The email channel is one of the primary ways B2B marketers are connecting to potential business clients. There are distinct differences with sending cold B2B emails verse warm emails. Cold emails are when there is no prior relationship between the respondent and the sender. Warm emails are when there has been some sort of contact via the telephone, direct mail, or social media.
Here are the Top 8 Must Do’s when sending cold B2B Emails;
Most importantly your email must give off the feeling of trying to start a long term relationship with the prospect – not just a quick hard sell.
Marketing can get very confusing sometimes as we try and implement the different concepts in growing our business and keeping our customers happy within the digital age.
This week I came across a very simple chart that states what a company must do in the marketing cycle to attract and keep buyers.
We must spend time and money on the Know, Like and Trust stage before moving to the buy stage. For many businesses this means a consistent stream of quality information about the company and its services available via inbound and/or outbound marketing.
If the customer knows you exist then gets a good feel for your company- trust will form. Once trust is created the probability of them buying your services or products is very high.
The key to all marketing is once the Know, Like and Trust is established then, and only then, can you start selling them something.
Over the years we get asked a number of questions regarding selecting business lists however the most common one is “Why isn’t there anymore list data available for my business segment?”
Most people who do research for available data start looking at their targeted Industry segment as a keyword in google. This will produce 1000’s of entries – some related and most non-related to the industry or business segment the buyer is trying target.
They will then research a few on-line directories such as the Yellow pages. This will give them again 1000’s of record results- some relevant- some not so relevant. By now the buyer is getting a somewhat inflated figure in their heads of how many companies might be in their target market.
They then make enquiries with a List broker such as my company DataConsult asking for specific list counts of industries. We will run the counts and send the details to the buyer and invariably they say the counts are a lot smaller than Google or Yellow pages. And then the question comes; “Why isn’t there anymore list data available for my business segment?”
Well, let’s look at these Key Findings from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to get an idea of how many businesses there are in Australia;
Here is a table that summarises these numbers.
So as these statistics reveal the total number of businesses in Australia with people working in them ( as opposed to just company name, trusts etc ) comes to approx 850,000. Of these 600,000 are below 5 employees.200,000 businesses have 5-20 employees and approx. 55,000 with 20+ employees.
You can see if we then select specific industry segments within the employee bands we end up with surprising results.
The other issue with comparing different data sources is that to run an effective B2B campaign you must contact or speak to a real person within the company ie the Decision Maker. Directories, Yellow Pages and Google searches will only provide you with the business name, address and maybe the telephone number however not the name of a contact in the company to talk to. Also with these on-line directories, there is no way of knowing the employee or revenue size of the business.
If you are interested in more Australian Industry statistics go to ABS Industry Statistics
Percentage of consumers responding to a direct-mail piece
Percentage of consumers responding to
Source: Data and
Marketing Association
A 2016 DMA study found that 5.3% of house-list recipients responded to direct-mail pieces; 2.9% of prospect-list recipients did the same.
Compare this to the results for online display (0.9%), email (0.6% for house/0.3% for prospect), social media,(0.6%), and paid search (0.5%). The results aren’t nearly as enticing.
Want to know more – Download the report here.