One-size-fits-all marketing strategies carried over from B2C seldom translate in the niche world of B2B. Therefore, pursuing communications tools shown to grow sales is an essential part of a cost-effective B2B marketing plan. One such tool is marketing automation. But leveraging this tool effectively takes know-how. Learn how your company can benefit from marketing automation in this six-part series.
Question 4: What Kind of Emails Should I Be Sending?
But First…The Platform
In other words, what type of automation campaign should you use? The automation campaign you will use will depend on what message you want to get across. Most likely, you will end up using multiple automation campaigns as time goes on. Before helping you understand all of the different automation campaigns, let’s go over the marketing automation platform.
Marketing automation is driven by cloud based software that integrates with your existing digital tools and properties. Primary responsibilities include:
- to capture, segment, and store customer information
- enables you to use programmed behavior to deliver personalized communications to customers with no manual action
- measures and monitors the actions taken by your customers
- provides attributable campaign performance data and metrics.
You have multiple platform options including Infusionsoft, HubSpot, and Marketo to name a few.
Infusionsoft is a low cost, easy to deploy platform. Monthly costs are roughly 20% of the cost of competitive systems. It does have its flaws, as the feature set and scope of capabilities is relatively basic.
Hubspot offers the most comprehensive all-in-one coverage with a sophisticated CRM and salesperson-friendly user interface. Costs vary, but start around $1,200 per month for an entry level package.
Marketo is best suited for organizations with a clearly defined marketing automation strategy. It is the most expensive platform on the market, but is also the option that offers the most website integration features on the market.
Now, The Different Automation Campaigns
Again, the automation campaign you use will depend on the type of message you are trying to send to your contacts. Do you want to update them regularly on company initiatives? Are you looking to introduce them to a new product and encourage them to buy? Or do you want their feedback on recent purchases or services? There are many different types of email campaigns you can introduce to your customers, but today we’ll cover three that will likely be the most useful to you.
Newsletters
Regularly sending out a newsletter allows you to build trust with your contacts without ever having had a one-on-one sales phone call. Newsletters give customers an insight to your company’s best practices and innovations that build your credibility. You get the chance to introduce a product, explain why it is so great and list the benefits you can provide to your customers, and provide the customer with a direct purchase or inquiry link. In building trust, these newsletters build sales. Newsletters also provide the opportunity to increase traffic to your website and build your social media following.
Product Launch Promotions
When building an email in order to promote a product launch, make sure that you center your message completely around the product. Do not overload the contact with information about other offers, unrelated products, or news. When introducing the product, make sure you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with the email promotion. You want to sell the customer not so much on the product, but on what they’re missing by not having the product. What benefits would the product pose to them? What solution can you provide them with? Lastly, what do you want your subscribers to do after reading your email? Make it clear. Include a “Buy Now”, “Subscribe Here”, or “Pre-Order Now” button to help instigate that action.
VOC Surveys
A VOC survey is a Voice of Customer survey. These give you a clear way to capture your customer’s voice and opinions on your products, services, customer service, and even your email marketing. Consider it a way to get your contact’s opinion on anything related to their experience with your company. Before you send out a VOC survey, you want to make sure you have identified a clear objective for sending out the survey, a clear idea of the data you want to encapsulate, and decide on what technology/program you want to use to capture the data. You may also want to capture responses on multiple different channels to get different types of feedback. All of these decisions will affect what differentiates your VOC survey and makes it as useful to you as possible.
You can use one or multiple types of campaigns depending on the message (or messages) you want to distribute. The most important thing to consider when choosing the campaigns you will put together is what you want to do for your customer or what you want from your customer. What is the end goal? From there, the choice is easy.