How to Market to the B2B User Via E-Mail Newsletters

1. The offer. B2B email recipients were inundated last year with offers for free white papers and Webinars. Do you have to come up with something completely new for 2008? No, but your white paper or free guide better be pretty darn informative. Remember, it’s about your buyers, not you.

2. Landing pages. Without a successful landing page, your email campaign is going to flop. The Web page your readers click to does the heavy lifting. Use concise yet friendly copy to request the basics, usually no more than name, title, company, phone number, and email address. Then make it easy and fast to download the offer. Ideally, it’s a sequence of quid pro quo pages. You politely ask for contact information to collect a lead. In return, your reader gets the opportunity to specify how she wants to continue a conversation with you (by e-newsletter, phone, postal mail, etc.).

3. Measuring success. It’s not about click-throughs, although it’s nice to boast of a double-digit percentage. Ultimately, it’s not about conversion (i.e., those who clicked through to the landing page, filled out your form, then downloaded your white paper). It’s about sales. B2B email marketing is a long-term game. The medium is fluid and fast. But the decision-making that goes into the purchase of high-end products or services is often very, very slow.