An often asked question in my email marketing seminars is - What's the difference in B2B and B2C Email marketing?
Since this lack of understanding stems from the fact that we are both consumers at home and work, and businesses at the same time. Further, the fine line between work and home computing is getting blurred all the time as we do office email at home, and look for phone or other gadget bargains at work...
Here, I explain the key difference in B2B email marketing and B2C email marketing as I understand it.
Intent
The objective for a B2B email marketing campaign is to generate interest in your products and services, to try to pre-sell or at least prop up the lead into a "suspect" first. Once you have a suspect getting warmed up to your offers and products, you can take further steps to convert that suspect into a "prospect", a warm lead.
So the intent of a B2B email campaign is to generate interest by offering free downloads, white papers, specifications, special reports about your products or services. You can further build credibility and trust by throwing in some customer testimonials, some case studies, and some relevant trends from the industry.
Provide information and lead the suspect into meeting your sales teams, ask for an appointment or a demonstration. If the offers and information seem interesting to the readers, they will surely ask for more, or ask for clarifications. That's it, B2B email marketing has delivered!
Now it is up to your pre-sales, marketing folks to turn the prospect into a Sale. There you go, the key use of B2B email marketing, to generate suspects into prospects into sales.
Remember, B2B email primarily informs, and builds interest, not sells directly! And you win with this.
Intent for B2C email marketing is more of a "Buy Now!", "Limited Stock", "Sales Ending Today!" kind of campaigns, where you don't plan to inform only.
Yes, you do inform about the product, its uniqueness, its benefits, but then immediately lead the prospect into the "hard sell" sales copy, where the limited offers, and bonus after bonus pile-on makes the prospect dizzy, thinking it is too-good-an-offer to miss.
Sprinkle "Add to Cart" all along the copy at strategic positions, and push to buy now. That's the speciality of a B2C email marketing campaign.
Of course, writing copy for either kind of emails is hard work. You don't just write, you craft the message.
So depending on your product or service, choose B2B or B2C, and once done, use the INTENT properly, and you have a winning email marketing campaign.
Comments