Guest Post: B2B Email Best Practices eBook

You know I like a good ebook — and when I find one, I like to spread the word. Galen De Young of  Proteus B2B has put together an excellent ebook about integrating B2B email with other email efforts. I’ve invited him to talk about his book, and his ideas, here:

Email marketing continues to be a popular tactic for B2B marketers. A March 2009 report by MarketingProfs and Forrester noted that 39% of B2B marketers planned to increase their spending on email marketing.

There are several reasons for continuing to shift budgets to email marketing. Email marketing is significantly cheaper than other forms of outbound marketing. It also gives B2B marketers the ability to quickly and efficiently segment their markets and deliver tailored messages to each segment.

When looking around for sources of advice and best practices on B2B email marketing, however, we found many articles and blog posts about best practices and strategies, but we couldn’t find a comprehensive single source on best practices. So we decided to create one.

In late August, Proteus B2B released a 58-page eBook on B2B Email Marketing Best Practices. The book contains more than 130 best practices, tips, and strategies for B2B email marketing. The first part of the eBook address many best practices germane to both B2C and B2B email marketing. As you progress through the eBook, however, you’ll find more and more issues specifically focused on B2B. You can download a section of the eBook without registration, or download the entire eBook by registering.

While the eBook’s content is substantial, it’s designed in such a way to quickly review each insight. B2B sales lead consultant Mac McIntosh said, “…after spending less than an hour to quickly skim through B2B Email Marketing Best Practices, I came away with seven ideas I intend to put to work right away to get better results from my own, and my clients’, B2B email campaigns.”

Although the eBook is designed to deliver bite-size information, I think the key is how you put it all together, how you integrate these good B2B email marketing practices and leverage those efforts with search marketing and social media.

At Proteus B2B, our marketing consultants too often see silos of responsibility—one for email marketing, one of search marketing, and one for social media—with little practical integration or synergy. Even when these responsibilities lie within the same group of people, we see missed opportunity for properly leveraging email content on the web for search, for using social media to drive traffic to email content, and for providing ways for email recipients to easily share email marketing content.

Earlier this year, we wrote a blog post titled, “Are you Optimizing Your Email Marketing for Search?” We noticed more than a few odd comments on Twitter concerning the concept, and one reader commented on our blog, “…content written for e-mail marketing is not intended for search engine optimization, really… it should be a little different than the normal content published on the website.” The truth is most B2B email marketing is content marketing—and most of that content is also publically accessible on the sender’s website. As such, you’re ignoring huge opportunities if you don’t also optimize that content for search.

An article in this month’s BtoB Magazine noted an Association of National Advertisers survey citing 87% of responding marketers said they are challenged with identifying cost savings and reductions. If you read through the eBook on B2B Email Marketing Best Practices, you’ll begin to see how you can do more with less, how you can truly leverage your investment in email marketing if you also begin to consider and coordinate search marketing and social media efforts around the same content.

We know we haven’t thought of everything, and that there are lots of good ideas for B2B email marketing still out there. We’d like to make the recently released eBook a strong resource for B2B email marketers. If you have found other ideas and practices that work really well, please let us know via the comments on our blog.

About Galen De Young

Galen De Young is managing director of Proteus B2B, a marketing consulting firm specializing in repositioning B2B companies and their brands, and Proteus SEO, which specializes exclusively in B2B organic search marketing. He’s a regular columnist for Search Engine Land’s Strictly Business Column, and a periodic contributor to MarketingProfs and My Daily Fix. Galen is a frequent speaker at marketing conferences and events, most recently speaking on B2B SEO at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Summit in San Francisco. He’ll be speaking at the same B2B Summit event in Boston next week.

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