Not surprisingly many brands in the consumer sector plunged headlong into digital – e-mail marketing frenzy, webinars, podcasts, viral advertising, Facebook and twitter.

But what of the business to business sector?

Well, the migration has been slower not least because relying solely on a palette of digital and social media is in many cases simply not enough to deliver the desired level of conversions, meetings, responses and sales. Not every business that you want to target is actively searching online for what you’re offering are they? Even if they are, their online searches will be conducted sporadically over many months. You are competing with competitors too; many keen to pay handsomely in their bid to accelerate up the front page of Google.

Savvy businesses know that the off-line channels are still highly effective acquisition tools. They play a pivotal role in signposting cold prospects, warm prospects, even customers to visit your online universe (if that is what you are aiming for). Not only that but if you want your B2B marketing to be cost effective and response rich you will need to harness many touch points. If you have read our previous blogs, you will be familiar with the continuum of behaviour; namely when you are looking to move your prospect from awareness through to interest, evaluation, desire and action, you need to deploy a number of relevant and enticing communications, delivered through different channels. Why? This will enable you to engage all of your prospects’ senses. You will build an enticing multi-dimensional view of your brand. You become memorable; hard to forget.

If you want to reach an enormous stadium of prospects but with each one to build a relationship then direct mail gives you that all important one-to-one intimacy. Start that all important first dialogue using paper and use it to encourage your prospect to visit your online universe for more goodies.

Don’t just take our word for it. A tracking study from the independent research firm Data Talk Research gives an in-depth analysis of behaviour and attitudes to show which channel or combination of channels offers you the best way of reaching your audience. Key findings of the report included:

• When you add direct mail to an e-mail campaign you increase the potential response rate from 5.8%  to 9.9%.
• ABC1s find direct mail twice as acceptable as e-mail – 27.4% as opposed to 13.4%. How many of your business target audience comprises ABC1s. A fair proportion we would guess.
• 95.1% of direct mail recipients with Internet access respond by e-mails -clearly demonstrating the benefits of print and pixels in the media mix – in this case direct mail opening  the door – generating awareness and interest  motivating the respondent to send you an e-mail.

Is it time to reach for your pen and paper?

So, in this particular blog I am asking that you step outside your marketing comfort zone, and look at two traditional channels to market that you may have dismissed because you’ve decided that they’re not for you. These channels we know from experience are still delivering results by the barrel load for many companies in the business to business sector.

Telephone coldcalling. I concede that few people relish the prospect of picking up the phone and introducing themselves to a cold prospect. But if you put that fear and prejudice aside, the telephone is still one of the most effective tools for moving a cold prospect from having no awareness of your business, to being interested in what you have to offer. To find out whether coldcalling works for the audience you are looking to reach, pick up that phone and give it a go. But prepare yourself beforehand: practice delivering a professional introduction; have a list of the compelling benefits of working with you to hand; be ready to listen more than you talk, and finally ensure that you have a realistic call to action. Don’t be unrealistic by expecting to make a sale in just one call.  Aim instead to nudge open the door to a warm relationship. Although you will be hit with rejection many times, you will cultivate valuable warm prospects too.

Direct mail.  Direct mail enables you to target your audience with a military like precision. To do this, of course, you need to have a pretty flawless mailing list and to have done your homework on the triggers that will arouse the interest of cold prospects and the barriers that could close that promising conversation down. Direct mail is a robust, resilient and cost-effective tool, ideal for launching new products and services and perfect for increasing the market share of an existing product or service.

It can also be used effectively as part of your follow up routine to any telephone cold calling exercise. Rather than just putting the phone down, firing off an email and leaving it at that, consider also sending out a mailshot to reinforce those messages given over the phone. Direct mail is extremely effective at ensuring that you are not forgotten, so don’t dismiss it as old fashioned.

Be honest with yourself, do you shun these two marketing activities because you don’t find them easy? If so, you may be overlooking two extremely effective channels for attracting new customers.

Drayton Bird, one of the world’s most successful copywriters and a man to have on your side when you want to warm your business to business cold sales prospects and clinch the deal was recently blogging about the art of selling; why it’s important to be tenacious when endeavouring to turn cold sales prospects into warm leads. He revealed the following startling statistics about salespeople and their perseverance powers on the cold calling front.

48.2% of sales people made one call and quit

24.4% made two calls and quit

14.7% made three calls and quit

12.7% made four or more calls

60% of the sales were made on or after the fifth call.

Nearly 88% of the sales people automatically eliminated themselves from the potential business.  They gave up before the person they were contacting had been brought to the point of being interested in buying.

It’s hardly rocket science is it?

How many times do you decide to buy a product or service for your business at the very first asking when an approach is made on the telephone?  In all likelihood, it will take several conversations interspersed with information, a high-quality direct mailshot, a peek at their website, doing a little sleuthing on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook before you’re ready to do a Meg Ryan, shrieking ‘yes, yes, yes lead me to the dotted line!’

If you want to turn cold prospects into warm clients and you’re using a powerful low cost combination of direct mail and the telephone as your staple ingredients, then to reiterate one of the messages in last week’s blog, you have to be a tortoise – in it for the long haul. In that first call if you’re trying to coerce your cold sales prospect into a sale, you will only succeed in triggering alarm bells that you are not to be trusted because you’re just too damn pushy. However if you can treat the first call as a “getting to know your needs” call – an opportunity to gather information, emphasise key benefits and hot on the heels of this communication you send an exquisitely written letter sandwiched by… a follow-up phone call, you are establishing a continuum of communication that, if your cold prospect is really interested in what you are offering, should lead to sales.

Of course, in the real world you will have to do an awful lot more than just send one lovely direct mailshot and make a couple of calls. Because businesspeople are elusive aren’t they? You may have to make a dozen calls just to get through to the person again. You may have to send information to other people in the decision-making unit and at times it will feel as though you are taking one step forward, two steps back. But your persistence, charm and attention to detail will pay off as one by one your cold sales prospects begin to thaw.

Yes, it’s definitely about building rapport… about deriving a real understanding of need and how you can meet these needs and all of the other good touchy-feely stuff that you have to deploy.

But most importantly it’s about not giving up before the miracle happens.

Slow down.

Take time to plan an intelligent, persuasive and engaging campaign. It pays to be a tortoise, not a hare if you want to increase your conversion rates.

Why is this so?

If you sell products or services that require some deliberation and consideration before cheque books are opened then no matter how pushy you are, your cold prospect will not buy there and then. You have not earned their trust with your ‘smacks of desperation’ approach. What’s more, what you often find  in the business to business sector is that more than one person is involved in the decision to buy. Their decision-making unit and indeed their decision making process will resist being shoehorned into your ‘one size fits all’ prospecting campaign.

Where do you start? At the beginning with benefits and barriers.

You have to understand the barriers to a sale for each group of cold prospects you are targeting before you start your campaign planning. Businesses will not do business with you based solely on stuffing them with the many benefits you offer. Yes, benefits are an important part of the marketing mix but, you must also address the barriers to a sale. How do you find out the barriers for each group? Nothing, absolutely nothing beats getting on the telephone and asking a handful of cold prospects. Explain that your motives are genuine. You are not looking to sell, merely to find out what makes the person at the end of the phone buy your product or services but equally what reservations  lurk in their mind blocking or delaying the sale. You’re now already halfway to building a relevant and enticing campaign. If you understand the barriers to a sale from the perspective of your prospect, you can address these in your sales letters, your website, and your emarketing campaigns and so on. Take a look at our previous blog to find out how you can use just a small amount of high quality b2b prospecting data to accomplish this vital task.

You must also understand how the person or group that you are targeting arrives at the decision to buy from you. It’s a fact that every person goes through the stages of awareness, interest, evaluation, and desire before moving to the final stage of action (purchase). However, the amount of time it takes to move from one stage to another varies depending on the audience you are targeting, the level of risk and expenditure associated with what you are offering and the number of people involved in the decision to buy. Whilst you’re on the phone ascertaining the barriers to a sale, it pays to ascertain purchasing patterns and decision-making protocols. You are now even nearer to building that exquisitely tailored and enticing campaign.

More on this important subject next week!

Why not start 2012 with a quick check of your email newsletter’s performance.

Is your template still delivering?
When was the last time you took a look at your template wireframe? Here are six things to check to see if you’re in need of a re-design.

1. Is the design consistent with company branding, and the look/feel of your website?

2. Is the template still rendering properly on the platforms that matter for your audience?

3. Do you need to take smartphone/handheld viewing into consideration?

4. Is the template designed to look good whether the images are on or off?

5. Is the preview pane space maximised to draw the reader into the rest of the newsletter?

6. Is the design clean and does it make it easy to scan content?

Are your goals up to date?
Setting goals for your mailings means you’ll be able to measure your results and conversions through the metrics that will be available to you.  To remind you about goals – these are the results you want from the mailings – and also how you’ll be able to track and measure.

Are your goals to increase sales (e.g. immediate, re-selling, up-selling or cross-selling), drive traffic to the website, customer retention, prospect nurturing, branding, front of mind or learning more about readers to fine tune what you send?

You should plan to review goals frequently, to ensure they’re up to date and in line with your organisation’s overall strategy.

Are you letting publishing deadlines slide?
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of running an email newsletter programme is keeping up with a regular publishing date. It is easy to let the date slip, an issue missed – and suddenly a monthly newsletter is inching towards quarterly. This affects your front-of-mind value and erodes your ROI. Here are 4 ideas to help get back on track.

1. Create a publishing schedule
This can be as simple as an excel file. Set up columns for each of the next six-12 issues of your publication. Then map out content that should appear in each issue.

2. Collate your content sources
Identify and have easy access to all your content sources: websites, blogs, marketing and sales material, any event and conference collateral.

3. Work ahead
Assign articles in advance, and populate future issues with the content as each article is signed off. This will help cut chase time as you approach a specific publication date.

4. Streamline approval
Sign-off for articles or the entire newsletter can cause long delays. Create a process and factor that into your publishing schedule.

Are you thinking beyond the written word?
Content in a newsletter shouldn’t be confined to the written word. Don’t overlook the opportunity to present your other content in your newsletter. Think about using your company’s podcasts, webinars, recordings of events, videos, photos, presentations and social media-generated material. (Don’t embed or attach these, instead make a link in your homepage to either the back page of your newsletter or page on your website.)

Have you integrated your social?
Are you taking advantage of the ability to promote your own social networks in your email? Your template should feature embedded links to them. Also, when you hit ‘send’, also post a link to the new issue on your social networks.

Reach beyond the inbox and let your readers promote your newsletter. Give them the tools to post the entire newsletter online or specific articles that they found interesting to their own network. (Capture these new visitors to your newsletter at every opportunity – feature your subscribe form in your Facebook profile, in your newsletter and on your website.)

Are you using your business intelligence?
One of the major benefits of email is measurability. If you’re only doing a quick check of open rates, you are missing a major part of the power of email.

To get maximum results in your ROI:

Know your key performance indicators (KPIs)
There are a wide variety of metrics available to you from your email marketing campaigns. Select the metrics that allow you to measure your KPI, and use this business intelligence to craft more timely, targeted and relevant emails.

Integrate
Tie your email marketing in with your CRM and marketing systems, such as Salesforce and Google Analytics, to get a complete integrated view of your marketing results.

So there you are – a quick pit stop check up on your email newsletter before you head into 2012…

Article by Denise Cox, originally published in the DMA Email Marketing Council’s Infobox, with kind permission of the Direct Marketing Association

Go under the hood of any successful small business in the business to business sector and you’ll find them on a curve of continuous improvement and innovation. According to the UK department of Business, Innovation and Skills, “Nearly two-thirds of all commercial innovations originate in small companies”. Good to hear because in the current climate, it has never been more important for small businesses to be fanatical about enhancing existing products and services and introducing new ones.

Accompanying these laudable strategies is the potential to waste money and huge sums of it when in fact a small quantity of squeaky clean, targeted and carefully chosen data could prevent this from happening…

Let’s imagine for a moment you’ve decided to introduce a new service. You steam ahead and implement this service without doing any market research. You’re at risk of bringing a service to market with insufficient demand to make it profitable. It can be straightforward to dot the I’s and cross the T’s when the service you are introducing is aimed squarely at existing customers. You already have your market research group and should take full advantage of it. A good quality survey, some focus groups, in-depth one to ones, a stream of telephone interviews and at the end of this process your existing customers have told you pretty much what you need to know about either bringing this new service to market or, mothballing it because it’s a dud.

But what if you’re aiming at a new target audience, an audience you’ve not targeted before? Should you steam ahead and introduce the service then buy your business to business list of prospects that closely fit the profile of customers you’re looking for and begin marketing with a vengeance?

Well you can, but you should be using business to business data – small targeted mailing lists in your market research phase as well as rolling out with the bigger lists in your promotional marketing phase.  

A word of warning; it’s not always possible for you to be precise about your target audience when introducing new services to a new audience. By way of example a business may believe that accountants of all sizes are their target audience and this may be so. Before arriving at this conclusion however, they should buy a small list of accountants segmented into different sizes, for their market research. The research may reveal for example a high demand from medium-sized accountancy practices but no demand from one partner practices. Armed with the results from these telephone surveys etc the business can buy a much bigger list for their launch campaign knowing that each accountancy practice represents the profile of the genuinely interested accountants they interviewed as part of their market research and not the smaller practices that were disinterested.

Consider your existing customers too. Are there enough for your market research?

If in doubt have your customer base profiled so you can buy a small list of prospects that match the profile of your existing customers. Why?  Your small group of loyal customers may be too tactful and kind in their feedback whereas a cold prospect doesn’t have an emotional attachment and so is more likely to yield objective responses to your proposed new service – responses that enable you to make improvements before you go to market.

It’s for this reason that email marketing has attracted a bad name when in fact it can be a fantastic, easy and cost-effective medium for you to use as part of your ongoing campaign to win hearts, minds and…sales. For starters, good old email, (forget email marketing lists for the moment), is an excellent way to keep in touch with current and prospective customers. Within seconds you can let them know about your unbeatable offer, your service upgrades, your latest blog post; the tantalising news on your website that should interest them. It complements your direct mail activity perfectly.

But, moving swiftly on to the thorny subject of email marketing lists, you may have had your fingers burnt in the past by renting or buying email data from an unscrupulous list provider. So you’ve closed the door on this medium when in fact there’s life in this upstart yet!

You need to sort out the wheat from the chaff – the good guys who will provide accurate, legitimate email marketing lists in accordance with the Direct Marketing Association’s Direct Marketing Code of Practice to boost your positive responses and, the less than scrupulous list providers most of whom tend to sing from the same hymn sheet.

•  They promise you the world (huge volumes of email addresses for a jaw droppingly low price).
•  They deliver a dud. Oh yes you get the responses. Hundreds, maybe even thousands. Irate folk that aren’t within your target audience and are left wondering at the relevance of your email.

So it pays to challenge any business providing email lists. Ask them the following for starters.

1 .Does this list comply with the Direct Marketing Association’s Direct Marketing Code of Practice? Are they registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office and does the data comply with the Data Protection Act 1998?

 2. How fresh, accurate and up to date are these email addresses?

 3. Can the lists be targeted by industry, size, location and job role?

 It’s a vast subject. There’s lots of really good information on this website – great tips, guidance and advice to help you plan your next email marketing campaign. Soak it up, it will save you a small fortune and you may well find room in your tactical marketing plan for email marketing.

Here are some top tips on generating responses by the barrel load from your sales letter.  Make sure that you read our previous blog too.

1. Start with the correct details of the recipient. Get them wrong and you may as well post their letter to the waste bin. No amount of sparkling prose will compensate for an incorrect spelling of a Christian name or surname. Then, correct details intact ensure that the salutation is appropriate. Should you address the recipient by their Christian name or surname?
2. Punch out the purpose of your letter in the opening paragraph. For example do you want to alert an existing client to your new services? If so tell them; don’t shroud your message in mystique. Are you contacting a lapsed client because you want to revive the relationship?  Don’t trot out a one size fits all introduction if you’re mailing different groups with different relationships. For example to a lapsed client, “Dear Dee, it’s been a little while since we have heard from you and so we wanted to update you with our new services,” … is much better than “Dear Dee, we are delighted to announce the launch of our new services.” Acknowledge the relationship in those opening lines if you want your letter to smack of credibility.
3. Break it up! The layout of your letter is absolutely crucial. It must be readable and attractive on the eye. A solid block of text punctuated with the odd highlighted phrase will turn readers off.  Here is a simple, successful structure you can emulate:

• Your salutation, (Dear Mr Simms ) followed by  a 2- 4 line introductory paragraph.
• Your follow-on paragraph ( 4 – 6) lines in which you state the benefits of what you are offering including any special offers.
• 3  to 6 indented bullet points (up to 2 lines per bullet point) – this is prime sales letter real estate; an opportunity for you to highlight the messages, statistics, facts, figures and juicy benefits you’re confident will motivate the recipient to get in touch. You can guarantee they will read these bullet points even if they only give a cursory glance to the rest of your letter.
• A  short paragraph (3 to 4 lines) outlining your call to action – what you want the recipient to do. Go to your website, pick up the phone and contact you, e-mail you? Be specific and clear with your instructions and reiterate your special offer!
• Your  one line sign off – charming old-fashioned etiquette – “thank you for taking the time to read my letter… I look forward to hearing from you.”
• Underneath  your signature lies the space allocated for your PS.  Why not use this space for two lines of genuine and unedited client testimonial instead?

If you want to move mountains with your next business to business mailshot, but are unsure where to start, these tips should help you.

Be brilliant at the basics. Direct mail is a touchy-feely medium. From the moment the envelope is in your prospect or client’s hands, they are evaluating it albeit on a subconscious level. If your letter has been printed with a crude laser signature onto a flimsy piece of paper its impact has already diminished. Ensure your letter is at least 120 gsm so that it feels good in the recipient’s hands and it looks the part too. Attach your business card by a paperclip. When mailing cold prospects this may be the one element held back for future reference. Read our previous blog on envelopes whilst you’re at it too. Should you hand sign each letter? Ideally yes. Nothing beats a proper signature but if you’re going down the route of mass-produced signatures, check the first batch to ensure they look authentic and clean (no dots of ink surrounding a fuzzy name). Small details count.

Be relevant. The beauty of direct-mail when you’re trying to woo business to business contacts is that it is high attention processing – business folk still pay attention to the post. There’s no denying that many business to business mailshots are consigned to the waste bin for many reasons some of which were addressed in our previous blog. However if your message is relevant and of genuine interest to the recipient, there’s every likelihood they will give some of their precious undivided time to your mailshot. Spend time crafting those relevant messages before moving to the production stage.

Build a strong case to buy or to contact you.  You can have a striking looking mailshot but if the contents do not convey clearly why you are the business to do business with it won’t work. In the business to business sector in particular, when decision makers are looking to buy, they need sufficient information to persuade them to move from the early stages of awareness and interest through to evaluation, desire and action. So, when you have developed your relevant messages reinforce them with more of the good stuff such as…the outcomes of your latest market research survey; recent case studies; 10 reasons why businesses bought from you last month; your customer care charter; a list of current clients; how many customers recommend you now; your client retention rate; your awards, accreditations, insurances and memberships; what’s on your website and blog that will interest them even more. It’s down to you to lavish the recipients of your mailshot with so many genuine compelling reasons to buy or to contact you that one by one you remove their barriers to a sale.

To test or not to test? The days when you would test creative tweaks have made way for quantitative offer testing. You may want to consider a ‘money off ‘incentive but are you confident this will encourage the highest levels of responses compared to say an offer of more services for less? Why not test both so the recipient can choose their preferred offer. With your next mailshot you can roll out with the strongest contender and another offer or, if it was a close call and both offers worked equally well why not repeat them.  A word of warning. Offering too many options confuses and can reduce responses. Keep it simple, limited to two.

In part two of our direct mail mini series we get to grips with the secrets of writing successful sales letters.

If you’re considering reducing your prices why not consider these options instead?

Can you offer clients easier to manage payment options? For example if you charge an upfront lump sum for your product or services and this is proving to be a barrier to a sale for  a good number of genuinely interested potential clients could you offer monthly payments for a small surcharge or even the option of spreading payments on a quarterly basis?  Make sure your terms and conditions are updated and agreed to so that you have some protection should a client fail to stick to the new payment terms.

Can you offer more for your clients without increasing your costs? For example if you deliver a service or product that requires some  after sales training  could you offer this free of charge? If you are currently doing this anyway, be sure to convey in full the financial value of these services to clients so they can see upfront what a great deal they are getting from choosing you. What extras can you offer clients that won’t break the bank but that could just tip the decision in your favour? Have a look at what competitors are doing to inspire you.

Conversely, can you unbundle – take away elements of your product or service that are time consuming or costly? Be careful if you go down this route. You have to be confident and certain from customer feedback that taking away will not impact on demand. But don’t hesitate from analysing the services or products that you provide, the cost of each element and whether it really is needed and desired by clients. You may find you are harbouring a few costly white elephants!

Can you make savings on your business overheads? Do a root and branch analysis of what you are spending in your business. Be mindful too of the need to balance cost savings with the need to maintain service levels to your existing and prospective clients. One business decided to switch from offering customers a choice of telephone and e-mail support to e-mail support only and their sales nosedived as a result. Another saved a small fortune when they opted for a lower grade of packaging only to experience a huge upsurge in customer complaints when their goods arrived damaged. When looking to reorganise and trim costs, place your customer at the centre of each anticipated change and evaluate at it through their eyes.

Finally, don’t apologise about your prices to clients. Emphasise the exceptional value you deliver in your direct mail and other communications using compelling case studies, statistics, facts and figures to underpin benefit statements. When selling products or services to other businesses, you cannot rely on an emotional pull alone to generate sales.