ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS column: Part 034: Email marketing 2.0 - How B2B companies can benefit from it

Email campaigns in B2B should not only aim to sell more products or services. Rather, email marketing is a clever way to identify the best potential customers and at the same time determine the need for solutions.

Many email marketing experts often talk about the ROI of email campaigns. Unfortunately, this is not as easy to measure in B2B as it is in B2C. After all, it's not about offering a few more products or selling an e-book with an email. Email marketing in B2B is a very special challenge and requires special units of measurement other than the traditional success criteria such as open rate or click rates. If you only use these units, you are not utilising the full potential of email marketing in B2B!

Today, email campaigns should be used to divide recipients into at least two categories: Firstly, those who are engaged and curious and secondly, those who are not engaged. This is the only way to achieve a meaningful dialogue with subscribers through email campaigns.

Email marketing 2.0

Of course, the open rate is important for measuring an email campaign, but it does not measure the full impact in B2B. If you only make decisions based on open rates or click-through rates, it can have a devastating impact on your business and even, in the worst case, simply be wrong! Even if the open rate of your email campaign is low, the click-through rates can be immense because you may have reached fewer people, but they were interested in your content!

Email marketing 2.0 links this data even more precisely to your company. If you use this strategy, you can customise your email campaigns even more to your company's objectives. It even has an impact on your development departments and your sales strategies.

Email campaigns must be used to identify the best potential customers and at the same time discover the need for solutions.

My tip:

Introduce a new unit of measurement for your email list: A=value/subscriber.

What is a new registration worth to you and what profile should it have? For example, you can create a special e-mail list of decision-makers, an e-mail list of buyers and an e-mail list of other functions. The more precisely you know which group you need subscribers from, the more important the value/subscriber becomes. Define these numbers based on your internal values and increase them accordingly.

You also define the B=loss/cancellation for each group. If someone cancels your list (or the email address no longer exists), your list loses value.

Simply calculate the real value of your email campaign with the equation = A-B after each mailing.

Monitor and analyse click rates

B2B companies can also benefit from click rates. If the click-through rate for a piece of information drops, it only means that interest in that particular piece of information is declining. Nevertheless, it may be that those who click through are generating very good sales. So if sales are dropping, but people are still clicking on the information, then you should send more information. Maybe there just isn't the information that readers need to make a decision in your favour.

As you can see, it is important not to simply lump "all subscribers" together but to separate them sensitively and then manage them strategically. If you link your email marketing with your website, you can define very special additional key figures that will help you to further optimise your email marketing - and thus increase the value/subscriber exorbitantly.

Integrate e-mail marketing 2.0 into your Internet marketing strategy and measure the really important key figures so that you can make the right decisions - and stop losing prospective customers to your competitors!

*Sanjay Sauldie, inventor of the Internet marketing strategy iROI (Internet Return on Invest) is Director of the European Internet Marketing Institute & Academy EIMIA.