Email Marketing Strategy is Truly an Effective B2B Solution

Many people doubt the effectiveness of an email marketing strategy. They say that ad campaigns are more useful, and that businesses should spend more of their time and money on social media and content marketing. However, a proper email campaign is not only effective at drawing customers into a conversation, but it can also put your brand forward as a major influence and thought leader for your industry.

Obviously, one of the major things it takes to be a thought leader is great content on a medium that people will find and read. But to be a great influence is something different. Having an excellently designed newsletter is easy to do with the right software, and this will make your business stand out ahead of competitors. As Dan Shewan wrote for Business 2 Community, most of the newsletters that people put on the market are ugly, and if yours looks good, then people will respect you. If content is what needs to be laser-focused to bring in your potential buyers by addressing their needs and interests, then your newsletter is something that requires a broadly appealing appearance. Everyone likes something that looks pretty, and a product can be attractive without losing its necessary business-centric focus. Even a B2B company benefits from having a well-put-together email newsletter.

One example of a company that has made a major push to stay on top of its advertising game is a professional newspaper that keeps in touch with its readership between print publications by sending periodic emails that are well constructed is Garden and Gun. Kim Alexander, the newspaper’s media publicist, said this was a major incentive for putting together the newsletter in the first place.

“We are at heart a print publication, but we only print six times a year,” Alexander said in an interview. “So we use email to stay in touch with our readers and drive traffic to our website.”

B2B companies can have the same impact if they put together something truly attractive in conjunction with extremely thoughtful content.

Social media is important, but so is an email marketing strategy
A point that Jayson DeMers from Forbes brought is that companies generally need social media profile, plus social media optimization, such as inserting keywords into posts. This goes along with an email marketing strategy. The goal is to have as many open funnels from which people can find content. A company’s social media, blog and email newsletter are all intended to grab specific people’s attention through a story targeting their interests. From there, your possible customers look through your website and your other online content and begin to carry an Internet “paper trail” that email marketing software picks up through integration with your website. In this way, when a customer follows through on the call to action and sends his or her email address to the newsletter mailing list, the marketing gets even more focused.

Basically, current email marketing procedures are founded on the idea that a company hooks people and then reels them in through progressively narrower and more specific content. The person reading the information on the website gets a special letter that has information culled from a database of different paragraphs and templates designed to be mixed and matched to produce a welcoming newsletter that is completely customized. The person opens the letter, which triggers another email, and after looking through the news stories, the marketing software determines how much has been read and which parts were seen. It then customizes the second email even more than the first, so that the information is even more direct and specific. The end result is greater relevance to the potential client, possibly causing a phone call.

The phone call comes from the emails
This brings up the other point of an email marketing strategy, which is generating further calls to action and reducing barriers to entry. Someone may feel no qualms about reading a blog, and once he or she reads the blog, that person goes the next step and sends his or her email address. After getting enough content through email, then (and only then) that person feels OK about calling the company. This can all happen passively without any work from the person doing marketing – it is all automated via the software.

The phone call engages the active side of good marketing software by taking all the information that has now been attached to this client and sending it to the person who takes phone calls. He or she knows everything this potential client has read and seen about the company and its products or services, and this means that a match with a certain pitch is easier to make.

But to make the call, customers may first need to see a few newsletters. And that’s where the email marketing strategy comes into the picture.