B2SB Email Marketing: The Best Practices, Personalization Tactics, and Metrics
By Heike Young
B2SB = business-to-small-business. B2SB is a subset of traditional B2B marketing. B2B is typically characterized by a longer and more corporate sales cycle. That sales cycle might include webinars, whitepapers, events, and numerous decision makers to sign a contract.
B2SB may feature some of that, but usually means marketing to small business owners who can make a buying decision fairly quickly without approvals from anyone else. In B2SB, marketing messages should be personalized to the owner as an individual, since the small business owner is still the primary or sole proprietor at their business. Messaging should center on helping the business grow—and the steps needed to get there.
In our newest episode of the Marketing Cloudcast, the marketing podcast from Salesforce, we talked to Endurance International Group’s Susan Rutgerson, who serves as Director of Digital Campaigns. Endurance delivers web hosting, design, security, and other digital services to millions of small business-owning customers. Endurance relies heavily on email marketing and B2B/B2SB email best practices to acquire new customers and upsell, engage, and increase loyalty.
If you’re a B2B company that markets to small or medium-sized companies, this episode has plenty of insights for you. Subscribe on iTunes to get the full episode, or flip through the embedded episode below.
Here are a few highlights from our conversation with Susan.
What resonates with small business owners? It’s all about education. Marketing to small business owners should always help clarify the thorny parts of having a business (like security, customer service, or financial matters) and help them prioritize what they really need vs. what they don’t.
Email marketing metrics should always directly relate to your business goals. In its B2B/B2SB email program, Endurance looks at traditional metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and ROI. But it also looks at the relationship of emails to reducing first 30-day churn, and whether emails are increasing upsells.
ROI can’t be the only goal. Susan explained, “[Measuring only ROI] creates a situation where we’re sending more email just for the sake of getting more clicks and hoping it eventually leads to more revenue.”
Measure click per clicker rate. Click per clicker rate means how many times a single subscriber comes back and clicks different pieces of content in the same email. You can increase this number with the strength of your content. Increasing click per clicker is a surefire way to increase loyalty and propensity to buy.
Use visual, not just textual, personalized content. As explained in the full podcast episode, Susan’s team sent a personalized email to small business owners that prominently featured a screenshot of their own website. These owners opened their email to see their own homepage looking back at them! Endurance’s CTRs quadrupled with this personalization tactic. As Susan acknowledges, “Content is a huge challenge for just about all marketers,” but thinking beyond traditional personalization methods is a way to break through the inbox clutter.
Start with one killer channel. Endurance has chosen to perfect its email strategy before branching out to other channels in the customer journey. “We’re getting email to a best-practice place. There’s a whole stack of other channels out there that we’d like to get into eventually, but we want to maximize email first,” says Susan. Start small.
That wisdom was echoed by the Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose on another recent episode of the Marketing Cloudcast:
“The heart of a great content strategy is being on just one platform first, and being different and great at it.”
The same goes for email. For even more B2B and B2SB marketing insights, download the Marketing Cloudcast to your podcast-listening device of choice. Get Susan’s episode now — and subscribe so you won’t miss another episode.
Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.
