Answer: Most e-mail newsletters today look pretty much the same, so how can you distinguish yours from your competitors’? By using behavioral targeting to learn more about what customers want and giving it to them. B-to-b e-mailers work with shorter customer lists and often longer sales cycles than their b-to-c counterparts, but that doesn’t mean they should be tempted to oversaturate their most valuable customers with a deluge of nontargeted email. Behaviorally targeted messages provide better response and can even be credited with shortening sales cycles.

The easiest way to obtain behavioral targeting data is through Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

If your e-mail list includes customers and prospects with Yahoo.com addresses, it’s possible they didn’t see messages you sent in February and March. The company, according to a March 11 blog post, made changes to its inbound mail service in an effort to block spam—a move that ended up blocking both spam and legitimate e-mails from bulk senders.
The snafu is a good reminder to marketers that they must constantly monitor their deliverability. Here are some tips that to help boost and maintain deliverability rates: Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

E-mail marketing managers love to include quick surveys in their e-newsletters—so much so that they risk overdoing it.

Melissa Read, VP-research and innovation at Spunlogic, an Atlanta-based full-service digital marketing agency, believes managers send surveys too often, causing respondents to burn out on the novelty of providing feedback. Eventually, she said, they’ll stop responding.

“Surveys should only go out when you want to understand something about the business respondents,” Read said. Otherwise, “it will become the survey who cried wolf and the next time you really want to know something, respondents won’t be as interested in telling you.”

Paring down the number of surveys is a good start, she said. Read offers these other helpful tips... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Small and midsize businesses are increasing their use of Web 2.0 tools as information sources, providing greater opportunities to marketers that are trying to reach this audience, according to a new study from market research company Bredin Business Information.

The study was based on an online survey in August of 338 business executives at companies with fewer than 500 employees. It examined which online tools SMBs use, how they use them to receive business information and the implications for marketers using Web 2.0 tools to reach SMBs. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Despite their proliferation, e-newsletters require considerable dedicated resources, not the least of which is content. And although they can be ideal companywide communication vehicles, without the ability to segment subscriber files and... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.