| Reggie Brady Marketing Solutions 203-838-8138 | ||||||||||||||||||
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 Driving B-to-B Traffic to Your Web Site: What’s Working and What’s Not
1. Email for Customer Retention Email pays off in spades when used for customer retention. This newer communication channel has armed marketers with a cost-effective means to cross-sell and up-sell customers and build customer loyalty. Compared with other traditional marketing channels email’s low cost, intrusive nature and superior tracking abilities delivers an extremely low cost per order and a high return on investment. While it is easy to personalize each message, marketers have moved beyond mere personalization of the salutation. Savvy marketers are using other data elements to customize and personalize their email messages. 2. Email Segmentation Sophisticated marketers have moved well beyond a “one size fits all approach” to customer communication and have applied all the techniques they use in traditional marketing to their email efforts. The key to success is developing customer segments that combine typical profile information with actual behavioral data on how customers interact with email. Marketers are looking at click-through patterns (and who has NOT clicked), whether a customer is likely to pass a message along to a friend or colleague, and transaction and purchase behavior. They can then develop discrete segments and create communications that are more targeted to each segment. Targeting can be accomplished by increased personalization and by “dynamic personalization.” Dynamic personalization is the ability to construct an individual’s email “on the fly” by inserting specific content clips that relate to the customer’s or segment’s profile. 3. B-to-B Acquisition Email Business marketers enjoy much more targetability and selectability for email lists than their consumer marketer counterparts. For example you can select on SIC, title, number of employees, and purchasing authority within tightly defined markets. B-to-B files are also more stable, so your results from test to rollout are more predictable. Costs are much higher on business files, but there is more room for negotiation on list costs. Ask for discounts if you are taking multiple selects from a list owner or if you can promise that you will be rolling out with substantial quantities or mailing the file multiple times if results are strong. 4. Viral marketing (Referral Marketing) Viral marketing is not the sole province of consumer marketers. It is being used effectively by many business marketers to gain new customers by encouraging existing customers to recommend their products or services. Viral marketing is a tactic that should be used judiciously on special occasions with planned promotions. The best way to launch a viral marketing effort is to have your customers pass your message on to a friend or colleague; whether this is from an email or from your Web site. Remember that your customers who do this are your evangelists. You may want to either reward them or treat them specially. 5. HTML, Rich Media and Streaming Media Response information across a multitude of clients is that HTML and rich media have three times the click-through rates as compared with text. There are ways to determine which of your customers can receive HTML and rich media and it is well worth the effort to employ these techniques if appropriate for your market. Some on-the-go business people and technical audiences prefer their information short and sweet in text format. 6. Ad Banners Are Not Dead But to make their use effective, you’ve got to do some heavy cost negotiation and monitor results very carefully so that you can cut off unprofitable banner buys quickly. Forrester Research issued a report in January 2001 looking at how online media buys are structured. They found that 38% are CPM based; 39% are performance based; and 23% are a hybrid of the two. Looking forward to 2003 they see much less emphasis on straight CPM pricing. 7. Affiliate Marketing The big three in this market are LinkShare, BeFree and Commission Junction. If you’re not using this marketing technique, spend some time on BeFree’s site where you’ll find information on how particular companies are structuring their affiliate relationships. And, don’t think that these programs run themselves. To do affiliate marketing right you should have someone dedicated to this area and treat your affiliates as business partners. Newsletters and e-mails are the building blocks of the relationship with your affiliate resellers. 8. B-to-B Vortals There are B2B solutions called vortals (vertical portals) and predictions are that’s where the gold is! Jupiter Communications predicts that by 2005, online B-to-B trade in the U.S. will be worth $6 trillion. Check out B2Bworks, PurchasePro, Yahoo’s small business center and VerticalNet to understand more about how these areas work. However, there are some negatives associated with B-to-B vortals: some players could go out of business, they do not play upon established business relationships and most payment processing is still offline. Regina Brady is currently a consultant on interactive and direct marketing. She formerly held executive roles at FloNetwork, Acxiom and CompuServe. A respected industry leader, Brady is active on several industry boards and advisory committees and is a frequent speaker at trade conferences. She can be reached at 203-838-8138 or reginabrady@att.net. Back to Articles | ||||||||||||||||||
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