BtoB Magazine
I’m not sure if email marketing can be fun, but it is interesting. I became interested in the subject after I downloaded a white paper on 2008 email marketing trends from Exact Target while I was developing a speaker proposal for an email marketing conference.
A great b2b email marketing resource is, oddly enough, BtoB magazine. I recently read a couple of (thankfully) short and easy to comprehend articles on the topic. One article was about personalizing your email efforts and the other was advice on nurturing leads via an email marketing campaign.
You can read the articles yourself, but these are my takeaways:
1. Appoint an email marketing database czar. Your effort is only as good as your data.
2. Use segmentation to send the right message to the right prospect at the right time.
3. Send email based on the prospect’s behavior. For example, you should know if your prospects have visited your website and exactly what pages they viewed. If they were researching a particular product, a well timed email offering a discount on that product may help get them off the dime.
Fishing for prospects to put into your email marketing database can also be fun. Exact Target does a great job of this (full disclosure: they’ve paid me nothing) utilizing the excellent industry white papers that are available on its website. The cost of downloading a white paper is providing them with your contact information and some other demographic data.
My idea: Collect demographic data that asks sports fans to name their favorite teams. Then you have an excuse to send them a “How ’bout those Mets?!” message when their team wins. They may even think of you when they think of winning. And winning makes everyone happy.
Daniel Durazo's Blog 