Creative Differences

Business-to-business and business-to-consumer e-mail campaigns require vastly different creative tactics to drive the highest response, according to a report by e-mail service provider Silverpop.

For example, Silverpop found that B-to-B e-mail recipients were much more likely to answer an all-text e-mail than their B-to-C counterparts.

Silverpop's study of 612 e-mails sent by 430 companies noted that image-rich messages to consumers generated a 7.1% click rate; for all-text e-mails that figure was just 4.7%. In contrast, all-text B-to-B e-mails pulled a 5.4% click rate vs. 3.5% for e-mails containing an equal amount of text and images.

Another difference between the two campaigns was the offer's positioning.

“Surprisingly, the location of the offer in B-to-C e-mails really didn't matter,” said Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey. “Whereas in the B-to-B world, if that offer wasn't in the top half of the e-mail above the fold, the numbers showed a significant drop in response rates.”

In another unexpected finding, B-to-C e-mails with newsletter-style layouts got a 7.1% click-through rate — the highest of the seven styles Silverpop monitored — while postcard layouts, a consumer-marketer favorite, drew 6.2%.

Postcard-style B-to-B e-mails got the highest click rates — 7.9% — compared with the newsletter type, which pulled 5.4%.

Nussey finds it interesting that companies will spend millions of dollars figuring out how to optimize their Web sites' layouts, but a comparatively minuscule amount to optimize their e-mails' usability.

“There's nothing about an e-mail message that makes it less responsive to layout and creative,” he said. “In fact, you could argue that in e-mail it matters more. If I go to your Web site, I'm going to give you a minute or two. In an e-mail, you'd better get them in three or four seconds.”