• If you do not segment your campaigns, relevance suffers
• If you never target e-mail according to the prospect’s behaviour, you are missing one of the most powerful conversion drivers.
• If you cannot tie your activities to website visits, social media interactions and offline activity, you’re only getting a tiny part of the picture.
• If your mail is still in a silo, the ‘leads’ you hand over to sales won’t reflect everything you know about each prospect (so they’ll be harder to close).
Unfortunately, for many B2B marketers, e-mail marketing is still stuck in the dark ages of ‘batch and blast’. It’s a low-cost medium so it gets away with it. But more and more marketers have moved their e-mail marketing to the next level and are multiplying their ROI.The challenge is to harness the power of the new e-mail strategies and tactics and release the true potential of B2B e-mail – without getting bogged down in complexity.
Five ways your email platform is holding you down
1. The e-mail silo: platforms treat news letters as a separate silo, divorced from all the other customer interaction channels. So you cannot merge a prospect’s activities with his or her website visits, content downloads, social media engagements and offline interactions.This single, unified view of the prospect is essential for deciding how to target each prospect – and when to hand them over to the sales team.
2. One-off campaigns: platforms are good for sending out one-off campaigns and blasts. They’re not so good at designing and delivering multi-step ‘drip campaigns’ that, over time, move prospects along the purchase journey. Without the automation, you are forced to send your mails based on your time-table, ignoring the buyer’s. With it, you can nurture prospects as they progress through your drip campaign. Multi-step campaigns need an automated marketing platform that can take each prospect along at their own pace and nurture longer-cycle sales.
3. Landing page disconnect: news letter always lead somewhere. But traditional platforms force you to create and manage these landing pages in separate tools. So your efforts are not just inefficient, they are less effective – because your ability to generate and test the right landing pages,and forms for each e-mail segment are limited. Managing your e-mails and landing pages together is essential to closed-loop marketing. Without it, you are leaking opportunities.
4. Trigger insensitivity: When a prospect does something meaningful – on your website, in social channels or via mail – you need to be able to respond with a relevant, timely e-mail. If you miss these triggers and simply blast e-mail to everyone whenever your promotional calendar dictates, you are ignoring your prospects and their buying signals. platforms cannot send automated e-mails based on triggers that happen in any channel or even offline. You need your news letter to be managed by marketing automation for that.
5. Revenue ignorance: Email platforms can tell you about open rates and click-throughs. But what your business really wants to know is which activities led to revenue. If you can’t connect your e-mail system to the downstream sales processes and activities, you cannot determine true ROI. If your e-mail activities (and those from every other channel) are integrated with your CRM system, you move from being in the clicks business to being in the revenue business. The good news? You are a very short step away from removing these obstacles in one bold stroke – by moving from your traditional email platform to proper marketing automation.
