eMarketer, which monitors trends in digital marketing, media and commerce, recently spoke with Maribeth Ross, Vice President of NetProspex, a business-to-business email and offline data services company.
eMarketer: How do you get recipients to read the contents of an email?
Ross: What you put above the fold on the top of the screen is very important because you want to capture their attention
right away. There are a lot of schools of thought on this, and the way I think about it is if I am a recipient, I’m not going to open something that I think is a product pitch. The recipient is going to ask, “What’s in it for me?” The answer can’t be, “We have a great product.” Nobody wants to invite themselves into a sales pitch.
eMarketer: What has changed for companies doing CRM mailings, and what do you think will change going forward?
Ross: A trend that I’ve seen in B2B customer-oriented marketing is taking a personalized approach. Once you have permission to have that relationship with the customer, you want to make sure you protect it. So what you’re going to send them is highly relevant content that is highly personalized. One of the best practices I’ve seen associated with that is making sure that any customer communications come directly from either their account manager or assigned salesperson. You can still send it out through your marketing automation system, but you want to make it look like it came from an individual, [as opposed to] a larger email program sent to many people.
eMarketer: What would you say is the underlying best practice in content marketing?
Ross: I always encourage our marketing team to think like the buyer. Put themselves in the shoes of the buyer and really figure out whether it makes sense — if the timing makes sense, and if the content is important enough to put in front of them.
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