Whether you need to capture a customer’s attention immediately or nurture a prospect over the course of weeks or months, email is the foundation upon which to build a multichannel, multifaceted marketing program. B2B or B2C, today’s marketing automation technologies coupled with sophisticated email tactics enable you to better establish a rich dialogue with each individual prospect or customer.

In fact there are some techniques successful B2C marketers use, which can be tremendously profitable in B2B campaigns as well. Here are six tactics that B2B marketers can incorporate into their programs to more strongly engage with contacts and drive revenue.

1. Communicate One Prospect at a Time.

In a recent study, 83 percent of B2B marketers cited delivering highly relevant email content to recipients as one of their top challenges1. You can begin to improve relevancy by using some of the advanced segmentation techniques B2C marketers employ. And simply segmenting your list will put you ahead of other B2B marketers. Only one-third say they are “very likely” to use email list segmentation to target the “prospect’s stage in the sales cycle.” To take your program up a level, segment by behaviour as well as demographics.

When it comes to deciphering buyer motivations, most marketers would agree that actions (e.g., how visitors interacted with your Web site) speak louder than words (e.g. budgetary information they listed on your Web form). In general, B2C marketers do a better job of taking this into account, with 51 percent of B2C marketers segmenting email campaigns by user behaviour, compared to just 38 percent of B2B marketers. If you’re not already, begin to segment messages based on recipient actions. For example, you might send customers who opened your email and clicked through to download a white paper a message for a related Webinar. For those who opened your initial email but didn’t click, send a survey requesting more information about their interests so you can improve relevancy going forward.

2. Understand the Truth About Deliverability Data.

In addition to coping with the same deliverability challenges B2C marketers face, B2B marketers have the added task of clearing corporate email filters. That means in addition to getting their message through the spam filters of major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), B2B marketers must contend with thousands of corporate domains, anti-spam firewalls and email blacklists. No wonder, then, that in a recent study 56 percent of B2B marketers listed deliverability as one of their top email marketing challenges.

B2B marketers can improve deliverability by employing the following tools:

• Inbox Preview—See how messages will render when viewed in leading email clients to prevent broken messages and formatting errors.
• Spam Assassin—Instead of guessing whether your important prospect email might be flagged as spam, you can use this tool before the send to examine and score your messages based on several spam-related criteria. Then, you can remove any elements that may cause your message to be inaccurately perceived as spam.
• Inbox Monitoring—What’s happening when your message reaches customers? Is it getting to the inbox, or being redirected to the junk or bulk boxes? With this tool, you can keep tabs on the percentage of each mailing that’s actually being delivered to the leading ISPs. Armed with a greater understanding prior to sending, you can make minor adjustments to message content pre-send to improve message delivery. But despite these benefits, only 34 percent of B2B marketers use this tool compared to 55 percent of B2C.
• IP Segmentation—Having an individual IP address ensures that messages all come from the same originating address, helping to build your reputation and improve message delivery. With ISPs and inbox providers heavily filtering email messages and closely monitoring sender reputation, it’s imperative that your organization have its own dedicated IP address. Yet only 25 percent of B2B marketers switched from shared to dedicated IP addresses in 2009, compared to 40 percent of B2C marketers.

As with all aspects of marketing, having great tools isn’t sufficient if you don’t embrace best practices. Start by telling recipients what kind of emails they can expect from you when they opt in to receive your messages. Mail regularly so they don’t forget who you are and mistakenly label you as spam. And keep content relevant. your messages. Mail regularly so they don’t forget who you are and mistakenly label you as spam. And keep content relevant.

3. Take a Multichannel Approach.

With the proliferation of social communities, smart phones and a host of other forums, people have more ways to communicate than ever. Savvy marketers recognize that since customers and prospects are moving in and out of different communication channels throughout their day, taking an integrated multichannel approach significantly increases the chance of getting your message in front of them.

New technology enables B2B marketers to interact with a variety of channels in one platform, spreading their message wide while keeping it focused. More marketers are integrating marketing messages across both social and traditional channels. To do this successfully, you must involve customers and prospects in the process by inviting them to select channel preferences. And leverage each of your channels to bring subscribers to other communications vehicles. For example, use your Facebook profile page to capture email addresses or Tweet about an exclusive SMS promotion. By reaching out across a variety of touch points, you achieve maximum impact.

Incorporating social media into multichannel marketing strategies is a particularly hot topic, with 87 percent of B2B marketers agreeing that social media will become a standard tactic like email.1 And with prospects increasingly turning to social communities, networks and blogs for opinions about various brands, businesses and services, the medium is a great way to stimulate interest and help move them through the early stages of the buying decision. A few tips to consider:

• Find out what social networks your customers and prospects frequent. Use surveys to get this info or capture it through a preference centre. You can also tap into customer communities to understand where they’re residing.
• Deliver content that educates, not just sells. Taking a consistent educational and engaging approach with your content allows com¬panies to drop promotional content into the flow (depending on the context) and have these messages be accepted.
• Make it easy to spread the word. Use highly visible text and graphics so it’s simple for customers and prospects to share your content, whether it’s posted on your Web site, in a blog or as part of an email. Studies have shown that including social sharing links in emails, for example, will increase the reach of your message by 24 percent.

Surprisingly, 37 percent of B2B marketers cite the inability to measure or prove ROI as a barrier to adopting social sharing, even though new technology makes it easy to monitor success in this area. Social-sharing features, for example, enable companies to track the number of times a message was shared. Other tools allow you to monitor the number of mentions of your company on social networks and blogs, providing hard data with which to gauge your efforts and compare your standing versus competitors. You can even monitor how your channels impact one another, comparing the dates of key marketing campaigns to the number of Tweets and blog mentions that resulted, looking for spikes in mentions and whether response was positive or negative.

Regardless of what combination of social media, SMS, landing pages and Web sites your multichannel marketing approach involves, remember to monitor impact and ROI by keeping tabs on sales, brand awareness, leads and cost reduction in addition to the number of opens, click-throughs and followers you’re racking up. By thinking holistically, you’ll improve your grasp of how the various elements of your marketing efforts are interacting and tying back to your overall business goals.

4. Use Surveys to Learn More.

B2B marketers have long appreciated the value of customer feedback. Surveying prospects and customers about their likes, dislikes, needs and desires is a great way to gain customer insights that enable marketers to better send relevant campaigns that increase engagement.

Today, new technology is enabling marketers to create more sophisticated surveys that incorporate exciting branching and advanced logic options. This allows B2B marketers to set up surveys that move respondents through different question paths based on their answers to previous questions.

The benefits? Marketers have to ask respondents fewer questions to get the same amount of information, resulting in higher levels of survey completions. Plus, you can set up countless different branching scenarios that enable you to get very specific in the prospect data and preferences you collect, which you can then use to send highly targeted communications. You could branch based on product, product line or business unit. Or you could do so based on industry. You could even set up branching based on current or stated satisfaction levels or areas of discontent

Armed with your new high-tech surveys, you can harness their power in myriad ways. Try sending them following an event to help increase engagement, or send them to prospects that have stalled to help re-engage them. Regardless of how you use these more sophisticated surveys, you’ll generate valuable market research; improve customer satisfaction and help drive leads more effectively.

5. Look Beyond the Email.

Email is the cornerstone of an engagement marketing campaign for B2B marketers. But in a Web 2.0 world, multichannel campaigns enable you to expand your efforts in new and exciting ways. Whether it’s using Web analytics, social media or an inbound marketing tool, digging into contact behaviour beyond email interactions allows you to improve your understanding of prospects and adjust and optimize future initiatives.

Hooking Web analytics into your B2B marketing program can help you monitor what prospects do on your site after they leave your email. These actions can give you valuable information regarding a prospect’s interests and location in the buying cycle that you can use to send targeted communications. And new technology also enables you to see what actions visitors took on your site before signing up for your email program, Webinar or field event. This form of Web tracking gives you a huge advantage because you can leverage this behaviour to identify a new subscriber with specific interests or characteristics and can send highly relevant messages immediately following registration.

Consider a company that specializes in selling computer software and hardware to businesses. A buyer browses the site and peruses your selection of laptops before opting in to your newsletter. How your communications proceed could play out in two distinctly different ways depending on the tools you use:

[Download PDF to see Table]

In addition to leveraging how contacts are interacting with your Web site before and after your emails, you should also evaluate social media impact to gain a more complete understanding of your marketing program. Monitoring share rates, the blogosphere and social forums enables you to analyze promotions, communications, etc. in a new way.

Imagine you send out an email with a link to a white paper. Previously, you may have measured success by whether recipients opened your email, clicked-through and downloaded your white paper. Measuring social media enables you to also gauge your success by whether customers and prospects are sharing your white paper and talking about it. These deeper insights will subsequently allow to you to engage customers and prospects more strongly by tailoring future content accordingly.

6. Test. Test. And Test Again.

No matter how well you think you know your customers and prospects, you can never be sure how people are going to respond to your emails and landing pages unless you test. In many cases, seemingly insignificant differences and simple changes can have a huge impact on response. Testing is one of the best ways to accurately gauge how respective elements of your messages are resonating with your recipients so you can make adjustments and maximize engagement. But despite these benefits, research indicates that B2B marketers lag behind B2C marketers when it comes to email testing

• 41% of B2B marketers test subject lines, versus 50% of B2C marketers
• 35% of B2B marketers test the offers/calls to action, versus 52% of B2C marketers
• 30% of B2B marketers test creative copy/layouts, versus 46% of B2C marketers

The good news for B2B marketers is that marketing automation technology enables you to do more testing than ever, more easily than ever. With very little extra time and effort beyond creating an initial email or landing page, marketers can engage more fully with prospects by providing a more measurably relevant experience that increases conversions and drives additional sales.

In fact, today’s technology has evolved to the point that in some cases, you can actually test and automatically optimize your messages in real time. With some marketing automation solutions, it’s as simple as loading the various content options and sending the mailing. The first few percent of the list that open the mailing are served the different options. The performance of these content variables is monitored in real time, and when one content element is clearly outperforming the others, a “winner” is selected. That winning content is then served to the remainder of the list, ensuring the best content gets to the largest portion of the list. It adds a whole dimension to the concept of A/B testing, enabling you to reap the benefits of stronger calls to action and heightened customer engagement more easily and quickly than ever.

Conclusion

Over the last decade, B2B marketing has changed dramatically. The rising tide of “noise”—people are exposed to thousands of ads each day—has resulted in a gradual “tuning out” of interruptive advertising and wide-scale broadcast marketing messages. In addition, buyers have become increasingly empowered, turning to the free information available online and the countless communities interacting across the Web. In short, buyers are in control, and to be successful marketers must focus on permission, relevance and engagement.

Given the challenging marketplace, B2B marketers need to employ every tool and tactic that might give them an edge. And that means taking a careful look at the techniques B2C marketers are using with success and modifying and employing them to your advantage.

From segmentation and Web analytics, to social media monitoring and multichannel messaging, to A/B testing and real-time content, these tactics can help move you from list-centric prospect blasting to behaviour-centric campaigns that connect more strongly with prospects and move them through the buying cycle more effectively. By taking steps to achieve extraordinarily relevant, personalized communications, B2B and B2C marketers alike can drive new levels of loyalty and revenue.