Up until now B2B marketing and B2C marketing were considered to be on two separate paths, employing completely different tactics, with ultimately two different end-goals. However, things are changing, as marketers move into 2014 we expect to see B2B and B2C marketing beginning to show signs of converging as SMBs and companies without a large IT-infrastructure use cloud-based solutions to host their email services.
There are two key drivers behind this trend. The first is the on- going increased adoption of content marketing as a key strategy for B2C and B2B marketing. The second is the trend for businesses to use email platforms such as Gmail that were once considered only of use for consumers, but are now being used as business communication tools. The impact for email marketers is that deliverability between businesses will start to be controlled more and more by the same reputation rules that once only applied to B2C marketing, meaning they will need to start monitoring subscriber complaints, spam traps and other list hygiene issues.
However, there is more to effective B2B marketing than just traditional features such as a sender’s email reputation. This is still important to ISPs, but email deliverability has evolved. Until recently, ISPs were focusing all of their efforts on punishing “bad” (spam) email. Now however, ISPs have shifted their approach and are rewarding “good” email. This is determined by engagement data which provides a view of whether subscribers are interacting positively or negatively with emails. Positive signs of engagement include opening, forwarding, replying or moving an email from the junk folder to the inbox, whereas negative engagement is represented by actions such as deleting your messages before opening or reading them, or moving mail to the junk folder.
Email address lists are organic and like any organism their performance will decline over a period of time if they are not maintained. B2B marketers need to ensure they are regularly examining all address data to guarantee they are updating it with customer preferences. By not listening to customer requests the danger is a negative impact on both sender reputation metrics and subscriber engagement.
With businesses expanding into more hosted email solutions marketers are faced with obstacles such as Gmail Tabs. However, early indications in 2013 suggest that most marketers can stop worrying about Gmail crippling their email response rates, there are two opposing forces that may decide how subscribers ultimately react to these changes: novelty and habit. For many users this was the first time Tabs were part of the Gmail experience, and some may have searched through their messages to see which brands were rerouted but they may not be as curious a week or a month later. On the other hand users that want to see at least some of their commercial email on a regular basis must now take an additional step to find it. That’s a habitual activity that develops over time, and as these users start to check the Promotions Tab as part of their regular email review, 2014 read rates could begin to climb.
There are a number of tools and techniques available for marketers to gather and understand the right data and how it impacts deliverability of email marketing campaigns. By implementing best practice in 2014, B2B marketers will ultimately boost engagement, deliverability and their own sender reputation enabling them to improve email marketing campaigns and improve inbox placement.
By Tom Sather, Senior Director of Email Research at Return Path.
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