The B2B Email Marketing Strategy Webinar Q&As

Q: does your software integrate with Salesforce

Yes, and a range of other CRMs (details available on request)

Q: is using linkedin something that you put into your email strategies

You can add a link to your linkedin profile within your email to drive traffic to your profile, and also have an associated linkedin group which posts bulletins using content from your newsletters and upcoming events.

If your sales/support team are active on linkedin then you could personalise the email from them and send links through to their linkedin profile, encouraging further conversation and engagement if the recipient wants to do more research before directly engaging.

Also linkedin is another place to share your newsletters to encourage sign ups.

Q: With eye tracking, there is a triangle the eye follows on a web page. I just wanted to know if there was any research on how people read emails.

In general, people will glance at the title, then the subheaders and click through to anything they find relevant. So the most successful campaigners put a lot of thought into these subheaders to attract attention. However, the beauty of email is that you can control the eye pattern of your recipients.

The way I like to gage a recipient’s interest is through heatmaps. Within PureResponse, at the end of every campaign you will see a heatmap on your reports showing you exactly where your recipients have been clicking (and therefore viewing) the most. I will then consider why these areas are most popular. Is it because of the positioning of the links, or what I was offering?

I would then use this information for further testing on my next campaign.

Q: Is there a best formula for where to put your sign up on your webpage?

The way I look at this is if I get to your website and think I'd quite like to hear more and sign up to your newsletter, I need to be able to find this within a maximum of 30 seconds before I lose interest.

I see more and more clients experimenting with this as positioning is so important. Try positioning your sign up form in different ways throughout your website and see which is getting the most clicks and sign ups.

You could apply some of these to your testing: always place above the fold of the page, place it after relevant content that would encourage sign up, don’t just limit to your homepage – place wherever there is relevant content on site, don’t offer too many call to actions in the same place – vary it up.

Q: What about website visitor tracking?

Your ESP should be able to help you track the path of your recipients from the email, to the website all the way up to the checkout.

Pure360 integrates with Google Analytics to easily help you to see these results, and also offers post click tracking to show you how much your site visitors have spent as a result of your email campaign.

Q: If somebody recommends 5 friends these people wouldn't have opted in to receive our emails so how would we make sure that we are emailing them without spamming?

It is safer not to give visitors any incentive to "tell a friend" because that creates a strong argument that you are the "instigator" of the message – i.e. they wouldn't do it without the promise of a reward from you.

You are sending a message to someone who you assume has consented via a third party (i.e. your visitor, who passed on his friend's details to you). So include a statement on your Tell a Friend page – somewhere obvious and above the "Send" button – that says something like: "By hitting the button you confirm that you have the consent of the individual whose details you are supplying."

It's also recommended that you check that the recipient hasn't already asked you to suppress his details. Your ESP should be able to help you set up a system whereby your website communicates with the database holding your suppression list and identifies and suppresses those who have opted out previously. If it's practical to do this, it must be considered best practice.

Finally, when you do send an email to the friend, make sure you state clearly why they are receiving the mail ‘Your friend Bob thought you may find this useful’ to avoid going straight to the spam/junk folder.

Q: Is a welcome email the same as an automated email that we send when somebody signs up to our emails?

Yes, once someone clicks submit on your sign up form, an automatic email is sent to the recipient to welcome them to the list (and perhaps offer them a discount for signing up... with a link to your website to get them engaged from the start).

Q: how do you suggest a successful use of Twitter?

Twitter should just be seen as another channel, like email, that you can use to get further reach for your content and drive traffic back to your website.

Firstly you need to make sure that you are already set up with an active Twitter account and have begun to build your following, then when you send your emails out you can begin to include ‘share this via Twitter’ buttons and ‘Follow us on Twitter’ links. Don’t add them so they look like an afterthought, make sure they are included in the design and say why they are being used ‘For more updates like this’, ‘To see the latest offers’, you get the gist...

Make sure that you are then using your Twitter account to post links to the same content that your email is talking about – a couple of posts per day is good to start with.

Twitter can also be a good place to get content for your website and emails – set up a weekly roundup of industry news, including your own of course, and use it to encourage sign up for your newsletter or company email.

We have articles in our resources section on integrating social media and email marketing, if you’d like more information.

Q: what is the email service that lets you see who has sent referrals to friends? 

I would imagine that most good ESPS will provide this functionality.

PureResponse will show you detailed reports of how well your campaign has gone. On the reports for each campaign you will see exactly who clicked on the send to a friend link in your email, and will have an option to export this list and send a new campaign to these people

I hope you found this Q&A session helpful - If you have any further questions on the topic of B2B Email Marketing Strategy then please drop me a comment below and I'll answer them for you.

If you missed our Webinar then you can view the recorded version here

Thanks

 Maria

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