Multichannel Marketing for B2B Marketers

Let’s see how good you are. Which one of these subject lines pulled the best open and click through rates?

1. Complementary session: Market with intelligence.

2. Marketing with Intelligence: learn and earn.

3. Three most critical tactics to your success.

You already know the answer if you sat in on Greg Grdodian’s session, “Marketing with Intelligence,” at last week’s Folio/Audience Development Show in New York. In fact, you probably opened the message, for it promoted the session.

The winner was No. 3. It pulled a 43% open rate, a 58% click rate and a 100% pass along. The other two didn’t even come close, and there’s no mystery why: No. 3 spoke directly to the needs of the reader. continue reading…

Do you sell to the industrial manufacturing market? Not much has changed since last year, has it?

Your goals are the same—acquisition and lead generation. You continue to move dollars online. And your biggest problems are lack of resources and a shortage of good leads—same as last year.

So why bother reading GlobalSpec’s 2010 market report? Because one thing has changed: the state of the business.

Yes, 70% of the manufacturers surveyed anticipate a sales increase this year; only 16% said that in 2009. continue reading…

Even the best marketers can land on blacklists or have their emails stuck in spam traps. But you can avoid these perils by using simple common sense.

Here are some tips from the British Direct Marketing Association. Follow them, and you’ll improve your email delivery both in the U.S. and Europe:

1. Improve your data collection—This is the most critical factor. Validate email addresses and double up on permissions and address entry. Always send validation emails.

2. Implement authentication—Have a mechanism that proves “the email really has been sent by the party that it is claiming to originate from.”

3. Monitor your sender reputation—ISPs and the companies that issue reports determine reputation based on broadcast volume, spam complaint notifications, bounceback activity and spam trap activity. continue reading…

Do these folks have real work to do? Marjorie Bricknell set off a debate on LinkedIn by asking this timeworn question: “Email Marketing and social media marketing are replacing nasty old junk mail, right?”

We would have taken offense at the “J” word were it not for the fact that Bricknell is a gifted direct mail copywriter. Her answer? That j**k mail is here to stay. And she confessed that she’s tired of the argument about which channel is tops. “Hold on! STOP!!” she wrote. “It’s all the same thing!” continue reading…

It’s hardly news that you can find a customer’s email address through email append.

But did you know you can do the reverse—get a name and postal address when you have only an email address to go on?

This process is called reverse email append. And it should be top of mind when you’re doing multi-channel B2B marketing.

For one thing, you’ll learn who the buyer actually is. That is, you can enhance your file with business demographics.

For another, you can now test direct mail (assuming you haven’t already done so). You will find, as other marketers have, that response goes up in channels when you use them together. continue reading…