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Email marketing is dead, no one opens letters, who needs your mailing list – such lamentations have been heard for ten years in a row in USA, Europe, the EU, and email marketing is still alive and well!
More recently, R&D found that 78% of B2B customers prefer to receive commercial offers via email. Why not talk about the role email marketing plays in promoting B2B projects?
Agree, it would be foolish to use email marketing only for sending commercial offers (alas, some business representatives do just that!).
Meanwhile, this communication channel has a lot of opportunities for building relationships with a very specific audience.
For example, the audience can and should be informed about what is happening inside your company and in the market where you work. Email marketing allows you to attract traffic and partners to affiliate programs and do a lot of other things to promote projects that can ultimately generate profit for your company.
How to use email marketing in B2B segment
Inexperienced marketers use the same patterns when implementing email marketing in B2C and B2B. In fact, there is a significant difference between how an individual consumer makes purchase decisions and how it happens in the B2B segment.
An ordinary user can buy some product, guided by a momentary emotion.
In B2B, a lot of time can pass from obtaining information to the final decision to purchase a product or service. Sometimes up to six months or more. And the decision to buy or not to buy will be made by the head or at least the commercial director of the company.
Now let’s give a specific example related to the promotion of projects through email marketing.
The Alanbase SaaS platform has appeared on the market, which will be of interest to most affiliate marketing participants.
At the initial stage, we can communicate that such an online platform exists through direct advertising.
Just not enough to say. We need to convince our target audience that it is useful and profitable to cooperate with our online platform. One ad somewhere in Yandex.Direct or Google Adwords does not solve the problem.
It only solves the notification problem. But the issues of information and education can be closed by email marketing.
So, we collect leads into the database, encourage them to leave their email addresses and prepare a mailing list.
In the newsletter, we talk about our advantages, about the opportunities that a potential client can get thanks to our SaaS platform.
We smoothly bring a potential client to the fact that he wants to take advantage of our offer, because it is really better than the offers of competitors.
In this case, the main goal of email marketing is to build trust, inform and educate.
At the same time, we understand that our target audience is companies that:
- came close to launching their own affiliate programs,
- or just starting to think about organizing an affiliate program,
- or right now they are choosing a new platform for placement for their affiliate program, because for some reason the old one has ceased to suit.
This means that in order for our email marketing to give effective results, we will segment within our potential customers, and each of the segments will receive content relevant to it.
At the same time, we remember that our target audience is not private users, from whom we expect to make a purchase here and now.
Our target audience is small, medium, large companies that want to seriously engage in partnership business. In each such company there is a leader who makes decisions whether or not to become our client. He is our addressee.
We write all letters for this manager or business owner. And so that our letter does not get lost in the general informational noise, we study our target audience, draw up a portrait of our ideal client, and do a lot of “boring” things. And all just to first write the right letter that the client will open, read and want to take advantage of our offer.
If, to promote the project, we also decide to create our own affiliate program, we will also use the mailing list to inform potential partners that now they have the opportunity to participate in it.
The main functions of email marketing in promoting B2B projects
It is customary to single out several key tasks that regular mailing lists solve in promoting B2B-oriented projects.
- Increasing the loyalty of existing users. This is done through reminders of the existence of the company, through the generation of even non-obvious informational reasons for which it is appropriate to send an email to the addressee.
- Increasing the level of awareness of the functional characteristics and capabilities of the product. You can regularly send ready-made cases tested (or implemented) by other clients to the addressee.
- Product training – sending a series of emails, each of which discusses in detail a particular feature or feature of the product.
- Using the mailing list as not the main channel for attracting traffic. For example, existing customers can be promised some bonuses or discounts if they attract partners to a new affiliate program, etc.
Features of the mailing list for promoting B2B projects
B2B mailing list will not bring you immediate sales. Only this does not negate the fact that each of your letters should be selling.
Build trust with your customers – “sell” them your authority and expertise.
You talk about the competitive advantages of your product – “sell” these advantages and clearly show how your offer differs from that of competitors.
Choose the right writing style. Business leaders like to keep things short, clear, and to the point. And if you sell your product or services with every letter, do not forget about the presence of a CTA in the letter – a clear call to action. The client must understand what he needs to do right now in order to take advantage of your offer.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, email marketing works to promote B2B projects. All you need to achieve results from sending emails regularly is to have a clear strategy and find your own recognizable voice. Try, experiment, run tests and never believe those who say that emails are left somewhere in the last century. It’s just that these people never learned how to use this amazing opportunity to get new customers and increase their income.
