in a bland business to business (B2B) email world, among a few other methods of reinventing your program.

1. Data for remarketing. One of the low hanging fruits of the B2B email world is leveraging email metrics for follow-up or remarketing email campaigns. We have one large B2B client that saw a huge return on investment (ROI) due to applying the basic intelligence that email metrics offer up and using those to strategize a customized campaign effort that drove over $100,000 in incremental revenue.
   
   So in a nutshell, we took the response metrics and made a decision tree for the conversion goal and developed custom creative and messaging based on what the person did and what we wanted them to do. The efforts generated an ROI of almost 4,000 percent and won a plethora of awards from the digital and direct marketing communities.
2. Use email to save money not just make it. We all know email is a revenue workhorse - in the business to consumer (B2C) and B2B world. Many B2B companies have realized that email can also reduce costs in other areas, making them even more effective. One client implemented an email program, not to sell, but to prevent expensive call center inquires. The email program saved the client over $1,000,000 in its first year. Not bad for a humble B2B email program.
   
   Too often, those potential savings are not communicated to other groups that could leverage them. Which leads me to…
3. Don't silo your email program from the rest of the business. In the B2B world, you must ensure you can fulfill each and every conversion. So if the email's job is to get the subscriber's attention and then move them through the sales funnel, the next step and certainly the conversion platform (which could be sales reps, call centers, online, etc.) needs to be ready (not to mention aware of any campaign) and able to close.
   
   We saw one B2B client increase its email-driven leads and revenue after adjusting its email campaign times so call center representatives had adequate time to respond.
4. The list matters. This is often the tricky part. Too often B2B marketers fall in some traps. They buy bad data or spend their time hunting for a profile rather than permission-based leads. While I won't go into that contentious discussion right now, the quality of subscriber data is often the most important correlation to success. Meaning you knock my first seven tips out of the ballpark, but bad data can mean the first seven don't matter. So work on capturing relevant and accurate data versus fishing in a generic lead pile where the prospects don't know or care about you and your business.

B2B email marketers are some of the best and brightest in the digital world - they just don't get the attention many other marketers do. Feel free to mention some rock stars below in the comments section or contribute your own tip or comment.

B2B image on home page via Shutterstock.

This column was originally published on July 12, 2012.