B2B Internet Marketing

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10 Benefits of B-to-B Email Marketing

by Doug Hudiburg

If there is any single tool that we should be enthusiastically embracing as marketers, it is business to business email marketing.

There is simply no way to match the value that business to business email marketing provides for communicating with prospects and customers.

The amazing thing is most of us are not actively engaged in any form of email marketing yet. At best, we send an occasional email blast to our customer base to introduce a new product or announce an event.

Many of us have NEVER sent a single promotional email to a list of prospects or customers. So if you are among the few who have, reach right back and give yourself a hearty slap on the back.

I have my theories about why most of us do not use business to business email marketing to its greatest advantage, which I will not go into here, but I suspect it is heavily related to the following barriers:

1) We must frequently rely on IT and/or our Web team to provide the enabling infrastructure and we are low on their priority list.

2) We do not have direct access to the mailing and tracking tools and have to rely on outside resources to put our strategies into play.

3) We do not know exactly how to implement an effective business to business email marketing strategy.

4) We fear being branded as a spammer at the slightest indiscretion.

Regardless of why business to business email marketing is not more widely accepted, the fact remains that it is a marketing tool that we must have in our toolbox.

Those marketers who jump on the bandwagon now will have a decided advantage versus the competition when they deploy their 'secret weapon'.

Benefits of Business to Business Email Marketing

1) Low cost

Compared to any other form of direct marketing, business to business email marketing is fantastically cheap. When you cultivate and mail to your own opt-in email list, the cost per message is so low, you can almost call it free.

You do need to invest in some kind of infrastructure, but if you are smart and careful, you can keep your costs below $1,000 a year.

If you only send 10 messages to a list of 2,000 subscribers, your cost is just $.05 per message. You can see how a serious business to business email marketing program could cost just a fraction of a penny per message.

2) Metrics Galore

With business to business email marketing, almost every step in the buying process can be measured and tracked on an ongoing basis. You can easily track the total clicks on every link in each message, the conversion of clicks to sales or clicks to leads, and with some programs you can measure opens (how many people opened your message) and forwards (how many people forwarded your message) You can take what you learn from one campaign and apply it to future campaigns with a high degree of precision.

3) Permission based ...