Olivier Choron
Email marketing, well, where to start? For many companies, this is a method which has slowly but surely become less and less effective, with the unsubscribe rate steadily increasing. On the consumer side, this is not surprising, as consumers who have already bought from yourselves require no further interaction… for now that is. And let’s face it, who else is fed up of receiving hundreds of ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ emails every day? Engagement rate unsurprisingly is low.
But for brands that operate within the channel, that’s right I am talking about B2B marketing, this is an exciting communication method which I will prove to you still works.
That said, the main issue with email marketing relates to brands’ inability to target their audience effectively in a cost effective way.
The good news – You don’t need to spend so much time and effort anymore!
Typically, you used to require several communications managers to manage the process, graphic designers to come with nice designs and HTML developers to code your emails. You also relied on finding, and segmenting your partner data, for each newsletter you sent. This was especially true if you attempted to ‘lightly’ target each partner type, such as by grouping partners by their membership level – Gold, Silver and Bronze, or perhaps by the products they sell.
You previously spent vast sums of money to export info from one source and load it on your email system, as each newsletter would need to be different, to embody content specifically designed for certain partners.
But even this still left some gaps: what happens when you have a gold partner that sells many of your product ranges? You either risked sending them five copies of duplicate information, or you create a newsletter specifically for them, an unrealistic and very costly task.
I’m sure some of you probably are still doing all of this. Don’t worry, we can stop this headache once and for all!
Take it from me, it is no longer necessary to spend this much valuable time and resources to run your email marketing program.
Use best-of-breed software to send 100%-targeted newsletters to your partners
I’m not sure if you have yet come across newsondemand®, you’d know it if you had. It has been a life changer for many brands. Take SAP, for example, they used to send up to three newsletters a day to their partners, each containing duplicate information. Their targeting strategy consisted of breaking newsletters down by product focus, so if their partners, unfortunately, fell into more than one of their product focusses, they would be sent more than one copy.
Not only was this time consuming for SAP, with content needing to be approved and translated into multiple languages, but by the time all content had gone through this vigorous process it was out of date. It’s not surprising partners were unengaged.
How it worked for SAP
News on demand has enabled SAP to create 100%-targeted newsletters for all partners, without the need for any HTML coding. All SAP have to do is insert articles into the platform, decide on their priorities (high priority articles will appear at the top), and a beautiful magazine-like newsletter will be produced. What’s also great is that partners can choose what topics they would like to receive information about, and even how often, e.g. weekly, daily or monthly. This guarantees they are receiving precisely what they want to read, when they want to read it. Are you doing this today?
The transformation
SAP’s email open rates are now up by 49%, with some emails receiving a click to open rate of 17%. Very impressive! The reason? Content is targeted and provided as/ when required by partners!
More importantly for SAP, the turnaround of content being approved is now considerably faster as no HTML coding is required; so sending outdated content is no longer an issue. It also takes them much less effort to produce fantastic-looking newsletters, with each article targeted to their recipients.
If you would like to find out more about this how this worked for SAP, I suggest you read this blog post or watch this webinar.
So if you have overlooked email marketing, it’s about time you re-visited it, but that’s only if you use email marketing software. Not only will this make the task easier for your brand, but it is also cost-effective. After all, a targeted approach is the best strategy and you will certainly receive it here.
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