Efficient B-to-B E-mail Marketing

Cisco doesn't offer incentives to customers to share their e-mail addresses, in compliance with certain countries' restrictions. “It's better to give a compelling, persuasive reason,” says Kushner. “We also promise that no salesperson will call.”

Here are some things to keep in mind about e-mail address collection:

• Explain to your customers the benefit of providing their address. Give a good business reason, like “We want to keep you up to date on new technical developments.”

• Service locations may actually be the most effective collection points, compared with, say, outbound marketing communications.

• Create a Web-based preferences page where customers can manage subscriptions and indicate the kinds of e-mail, postal mail and phone calls they'd like to receive.

• Avoid blanket permissions that apply across brands or business units. Lewis says, “The more options you give them, the happier both sides will be. You may find they'll decide to receive things they didn't know were available before.”

• Place an e-mail address-collection device both on your home page and well into your site. “Thanks to search engines you never know where people will enter your site. So be sure the e-mail sign-up is everywhere, including landing pages,” Brady notes.

RELEVANT COMMUNICATIONS

Stop blasting! Once you have an e-mail address, your mission shifts to maintaining its status — preventing that customer from opting out. So relevant, timely, targeted communications are a must. We all know this, but not all of us are doing it.

Tektronix, an engineering instruments company in Oregon, feels it's solved the relevance problem by communicating with customers using “incremental profiling.” Based on product interest, the firm sends an e-mail, or makes an outbound call, with an information-based offer.

For example, for customers who've indicated an interest in spectrum analyzers, Tektronix will offer a paper titled something like “Fundamentals of Real-time Spectrum Analysis.” If the customer bites, more detail is requested about product interests: Is the client looking for radar, surveillance, RFID, or other subtopics within spectrum analysis?

The result is better segmentation, greater relevance and, best of all, response. The program is delivering 46% clickthrough and 9% response rates, meaning the customer opened, clicked and took some action to continue the dialogue. According to Tektronix CMO Martyn Etherington, “We get not only high response rates but also a good, profiled database. The hard part, though, is the rigorous planning that goes into setting up the dialogue streams in advance. We involved our sales peers in developing questions for the e-mail conversations.”

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RUTH P. STEVENS (ruth@ruthstevens.com) consults on customer acquisition and retention, and teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She is the author of “The DMA Lead Generation Handbook” and “Trade Show and Event Marketing.”

Appending Tips

E-mail appending has matured dramatically since its early days. FreshAddress CEO Bill Kaplan offers three possible approaches:

• Send your house file to the vendor for matching against a large database of opted-in names. These are businesspeople who have given permission at some point to share their names, typically by having either checked — or not unchecked — a box indicating that they're interested in receiving e-mail from selected marketing partners. The match is done based on first/last name and company name/postal address.

• Append unmatched names using corporate domain pattern matching. Vendors do this in different ways. At FreshAddress it's optional. TowerData's B-to-B appending process consists primarily of imputed address formulation. You'll have to decide whether your company is comfortable with this practice.

• Match against an opt-in consumer e-mail address file. FreshAddress has 450 million consumer records, many of which identify small or home office operators and corporate employees working from home.

After the match, the next step is cleanup and validation. FreshAddress runs the matched e-mail addresses through as many as 20 hygiene and suppression processes, comparing them against the Federal Communications Commission's wireless blocked list, the Direct Marketing Association's do-not-e-mail file, spam traps, and of course house file opt-outs.

Finally, the vendor sends an e-mail on behalf of the client, selling customers on the benefits of receiving e-mail but offering the option to unsubscribe. Bounces and opt-outs are tracked and deleted, and the net names are run through the suppression process again to ensure they're as fresh as possible.

What append rates can you expect? FreshAddress averages 10% to 30% on B-to-B files, broken down as follows:

• 3% to 7% from matching against opt-in names.
• 6% to 18% from corporate domain pattern matching.
• 1% to 5% from consumer and small/home office matching. — RPS