Email marketing's evolution challenges some popular notions about new marketing channels

So email marketing is a dying channel? Social media has taken over and now rules the roost?  Not so fast.
In the trenches, where actual marketing and lead gen occurs, outside of the scope of industry articles and blogs that state otherwise, email is growing in use at an exponential rate among b2b marketers.

While the days of generalist mass email blasts are going the way of the dinosaur, the use of email as a nurture marketing and content delivery vehicle are rapidly expanding.  We may not see a similar volume of email, but the usage by savvy marketers is certainly growing fast.  This post explores the new ways smart b2b marketers are using email to increase their lead conversion and improve their overall marketing  presence.

Get personal - the b2b marketer should rethink email marketing firstly from the perspective of what it is attempting to communicate to the potential buyer.  Personalization in email is not a new concept.  Marketers have been applying personalization to email for some time.  So what do I mean when I say "get personal"?  I mean get personal in the the content you deliver and how you deliver it with email.  Go beyond dropping the person's name/company in the email and start to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.  That is the essence of getting personal in email marketing.   In order to execute a more personalized chain of communications, you need data.  What data you needs depends on how automated you want to go or how deep your content catalog is.  A simple example is you have solutions that support 3 vertical market segments.  A lead comes to your website and downloads a white paper relevant to Vertical segment 1.  You will then execute a series of follow up emails (usually automatically based on triggers) that provide supporting and relevant content.
A typical email trigger series may look like this:

Action - Download vertical white paper 1

• Trigger 1 - "Thank you for accessing white paper - cross promote white paper 2"
• Trigger 2 - "Thanks for accessing white paper - here is a link for product data sheet for vertical 1
• Trigger 3 - "Promote webinar/event relevant to vertical 1

In this example, you will need the basic name/email and the information about the asset that was downloaded.  this information will then trigger the subsequent communications.

Save Time and Money with Triggers
Trigger-based emails are becoming extremely popular amongst savvy marketers.  The reason is simple, Triggers never sleep.  While you're on vacation, in a meeting, at a trade show, home sick....whatever, you're triggers are sitting there, faithfully doing what was once a rote task that you had to be there for.  Well, I'm here to tell you that while they may sound simple, trigger-based emails are not as easy as an auto-responder.  Like any good campaign, they should have expected outcomes, planning and follow up actions.  Trigger-based emails, like the ones found in SalesFUSION, are often tied to the website.  You're website is presenting content out to the masses.  Someone comes in and accesses an asset.  The trigger-based email fulfills the asset automatically, then waits a day, thanks them, waits a few more days, thanks them again.

The importance of triggers cannot be understated.  They allow the marketer to always be on.  They also enable you to make actionable the content on your website.  You can also ensure that all leads that hit your website are treated equally, at least initially.  This has a real and measurable impact in your lead conversion rates. 

Drip Campaigns 
Unlike trigger campaigns, drip-based marketing campaigns are used more as a series of communications that are related to each other.  The primary difference between drip-based email and trigger-based email is who receives it and when.  In drip campaigns, you are communicating initially with a group, segment or list on a specific calendar date and time.  Most typically, the drip campaigns have specific follow up emails that are sent to groups who have behaved or interacted with the previous email in a certain way.  This string of communications can be relatively short (say 30-days) or long (90-days).  The benefit of drip campaigns is that they allow for continuous branding and messaging of relevant content to a group of people over time.

Email marketing has not succumbed to social media, or any other channel for that matter.  It is rapidly growing in usage amongst b2b marketers.   Email is being used more efficiently and effectively and has grown up in its overall efficacy as a marketing channel in and of itself.

Understanding nurture marketing

Nurture marketing is a term that has gained public visibility over the last several years.  As eMarketing applications have flooded the b2b marketing community, there have been great strides in technology-enabled marketing to help professionals increase their capabilities relative to demand and lead generation.

As with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding at how best to leverage new technology in day-to-day circumstances. Nurture marketing is a perfect example of this.  The term itself can be somewhat misleading so we'll first spend some time defining what nurture marketing is, what technology makes up "nurture marketing" and then we'll provide some real world examples of how b2b marketers can leverage this technology to improve their coverage and reach.

What is nurture marketing?   

Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer.  The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria.  This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral.  For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical.   Behavioral criteria are typically dependent upon a prospects interactions with the seller.  These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).  

How is nurture marketing implementing?

In the context of eMarketing, nurture marketing is typically comprised of  of 2 types of email communications; Drip Email and Trigger Email.  Drip emails are timed emails that go out to a pre-defined segment of contacts at a pre-defined time/date.  Trigger emails are only sent when a certain condition is met such as follow up email sent based on a campaign response.

Probably the best way to describe nurture marketing is to describe a sample campaign.

Basic nurture campaign:

Campaign Type - Webinar 

An initial invitation will go out or other promotional vehicles (banner ad, email sponsorship....etc are implemented.  Initiations direct individuals to a registration page for signing up for the webinar.

2-3 days after the initial webinar email invitation goes out, a subject line swap email is implemented.  In this case, the original email subject line is changed to a new subject and automatically re-sent to all those in the original list who did not open the email.

2-3 days later, a reminder email is triggered for all registered leads for the webinar.

The day of the webinar - a second reminder is sent about 1 hour before the start of the event.

Post-webinar - 2 primary branched followup campaigns are then executed following the webinar.

Branch 1 - Attendee email follow up campaign - For attendees a followup email is immediately triggered thanking the attendees for attending and the email may include a redirect to a companion white paper, a pdf copy of the presentation or to the website for additional information.

Potential follow up activities for branch 1

• Attendee responds to email - triggers call from sales
  
• Attendee does not respond to email  - put  into 7-day drip email
• Attendee responds to email - triggers invitation to next webinar

Branch 2 - Non-Attendees - those who registered but did not attend webinar - for this branch you may go in several directions.  The key is to stay engaged with this group as they were interested enough to register but likely had something come up that prevented them from coming.

Potential follow up activities for branch 2

• Send "sorry you couldn't attend" email immediately following the event - redirect to a re-broadcast registration (if applicable)
• Send email with link to copy (pdf) of the presentation
• Email inviting to a similar webinar
• Email inviting non-attendees to download a copy of a white paper

As you can see from this very simple example, companies can get very creative and detailed in trigger/drip followup.

The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.

Solutions like SalesFUSION (www.salesfusion.com) are specifically designed to help marketers implement these types of campaigns.

To learn more - visit us at www.salesfusion.com

i