Recession-Busting B2B MarCom Tip #4: Re-Energize Your E-Newsletter
According to an October 2008 survey of 189 marketing professionals by Forrester Research (Making Social Media Work in B2B Marketing), B2B marketers continue to rely on traditional digital marketing methods to drive leads — including e-mail newsletters.
Yet, given the rise of blogs and other social media tactics — and overflowing e-mail inboxes — you might wonder if something as lowly as the e-newsletter is still a viable tactic. 
The answer is: most definitely. Think about it. Despite the buzz about social media, email remains the #1 activity on the Internet. This means that all of us check email, read email, and respond to email constantly.
Plus, not everyone reads blogs or has a LinkedIn/Facebook account. I’ve had PR and marketing professionals tell me they never read blogs but they continue to read newsletters, something I realized based on my own experience.
Although I have this blog and Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts, I still have people subscribing to my e-newsletter every single day.
(But, just because people still subscribe to e-newsletters doesn’t mean they’re reading them. If I get tired of a company’s e-newsletter, for example, I don’t unsubscribe, I simply delete it without reading it.)
If you’re a marketer who has been putting out an e-newsletter for years, now is a great time to look it over to see how you can re-invigorate your publication, and your audience, too, with the following tips:
1. Look at your email stats for the last year.
- How many people subscribed?
- How many unsubscribed?
- How did subscribers find your newsletter or what prompted them to sign up?
- If you use your e-newsletter to get people to take some sort of action, such as downloading white papers or signing up for Webinars, what percentage of your subscribers did so?
- How often was your newsletter forwarded to others?
- How often was content in your e-newsletter posted to blogs, appear in Twitter posts, or reprinted or mentioned in other e-newsletters or trade publications?
2. Survey your readership.
Set up a simple survery using one of the free tools available, such as Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. Constant Contact now offers survey capabilities, too.
Keep the survey short and sweet so that you don’t waste people’s time. (I like to keep my surveys to ten easy questions that can be answered in two minutes or less.)
Ask your subscribers how often they want to receive the newsletter and what topics they want to read about. If you’re a larger company with multiple products or business units sending out one e-newsletter a month, ask your readers if they would like content written just for them.
3. Make your newsletter a priority.
Newsletters tend to fall through the cracks, I think, because they’re seen as “fluff” versus revenue generators.
For an e-newsletter to be successful — that is, to generate leads and ultimately sales — you have to make it a priority. This means you publish it on time all the time, that you continually develop new content for it (and not use warmed over press releases), and that you analyze your statistics in order to explain to management why the e-newsletter is a necessary marketing tactic.
Done right, B2B e-newsletters are a great way to stay top-of-mind with prospects not yet ready to buy and maintain relationships with current clients. It’s why I’m still publishing mine and have been doing so for the last eight years.
For additional information about email marketing, be sure to download the following reports and articles (which came to me via e-newsletters — ha!):
Exact Target: No Executive Left Behind: 10 Things Your C-Suite MUST KNOW About Email Now
SilverPop: Spam: What Customers Really Think
ClickZ: 10 Reasons to Be Thankful for E-mail by Karen Gedney
Are you a B2B marketer with an e-newsletter success story? If so, I’d love to feature it on this blog. Drop me an email at: info@dhcommunications.com
December 1st, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Dianna,
After two years, my blog (www.sales-lead-insights.com) has won awards but has generated less than ten percent of the number of subscribers who have signed up for my newsletter (www.imninc.com/macmcintosh) over the same period.
More important, I can track lots of leads and sales from my newsletter. Only a handful of sales leads and no closed sales have come from my blog.
An evaluation of my blog’s readers who are RSS and e-mail subscribers shows that most are either other B2B marketing bloggers, suppliers of B2B marketing products or services who post comments as a way to promote their own business, or competitors. Few are actual decision makers or key influencers at the kinds of companies that buy my sales lead consulting and marketing speaking/training services.
Not content to learn from just my own experience, I’ve been asking bloggers and other B2B marketers who use blogs and social media, to show me more than anecdotal evidence that those tools are driving B2B leads and sales.
Unfortunately none have been able to, with the notable exception of Blendtec’s “Will it Blend?” campaign, a video-based campaign that resulted in a 500% increase in B2B sales driven by consumer demand created by the videos which are powerful demonstrations of the company’s blenders.
Dianna, if you or any of your readers have any quantifiable evidence of blogs and social media driving B2B leads and sales, please share the proof with me.
One of the benefits of blogging and social media I hear about most often relates to SEO. However, I think that if most B2B marketers put the same money and effort into organic search optimization of their websites, they would see a higher ROI than they get from their blogs and social media.
Dianna, I haven’t given up on blogs and social media, but at the moment I find them to be more effective at branding than at generating leads and driving sales, and have come to believe that blogs and social media are a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have” tools in the B2B marketers’ toolkit.
Sincerely,
Mac
M. H. (Mac) McIntosh
http://www.sales-lead-experts.com
December 1st, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Mac,
The only B2B company I know that has used viral successfully is Cisco — they recently ran a viral campaign to promote the launch of a new router. I do not know how many leads they generated from the campaign.
I think social media is great for *influencing* purchasing decisions versus driving leads or sales. It’s also a great way for getting the word out about your white paper, launch, etc. in a way that an e-newsletter cannot.
Social media is also a great way to get “known” online. My client, for example, has a blog and due to it, was asked to write a regular column for an industry portal.
However, despite all the buzz about social media, I still think e-newsletters are wonderful because they do help drive leads and sales. It’s why I still publish one.
BTW, Mac, I haven’t received an e-newsletter from you in months.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:27 am
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December 4th, 2008 at 3:40 am
Dianna,
You are correct, I haven’t sent out a newsletter in a couple of months. But even my only occasional newsletter generates lots of leads and sales where my blog which has been more regularly updated hasn’t.
By the way, have your read technorati’s State of the Blogsphere 2008?
http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ It supports your point about blogging leading to wrirting and speaking assignmments as one of the key benefits.
Bloggers mention leads and sales as benefits too, but at the bottom of the list. And there wasn’t any evidence presented that it works for leads and sales. I’m still looking…
Sincerely,
Mac
M. H. (Mac) McIntosh
http://www.sales-lead-insights.com
December 4th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Mac,
Would you give up your blog? Why do you keep writing it? If the newsletter is getting you more leads, why not ditch the blog and focus your energies on producing an e-newsletter every month?
December 11th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Dianna,
Good post — common sense advice. While the hype about social media is warranted, the penetration isn’t all that deep at this point. It’s wise to keep focus on fundamentals and tried-and-true methods, especially in this economy. The trick question — we all know it’s important to make it a priority, put it out on schedule, etc. Any tips on how to do that? Our clients some times elude our best advice and intentions…
December 11th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Paul, I know this sounds self-serving, but I tell clients to outsource their newsletter — because then it gets done versus being relegated to the back burner.
Thank you for stopping by!
January 6th, 2009 at 4:02 am
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