Every day, over 294 billion emails are sent. This makes the 400 million tweets and 2 million blog posts seem paltry in comparison. With that much email communication going on daily, it is understandable that in a recent survey, 65% of B2B buyers indicated that email shapes their perspective of companies and brands. Food marketers can take advantage of email for B2B brand building by considering a few key points in structuring email campaigns and composing individual emails.
Here are some tips to more effectively use email as a B2B branding tool:
1. Personalize: The sender is half of the relationship in any communication. The receiver has a name and so should the sender. One-on-one is the most effective technique in establishing a brand as an entity of people who care about the people they want to do business with. To elevate your email above the “blast” communication level, send them from a person, not sales@ or marketing@ addresses. The primary reasons emails go unopened/disqualified are the sender and the subject line.
2. Target: In B2B food and beverage marketing, not all contacts/potential customers are created equal. Each has its own unique needs to be met and problems to be solved. By targeting your messages, you position your brand as uniquely capable of meeting your customers’ needs instead of just selling your products. This approach creates a dialog and engagement based on problems/solutions that build your brand.
3. Show some personality: Every company and brand has a persona that is reflected in all communication, including advertising and marketing, in email and any other communication channel. Always speak to your audience in the tone and persona of your brand. Consistency in communication is a powerful brand builder because it is the means by which your brand becomes familiar, and the more familiar your brand, the more comfortable your target audience will be in doing business with you.
4. Define the action: Every brand building and promotional email should have a call-to-action. . .what are you asking your target audience to do? The way in which you ask someone to take an action is very important. Make sure the action is helpful to the audience and not simply self-serving. Brands need to build value and a call-to-action is an excellent way to do this by offering something of relevance or importance in exchange for the action. Place a call-to-action near the beginning of the email to reinforce your intent to be helpful and position your brand as being customer focused. It also helps in grabbing the reader’s attention quickly placing the “what’s in it for me” upfront.
Food and beverage marketers who embrace email as a branding tool will begin to look at emails through the eyes of their customers. Since email is the primary channel of business communication, it always presents an opportunity to build a brand.
