We all know that “spray and pray” email marketing doesn’t work, and that one of your biggest risks is getting your prospects so tired of your emails that they unsubscribe. But what CAN you do to make sure your email communication is effective?

1. Don’t email too often. While you obviously want to stay top of mind with prospects, emailing too often is probably one of the quickest ways to make them unsubscribe.

2. Listen first. What type of information does the particular prospect need right now? Where are they in the buying cycle? Taylor your email to their specific needs.

3. Make your subject line catchy. A great subject line makes a big difference in terms of open rates.

4. Keep your subject line short. Email messages with short subject lines tend to outperform emails with longer subject lines.

5. Make it high quality. each and every email you send out needs to include high-quality, useful material. There’s no need to write each email from scratch – utilize existing content, including your company’s PPD and white papers, to create short, high quality emails.

6. Keep it short. We’re all busy. No one has the time to read through a long email. If ever in doubt, err on the side of “too short” rather than “too long” and split long messages into two separate emails.

7. Personalize your email. Include the recipient’s name in the subject line or in the greeting, and – if possible – address a specific concern of theirs in the opening paragraph.

8. Be sensitive to the recipient’s response to your previous email. A prospect that has opened your previous email and has clicked on the link embedded in it is ready for more frequent communication. A prospect that doesn’t open your emails or that glances at them without clicking on the links should be contacted infrequently, but regularly.

9. Don’t be spammy. Mentioning your product or solution and including a link to your site are fine of course, but make sure the bulk of your email contains truly useful information, even if not directly related to what you have to sell.

10. Automate. Use a sales enablement tool or a full marketing automation system to keep rack of your email marketing. Doing all of the above manually is nearly impossible.

Are you still viewing email marketing as a cheap, easy way to reach thousands of inboxes without putting too much effort into your message? Think again. The more generic your email is, the less it resonates with your recipient, and the less effective it is. If you’re still doing email blasts, your best case scenario is that your recipient would just delete your email and feel annoyed. Worst case scenario: your recipient unsubscribes, or reports your email as spam to their email provider.

You would think that generic email blasts would be a thing of the past by now, but a quick glance at my own spam folder is telling me otherwise. It is filled – packed – with generic emails, some of them from reputable companies – who never even made it to my inbox!

As marketers, we need to realize that email providers are looking out for their clients – not for us marketers, and in fact part of their responsibly towards customers is to shield them from unwanted email. Ask any email user and they’ll tell you how important spam protection is for them, and the better the email provider is, the more spam it filters out – for free.

It’s also important to realize that while there’s classic, obvious spam that no one wants to receive (“Best Male Enhancement Drugs Online Store! Free Shipping!”), email from a reputable company can become spam if the recipient didn’t opt in to receive that email. Email from a reputable company can also be deemed as spam by the recipient if it is generic and non-personalized, if the content is not interesting or not well written, and if it is sent too often.

It’s a delicate balancing act, really. You want to only send emails to leads who have opted to receive emails from you, and you want to keep your emails personal and interesting. You want to send them in a pace that aligns with the specific prospect’s needs and level of readiness. Doing all that manually is pretty much impossible of course, and this is where marketing automation and sales acceleration tools become invaluable. Both enable you to make sure that your email marketing remains focused, on-target, and never finds its way to the recipient’s trash folder, or – worse – makes them unsubscribe.

Were you surprised to find out that the majority of consumers check their email before they do anything else online? I wasn’t, becuase I do it too! I think it’s basic human curiosity – email is still more personal than social media channels. Messages we receive via email are meant for us, and often require us to take action. So it’s natural that we would be gravitated towards checking our email first. Kind of like in the past we used to wait for the mailman…

Will you agree with me that if consumers’ first online activity in the morning is to check their email, the same is probably true for B2B buyers? They get into the office, they sit down, start their computer… it makes sense that the first thing they would check is their email.

Which means that when you send these prospects an email, the last thing you want is for that email to be something generic, a message that means nothing to them and will be sent to the trash, or – worse – cause them to unsubscribe. You want your email messages to be targeted, interesting, filled with content that will grab the buyers’ attention.

You also want your emails to be short and concise. I can’t imagine wanting to read a very long message first thing in the morning. You don’t want people to glance at your email and decide it’s too long and they’ll get back to it later, becuase in the vast majority of cases, they won’t.

Way in the past, we used to treat email marketing as one of the easiest forms of marketing. It’s easy, right? You simply blast hundreds, maybe thousands of email addresses with your message and forget about it. But today we know better than to do that. We know that generic email blasts are not just ineffective – they could backfire and cause people to unsubscribe.

Personalized emails that contain the right message for the right recipient at the right time in the buying cycle are essential. Your prospects check their email first thing in the morning. What will they find in their inbox? Will it make them visit your site, hit the delete button, or unsubscribe?

I loved watching this funny commercial, right before the 2009 holidays, that showed examples of the lamest gift-giving one can possibly come up with. Things like giving hard candy to a toothless elderly man, or a set of shampoo and conditioner to a bald guy. We all do these things once in a while – give someone something that shows complete and utter thoughtlessness. Me? I once gave a Starbucks gift card to a colleague that told me, a few months before, that he hates coffee.

What does this have to do with B2B marketing? Well, in the examples above, the messages you send to the prospects in your database are like the gifts people give to each other during the holidays. If you’re not careful about keeping lists and really listening to people, you will likely end up either giving a generic gift, or giving a completely inappropriate gift. These will leave the recipient cold and indifferent (best case scenario) or will be a major turnoff for them and damage the relationship (worst case scenario).

The same is true for a B2B company’s prospects. You’ve got this big list of prospects in your database, and it might seem easiest to just blast them occasionally with a generic mass email that tells them how great your company is. But if you stop and think for a moment, maybe put yourself in their shoes, you will realize that these generic emails would be a miserable waste of time. Best case scenario, your prospects will just delete them. Worst case, they will opt out and move on to your competitor.

Generic email marketing is just like giving generic gifts. It shows a level of disengagement, even disrespect. Why would prospects become engaged if you’re not giving them anything worthwhile?

Of course, giving truly great gifts requires careful list keeping throughout the year and truly listening to each recipient, trying to identify what their needs are and to answer them. When it comes to the B2B space, doing so manually – keeping your database up to date and tailoring your messages to each prospect according to their specific needs and their level of readiness is nearly impossible. This is why marketing automation systems are such an integral part of a successful B2B marketing campaign. Automating your email marketing enables you to get to know your prospects better, to know exactly what they need at each step of the complex sales process.

Knowing who your prospects are and what they need enables you to create messages that your prospects are actually interested in receiving – just like a great gift where the recipient says, surprised and delighted, “Wow! This is exactly what I was hoping for!” Imagine being able to get this response, instead of an annoyed “another email from these guys!” whenever you email a prospect. If this isn’t going to translate into more sales, then I don’t know what is.

There’s no doubt that drip marketing, or more specifically closed-loop marketing, are vital tools for B2B marketers. Because of the long buying cycle in the B2B space, marketers are faced with the challenge of keeping in touch with prospects over extended periods of time. One of the best ways to do that is using drip marketing. The regular delivery of scheduled messages containing high quality content helps to ensure that the company is seen as relevant, and that it is top of mind when the buyer is ready to make a purchase.

Closed Loop Marketing works even better, because the communication is finely tailored to each specific contact and is based on that contact’s previous actions and on where they are in the buying cycle. This is the type of fine tuning that makes sure your communications are never seen as spam and that the material you deliver is timely and useful to the recipient. It is also the type of fine tuning that is best done via marketing automation systems, because if you have more than a handful of prospects in your database, doing it manually is nearly impossible.

Drip marketing CAN get annoying and spammy if you’re not careful though, so keep in mind the following tips for doing it right:

1. Provide value. Dripping messages to your contacts will not work and could in fact backfire and result in opt-outs if the content is perceived as not helpful or as low quality. Make sure the messages your contacts receive are truly helpful. Your goal is to avoid being seen as a company that pushes hard to sell. Instead, you want to be seen – and to be! – a trusted source of information that helps your prospects to solve business problems and to achieve their business goals.

2. Be relevant. Generic email blasts don’t work – even if the content is high quality. In addition to being top notch, the content you deliver to prospects needs to be relevant to them and to their particular business needs. This type of segmenting is of course easier to manage with a marketing automation tool. [http://www.etrigue.com/Products/Professional/]

3. Remember the importance of timing. How aggressive you should be with a prospect always depends on where they are in the buying cycle. We said it before: If they are looking at you to justify the purchase of another product, you had better get in there NOW. If they are three months out, put them on a moderate drip program, and if they are way out, nurture slowly and follow up with a periodic qualification call.

Drip email marketing, when done right, is one of the most effective ways for B2B marketers to nurture leads. To get it right, you need to do it right, and doing it right is easier with a reliable sales enablement or marketing automation tool.

Across the board, the economic slowdown is taking a toll and many businesses are in survival mode.  Sales and marketing teams are working over time to decrease the sales cycle and increase sales.

In a new article on destinationcrm.com, eTrigue’s Jim Meyer suggests seven timely tips on accelerating sales and making the most out of resources in a down economy.

In this article, Meyer gives quick and easy, back-to-basics ideas to help accelerate lead flow and sales without breaking the budget. These tips are easy to execute, don’t incur costs and require very little time. The article offers tips on taking demand generation to the next level — ensuring a measure of success that exceeds mere survival.

In addition, it’s worth taking a look at DemandGenReport.com’s article by Amanda Ferrante: “New Benchmark Study Showcases Payoffs from Lead Generation.”  Ferrante points to a new study on the critical role lead generation plays in the sales success of BtoB companies.  The study shows that companies aligning sales and marketing with lead generation outpace their competitors.

Tighter budgets and fewer bodies — that doesn’t have to be a recipe for less-effective marketing. Faced with the challenge of doing more with less, automating your marketing efforts can be the great equalizer. The process begins with a demand-generation system that efficiently customizes, tracks, nurtures, and identifies interested prospects over time, easily providing the marketing and sales teams the information needed to help close sales faster.

While this may sound a bit self serving given companies who provide Marketing Automation platforms like eTrigue benefit from customers with large prospect lists, it may be time to re-think your email list strategy.

Our customers, who cover a wide variety of industries have traditionally followed similar strategies—build a list that targets the budget holder, typically the decision maker, and nurture until sales ready. This may be one or two different contacts at a company.

What worked in the past may not be appropriate today. The current recession, albeit over-hyped, is being reflected in how companies evaluate spending decisions. In fact, the financial crisis spooked many companies into what is likely to be a long-term change in both spending habits and their decision making process. We are seeing dramatic results from smart marketers adapting to this change by casting a much wider net at each target company. Where a single individual may have been responsible for vendor or product selections that process now may include two, three, or more to make a buying decision. These extra eyes on the spending process requires company-wide nurturing to assure that once the buying process starts, it moves rapidly. A group decision making process makes it harder than ever to identify who has influence, so broader marketing strategies are appropriate. This in turn means larger lists and an often requires an automated lead nurturing process.

Marketing automation allows companies to appropriately target each decision maker based on their particular concerns. A CEO may be interested in revenue and cost, the CFO in cost only while Sales is interested solely in revenue. Using a batch and blast solution that doesn’t let you effectively segment and drive recipients to the appropriate content lessens the likelihood of a sale or best case extends the sales cycle.

Beginning with a message that is typically appropriate for a given title is a good place to start. Following up with a second email based on content viewing habits that tell the whole story rather than title helps you focus on specific pain points. Behavior and motivations change in tough times. Revenue may not be a concern of the CEO and the moment; he may be solely focused on cutting costs. If you continue to bombard him with revenue messages, you’re less likely to get his attention. Well crafted emails and content targeted appropriately can be the difference between winning and losing a customer.

The world has gone on-line, but many companies haven’t grasped the fact that for most of your potential customers, the front door to your company isn’t the one you walk in every morning–it’s your web site! You wouldn’t ignore a customer to your physical office, so why do companies fail to engage with potential customers that come to through their online front door?

I initiated this discussion at dinner the other night. A…B…C… Always Be Closing… I asked how many of the seven companies represented were actually tracking web activity down to the email address of the visitor. Only two of seven were using an automated marketing solution to track prospects and automatically follow up. They were instantly the best salesperson a guy could have. Even better, one was already a customer using eTrigue.

And while we take an educational approach to the sales process here at eTrigue, these marketing automation “converts” took a completely different approach. FEAR! “If you’re not tracking who is on your website and following up immediately, your competition is going to win the business” “No ifs ands or buts about it” It was actually fun to watch as these two street wise marketers, after a couple of drinks, school their colleges on the realities of marketing in down economy.

It gave me a new perspective on the nature of our current economy and how the strong/smart will survive. It’s becoming a competitive imperative that companies understand who is walking in their on-line front door, and more importantly following up with relevant communications. 85% of all B2B buyers use the web to research their buying decision. If your competition is reaching out to their saleable market with emails and tracking every move the recipient makes on their website and you’re not… Well, yes you do stand a good chance of losing. They know more about that prospective customer and are likely calling them within minutes of their web activity. The odds of contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after a prospect engages with your company drops by 100 times according to an MIT lead management study.

Are you losing customers by not engaging with them as they tour your web site?

At a recent industry event I heard campaign horror stories ranging from emails without a single functional link to messaging that wouldn’t sell ice in August.  The one that really caught my attention was from a marketing manager who had run a variety of simple email marketing campaigns over the past year with good results. Using the website tracking information she gathered over several months, she segmented her database in an effort to send more targeted email messages. With four unique product offerings she was sure she would accelerate her company’s lead-flow with more focused emails and end up with a BIG pat on the back!

Unfortunately, when campaigns cross in the night, it can spell disaster.

The company she works for, which will remain nameless, as well as the marketing solution she used (not eTrigue), sells very high-end equipment. The value of each customer is substantial. Over the past few years they had built some really good relationships starting with their email nurturing program. In fact, a majority of their marketing budget was now focused on email.

And now for the CATASTROPHE!

Running multiple campaigns at once is commonplace. In this case, a slight oversight had a dramatic impact on this company’s ability to market to many of its high priority prospects. The combination of auto-response emails from landing pages, automated follow-up emails from downloaded content, and a slight miscalculation in the design of her newly created email campaigns, resulted in some prospects receiving as many as four emails in one week. And of course — opt-outs! She had just “turned-off” a large number of viable customers. Her VP of Sales panicked and in her words; her CEO was within nanoseconds of turning-off her paycheck.

As this a good example of how Demand Generation platforms, like any other tool, can be dangerous if used improperly or with inadequate attention to detail. The impact can often be huge given the power to email to hundreds of thousands for prospects with the click of a mouse.

Here are some simple points to consider when building your campaigns to help prevent catastrophe:

• Make sure you understand the logic of all campaigns that are currently running. Your platform should give you a view of all active campaigns.
• Include protections just in case you miss something. eTrigue includes the ability to restrict outbound email campaigns by the number of days since the last email, or a specific date range. eTrigue will also allow you to email, or prevent a mailing based on the subject of an email.
• Decide in advance whether it is “o.k.” for a prospect to get a thank you email as the result of an action, i.e. download, “in addition” to your other email campaigns.
• Use more small campaigns vs. complex large ones. It’s often easier to sort out the logic if you break your marketing up into modules.

Happy Marketing!

With increasing concern over the worldwide economic situation, organizations are eagerly searching for ways to accelerate sales without impacting their budget. Compounding the problem, buyers are spending more time scrutinizing each dollar — more decision makers, longer evaluations, and definitely more hand wringing. It’s times like these when each impression counts more than ever.

One of the advantages of working for a company in the demand-generation market is you get to talk to a lot of very enthusiastic marketers who really can do more with less. Over the past six months I have seen a definite trend towards several smaller, targeted campaigns vs. broad, generic ones. Marketers are rolling up their sleeves, spending more time segmenting their databases, creatively focusing each message in an attempt to prod existing prospects down the funnel. And it works!

Response rates have increased significantly, with more targeted emails focused on “pain points” by title, combined with other variables, including product interest based on web pages viewed. And while you might suggest this is something good marketers should have been doing all along, my impression is companies are focusing less on other activities, so marketers have, and are, spending more time focused on optimizing their demand-generation programs. More than one VP of Marketing commented on how digging into the data has not only improved their conversion rates but also given them a new perspective of their database – and how to more effectively market to it.