In the b-to-b world, transactions are less about impulse than company reputation, trust and well-conveyed product benefits. It is essential to reach business buyers multiple times through multiple channels to assist them during their purchase decision-making process.
A challenge that many marketers face is the increasing costs of multichannel campaigns. This is exacerbated when promoted to nonqualified prospects. Best practices suggest creating a subset of your customer base that identifies the prime audience for your product or service; this group will be the focus of your multichannel marketing efforts.
The initial step is to send out multiple scheduled email campaigns that demonstrate your company’s reputation and benefits of your products or service. After these campaigns are deployed, pull out the clicks and profile them against your customer database to identify your prime target audience.
You can then begin to execute on your multichannel campaigns by including other direct and digital channels. A common thread should be utilized through all channels, which the recipient could immediately identify with the initial email promotions, improving recall and increasing conversions.
Personalization is also a critical component of a multichannel campaign. By personalizing your messages, the results of your campaign are significantly increased. As the number of personalization elements are increased from one, the overall effectiveness of your campaign will increase.
When creating your campaigns, use recipient intelligence to create personalized offers, customize the messaging and deliver it to them through multiple channels. You should include personalized greetings and relevant messages based on demographics and firmographics such as number of employees, Standard Industrial Classification code, industry and job title, buying signals, click stream data and response history.
At a recent b-to-b conference, the speaker polled the audience to see how many had appended their customer file with an email address. Surprisingly, very few raised their hands. Yet a multichannel database cannot exist unless it contains multiple points of contact to reach each customer. Therefore, it is critical to append phone, email and postal information to your database regularly.
Marketers can also add social media information to their database by using prospecting lists with identified socially active people from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Greg Grdodian is a partner at Reach Marketing.
