The Long and Short of B2B Email Marketing

The prob­lem with email marketing

In 2010, Sheryl Sand­berg, for­mer COO at Face­book claimed that ​“Email is dead”.

In 2014, Slack was per­ceived as the ​“Email killer”.

Since the first mar­ket­ing email was sent in 1978, peo­ple haven’t stopped announc­ing its death. Almost half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, email is still not dead. One could argue it’s very much alive. And works won­der­ful­ly, too:

More than four bil­lion peo­ple use email world­wide, and four in five con­sumers pre­fer email over any form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Plus, 95% of mar­keters believe email mar­ket­ing has an excel­lent ROI.

• 40% of B2B mar­keters said email newslet­ters are the most crit­i­cal aspect for suc­cess of their con­tent mar­ket­ing plan. (Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute, 2017)
• Email mar­ket­ing pro­duces 174% more con­ver­sions than social media. (Cam­paign Monitor)
• A good email ROI rate can aver­age between 3600% to 4200% (Mail­er­cloud)

Hid­den behind the channel’s endurance, resilience and out­stand­ing results, a big prob­lem lurks unno­ticed: Most of us do it wrong. I say ​“us” because, even though we’ve been doing email mar­ket­ing for almost twen­ty years, craft­ing cam­paigns that make the chan­nel help­ful for both long and short term strate­gies is still a challenge.

The Long and Short of It Strikes Again

Back in 2013, Peter Field and Les Binet pub­lished their leg­endary paper stat­ing that long term adver­tis­ing strate­gies showed much more effi­cien­cy than short term ones. You may already know this, so let’s sum it up. Long sto­ry short (pun intended):

Short term is pure­ly tac­ti­cal and great for acti­va­tion. It tar­gets spe­cif­ic seg­ments, usu­al­ly warm leads mid-fun­nel, and is eas­i­er to mea­sure with per­for­mance mar­ket­ing tools.

How­ev­er, short term cam­paigns lose effec­tive­ness soon and the impact in audi­ence per­cep­tion and sales go back to square one fast.

Though long term cam­paigns take more time to show results, these not only strength­en sales and adver­tis­ing per­for­mance, but also boost the short term coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign performance.

Cam­paigns evok­ing emo­tion have a high­er prob­a­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing mem­o­ries and work best when address­ing your entire tar­get audi­ence.

Mem­o­ry build­ing is essen­tial in B2B because (as we stat­ed in pre­vi­ous issues) only 5% of your poten­tial cus­tomers are active­ly look­ing to purchase.

You need to build men­tal avail­abil­i­ty for the remain­ing 95% so your brand comes to mind when the time is right.

• Con­clu­sions from the objec­tive analy­sis are solid:
• Long-term invest­ment in adver­tis­ing deliv­ers dou­ble the prof­it of a short-term approach
• Brands which tar­get the whole mar­ket achieve 3 times as many large busi­ness effects than those that focus on exist­ing customers
• Emo­tion­al adver­tis­ing is twice as effi­cient as ratio­nal adver­tis­ing, and deliv­ers twice the profit

The study even con­cludes that bal­anc­ing your bud­get 50/50 to work the long and short respec­tive­ly deliv­ers the best results. For B2B. For B2C con­sumer prod­ucts it’s ⁶⁰⁄₄₀.

If the evi­dence is out there, why do we seem to focus too much on the short term alone?

All mar­ket­ing is just marketing

When we dis­cuss this issue with clients or col­leagues, we often see the same counter-argu­ment: ​“This only mat­ters for large con­sumer brands”, or ​“it only applies to large, main­stream advertising”.

They’re wrong. Adver­tis­ing, brand­ing, posi­tion­ing, prod­uct, mer­chan­dis­ing, acti­va­tion, TV, radio, pod­casts, dig­i­tal: It’s all the same thing. There’s still Four Ps in Mar­ket­ing, remember?

This reveals an under­ly­ing prob­lem with mar­ket­ing in our industry.

Per­for­mance incen­tives are look­ing for short term KPIs, so we tend to focus efforts on the bot­tom of the fun­nel. Nobody gets a bonus for some­thing that will hap­pen in five years, and that you can­not tech­ni­cal­ly ‑or eas­i­ly- attribute to a par­tic­u­lar action.

Uncer­tain mar­kets – and we’ve been in one for the past 15 years – lack patience. And the lack of patience makes the mar­ket uncertain.

We over-use pro­mo­tions and acti­va­tion nar­ra­tive in order to get results we can share with the board so Annoy­ing Alex on Finance can give us a break and, per­haps, we can enjoy our three-day year­ly vaca­tion with our phones turned off.

This makes tech­ni­cal mar­ket­ing in gen­er­al, and email in par­tic­u­lar, dis­joint­ed from the greater scheme of things. It’s less risky for our stress lev­els and job safe­ty. And less effective.

In oth­er words, we con­fuse tac­tics with strategy.

This hap­pens across all chan­nels, and most def­i­nite­ly with email. We tend to think of email mar­ket­ing as a con­ver­sion dri­ver, not a mem­o­ry-build­ing one. It can and should be both.

Get­ting the basics right:
Seg­ment and conquer

Counter-intu­itive­ly enough, in order to bark at the right tree, we need to focus our long-term atten­tion on cus­tomers out of mar­ket. This requires under­stand­ing our Cat­e­go­ry Entry Points (CEPs, or fan­cy for ​“cus­tomer needs”) and cat­e­go­riz­ing our audi­ences accordingly.

Seg­ments are extreme­ly impor­tant in B2B and often neglect­ed, due to lack of enriched data or sim­ply because we tend to embrace cam­paigns as some­thing we only send once or twice a month just with prod­uct updates and com­pa­ny news.

Here are some exam­ples we see often:

Deliv­er­ing the same nar­ra­tive to dif­fer­ent customers

Send­ing the same email to a new lead and a long-term cus­tomer can send a con­fus­ing or irrel­e­vant mes­sage to at least one of them, and will dilute the impact of your nar­ra­tive. Part­ners, dis­trib­u­tors, first timers, large buy­ers, leads, they’re all different.

Our cre­ative approach is data and infor­ma­tion dri­ven instead of brand driven

Focus­ing sole­ly on pro­mo­tions, new prod­ucts, specs, dis­counts, or clear­ances is like­ly to boost short-term sales but won’t do much for brand loy­al­ty (or, more real­is­tic, and much less dra­mat­ic, aware­ness) and mem­o­ry. Do not neglect emo­tion and nar­ra­tive. Sto­ries still matter.

For­get­ting the pow­er of tai­lored nur­tur­ing automation

Anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty missed. Auto­mat­ed work­flows allow you to send per­son­al­ized con­tent at the right time, based on user behav­ior and pref­er­ences. It can guide cus­tomers along the dif­fer­ent stages of their jour­ney. For exam­ple, after a poten­tial cus­tomer down­loads a whitepa­per, an auto­mat­ed email sequence can fol­low up with addi­tion­al resources, case stud­ies, and tes­ti­mo­ni­als, build­ing that men­tal avail­abil­i­ty and trust. Remem­ber that B2B clients can­not be pushed down the fun­nel. B2C is about cre­at­ing a need. We’re sell­ing to peo­ple that become in-mar­ket when the time is right.

Fail­ing to lever­age the val­ue of return­ing customers

Repeat cus­tomers are more like­ly to con­vert and tend to spend more than new ones. Send­ing per­son­al­ized offers or loy­al­ty rewards to return­ing cus­tomers can encour­age repeat pur­chas­es, and fol­low-up emails after a pur­chase can pro­vide upsell oppor­tu­ni­ties, fur­ther increas­ing cus­tomer life­time val­ue, as well as some valu­able feedback.

For­get the stan­dard questions

Ask your favorite ​“Mar­ket­ing Expert Extra­or­di­naire and Friend­ly Cus­tomized AI/GPT Agent” what you need to do to self-assess your email mar­ket­ing per­for­mance. Go and do the same by googling the top three or four results for ​“b2b email mar­ket­ing tips”. You’ll get the same mix of bull­shit and plat­i­tudes on both: A long list of KPIs fol­lowed by vague deliv­er­abil­i­ty advice and a set of tools that will mag­i­cal­ly trans­form your results into sales.

B2B is dif­fer­ent. And your busi­ness is unique. We promise. Instead, try to ask the right questions:

• How can we reach our out of mar­ket audi­ence with email?
• Are we deliv­er­ing val­ue, free of charge, so our cus­tomers can improve their life and busi­ness results? What’s in it for them?
• Is our mes­sage mem­o­rable? Can we do some­thing more to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it?
• Do we actu­al­ly know how long it takes for them to con­vert, on average?
• Do we know the aver­age life­time val­ue so we can plan a long term acqui­si­tion strat­e­gy with a real­is­tic budget?
• Is our email post-click expe­ri­ence tai­lored, so when a prospect is final­ly ready to be in-mar­ket we can make it as easy as pos­si­ble for them to con­vert? This applies to on and offline marketing.

Some prac­ti­cal advice, in case it comes handy

A good place to start is:

• Under­stand your Cat­e­go­ry Entry Points through The W’s Frame­work so you can bet­ter seg­ment your audience.
• Plan your email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns for the next twelve months. See­ing it all in one place will help you keep a bal­anced mix of client acti­va­tion and brand storytelling.
• Split your reports. Con­sol­i­date per­for­mance data sep­a­rate­ly. Con­ver­sion dri­ven cam­paigns are pret­ty clear. Just look into good old open rate, click rate, clicks to open rate, and email-attrib­uted sales. Long-term strate­gies are hard­er to track, but once you have six months or more into it, pat­terns should start surfacing.
• Tack­le all the stages of the buy­ing cycle and all your audi­ences with tru­ly tai­lored cam­paigns. Have sep­a­rate approach­es for exist­ing or for­mer cus­tomers, deal­ers or dis­trib­u­tors, prospects, press, etc.

The evi­dence is out there. Mix­ing the long and the short pays off, and email is a fan­tas­tic, cheap, per­for­mant and famil­iar chan­nel to explore this.

You can only enter a vir­tu­ous sales cir­cle if you put enough effort into the inputs with­out obsess­ing over the out­puts. Get the strat­e­gy togeth­er, the team aligned, do the hard work first and, in the words of a great 90s poet, have a lit­tle patience.