
- How to Sell to Market Research Buyers, Part 3
- How to Sell to Market Research Buyers, Part 2
- How to Sell to Market Research Buyers, Part 1
- 5½ [behind-the-scenes] Marketing & Sales Activities You Need To Do in December
- Got something to say?
- Running a small firm? Who holds you accountable?
- Marketing & Sales Success Begins with a Simple Step… Thinking!
- Your Sales Forecast Doesn’t Have to be a Guessing Game!
- Lead generation is a 3-step process.
- Measuring Sales… it’s Not just about Revenue
- 7 Selling Behaviors Seller-Doers Must Employ to be Successful.
- Can you really be “all things to all people?”
- 12 Marketing & Sales Activities you Gotta STOP this Year!
- How to maximize the impact of your marketing investment.
- Revenue Growth? Try the ‘5% Challenge’… it’s Brilliant!
- Should you ever walk away from revenue?
- Get Ready for 2017 with these 6 Marketing & Sales Activities
- 20 Marketing and Sales Concepts Business Leaders Need to Know, Part 2
- 20 Marketing and Sales Concepts Business Leaders Need to Know, Part 1
- 10 Guidelines for How to Be Successful at Sales
- Strategy Before Tactics!
- 6 Marketing & Sales Lessons Learned in our First 4 Years in Business
- The Sales Presentation: Stop Reading the PowerPoint Slides and Tell Your Story
- Content Marketing not working? Eh, don’t worry about it!
- Marketing Measurement: 3 New Methods You Have to Try in 2016
- The One Thing You Must Include in Your 2016 Marketing & Sales Plan
- Not using LinkedIn? Are you kidding me?!
- Is it OK to fire a client?
- Take Charge of Your Own Success… Stop Relying on Others!
- Getting first-time clients to take a chance on you.
- 9 Ways to Build your Business During the Summer Slowdown
- The Top 10 Ways to Build Awareness
- The 13 Most Common Website Mistakes
- The Most Important Part of Exhibiting
- Content marketing isn’t a one-time thing… it’s an all-the-time thing.
- THINKING! A framework for creating better business plans in 2015.
- Not happy with your marketing & sales? Then make just one change in 2015!
- For Beginners: Should I Tweet Daily? Yes… and here’s how.
- Got your Marketing Plan for 2015? No?! Now’s a good time to start…
- How to Connect with Booth Visitors – An Exhibitor’s Worksheet
- Not getting the email results you want? Make sure you’re following these 7 email marketing guidelines.
- 10 Ways to Get Clients to Sell FOR You (and they won’t cost a dime!)
- Do you know where you’re going? Why Strategy should drive your marketing & sales.
- 11 execution tips to help you exceed client expectations
- How to Turn First-time Clients into Repeat Clients
- 15 easy, low-cost marketing and sales tactics for 2014 – Part 2
- 15 easy, low-cost marketing and sales tactics for 2014 – Part 1
- 13 Lessons for Researchers Who Don’t Want (or Like) to Sell
- Social media marketing success in 30 minutes a day
- Get it right! You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
- It’s not that complicated! A common sense approach to the marketing & sales process.
- How MR firms are blowing it with new customers: Lessons learned while secret shopping
- Management or sales… you can’t serve two masters.
- Prove it! Nine ways to convince prospects to work with you for the first time.
- Five everyday ways to grow your business
- How that ‘one great client’ could doom your firm
- Six marketing and sales mistakes MR firms make every day
- Eight proven ways to build awareness – and why you should!
- Suspects, Prospects and Clients: Is your firm focused on the right target?
- A Checklist for Conducting Your Own Marketing & Sales Audit
- Learning to play the game: What football can teach us about marketing
- Differentiating your firm in a crowded marketplace
- 25 low- or no-cost ways to grow your business
- 15 Reasons E-mail Still Matters in Sales and Marketing
- Come prepared, dress the part and follow up: 10 dos for exhibiting at MR trade shows
- No rookies, no gum and no Frisbees: 10 don’ts for exhibiting at MR trade shows
- How to see yourself as clients see you
- Marketing 101: It takes Work to make it Work
- Use the 8 Ps of Marketing when Setting Strategy
- Integrate the 4 As of Marketing into Your Planning
- Size Does Matter: 4 Approaches to Growing Your Business
- The 12 Guiding Principles of Marketing (part 2)
- The 12 Guiding Principles of Marketing (part 1)
15 Reasons E-mail Still Matters in Sales and Marketing
With the explosion of social media over the past few years, you might suspect that the use of e-mail, that ol’ standby, as a marketing tool would be on the decline. Not even close!
Consider these e-mail-related statistics in the B2B environment:
- In 2013, it is estimated that there will be 691 million corporate e-mail accounts worldwide, up from 657 million in 2012 and 568 million in 2009. (The Radicati Group)
- 71 percent of B2B firms use e-mail marketing. (Forrester, 2011)
- E-mail is the preferred method of commercial communication by 74 percent of all online adults. (Merkel Report, 2011)
Here are 15 reasons why you should include e-mail marketing in your promotional plans.
- There are a number of commercially-available platforms that make creating (branded, HTML versions), executing (create a list and blast) and measuring (built-in analytics) e-mail campaigns easier than ever. Two of the most popular are www.myemma.com and www.constantcontact.com.
- Because businesspeople have their smartphones with them nearly 24/7, your e-mails are literally being delivered into the palms of their hands.
- You deliver your message directly to your audience – they don’t have to go looking for it or stumble across it.
- Look at the statistics above. E-mail is the de facto standard for business communication because people are used to using it and are simply comfortable with it.
- E-mail marketing is very inexpensive, with costs as low as a penny or two per address when you blast.
- The built-in analytics of the available platforms allow you not only to tally how many e-mails were sent, received, opened and how many people linked from your e-mail back to your Web site but these platforms will even tell you who did it so you can follow-up.
- It supports your other marketing and business initiatives. Clients can link from an e-mail to your Web site and your social media sites; it can be used to help launch new products, support your content marketing and so on.
- E-mail can be very targeted. Simply split your list into the relevant groups and send a different e-mail message to each group.
- Ease-of-use and built-in analytics make for easy A/B testing (http://tiny.cc/aawbkw), allowing you create a process of continual improvement. You can learn which kinds of subject lines work best, what type of content is preferred, which layout works best, whether long or short text is preferred, etc.
- E-mail extends your reach into the marketplace. Send out your e-mail and provide valuable content and it will get forwarded on to others not currently on your list.
- Good content in your e-mail (as opposed to self-promotional and sales-focused) helps your firm establish trust and credibility among your target audience.
- Depending on what kind of content you provide, e-mail can also help position your firm in the industry and showcase you as a subject-matter expert.
- E-mail is a connector – it literally links people back to your Web site, blog or any important resource on the Internet.
- E-mail is key component in the lead-nurturing process, helping you to stay in touch with prospective clients.
- Client contacts who opt in to your e-mails want to hear from you, showing a heightened level of interest and making them more qualified prospective clients than those who don’t opt in.
So, are you interested in adding e-mail back into your mix? The following are five key things to do to help ensure success.
- Write about things your audience wants to hear about, not just what you want to write about. Consider articles on research methodologies, applications, new technology, white papers, case studies and so on.
- Be consistent. Once you start, stick to the timetable. If you’re unreliable with something as simple as e-mail, what does that say about the quality of your work as a company?
- Use an opt-in list. Anything else is really spam. Conversely, make it easy for a subscriber to opt out.
- Start with an editorial calendar. That is, plan out, for at least the next six months, what you are going to write about and when you’ll write about it. It’s a lot easier and far less stressful than trying to figure it out each time you need content.
- You can’t manage what you don’t measure so be thorough in your measuring. Look at delivery and bounce rates, open and click-through rates, list growth and sharing numbers and continually conduct A/B testing (see No. 9 above).
So, here we are, entering the fourth quarter of 2012. As you start looking ahead to 2013 and crafting your marketing plan, make sure that e-mail marketing plays an important role in it. You’ll be glad you did. Good luck and good marketing.
This article was first published for Quirk’s.
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