B2B Email Marketing: Boring or Brilliant?

Discover what really works in B2B email marketing with Napier’s on-demand webinar where we share results of our email marketing study.

The webinar covers:

• Benchmarking of B2B email campaigns
• The best B2B email ideas
• How companies get it wrong
• Why companies don’t bother
• How to be top of the email marketing class

Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.

Napier Webinar: ‘B2B Email Marketing: Boring or Brilliant?’ Transcript

Speakers: Mike Maynard

Hi everyone and thanks for joining us for this webinar. Hopefully you guys can all hear me. It’d be really good if someone could just maybe post in the chat to say that the audio is working. I’m in a new setup today, so I just want to make sure that everything is good. And today we’re going to be talking about about email marketing, and we’re going to be asking whether B to B email marketing is brilliant or if it’s boring.

So this is going to be an interesting webinar, because what we did was we actually went out and did some research. So we’ve actually gone out to find out what people are doing in B to B marketing, so you can see what’s really happening.

So, yeah, I don’t know if anyone is able just to post in the chat and just confirm that you can hear what I’m saying. Appears to be quite quiet, and it would be great to know that it’s all working. Yeah, yeah, perfect. So thank you for that. I can see that the audio is okay, right? So we will crack on with the presentation.

So I think you know one of the reactions, and this is an interesting webinar, because when we run webinars, we get huge levels of interest when we cover AI. And to some extent, we kind of feel that, you know, AI has been done to death, but it’s still something everyone wants to learn about.

And then you talk about email marketing, and you get this kind of response where people are like, Oh, I don’t want to hear about email marketing. I don’t want to know it’s something we all understand. It’s old, it’s boring, and I think, you know, it’s really disappointing.

So actually, what we wanted to do was go out and find out what people are doing. So we wanted to find out what email marketing the typical B to B marketer is actually doing, and then to also see some of the best and learn from it. And you’ll see with a little character there, he’ll become a little more apparent later on, but he’s our super spy that went out to find out what was going on.

So let’s have a look at what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to discuss very briefly how we did the research. We’re going to look at whether marketers are collecting data. This is a really big thing for me, because a lot of B to B markets will say, well, data is our most valuable resource, and. The one thing we have learned from doing this is a lot of marketers are not using the data they have and not trying to grow their data. So this leads to the fact that some marketers are not even sending emails. And we’ll talk about that.

We’ll then go into the main part of this presentation, and we’ll talk about the emails we received. So this is going to give you an idea of some of the good and maybe some of the bad about what we received, and, you know, particularly, some of those email mistakes. And lastly, finish with some conclusions and recommendations.

So we’ll start off with a bit of background, go into a little bit of data in terms of what we’ve done, and then we’ll start looking at what companies were actually sending, which I guess is the most interesting thing for most of the people on the webinar today, is to make sure that you get the ideas from the people who are doing the best things.

So how do we do it? Well, some of you on the call probably have had an inquiry by a guy called Fred Fox. Freddie, who is absolutely fearless, is a fox who we sent out to go and register on basically three categories of companies websites, so pneumatic semiconductors and materials handling. We picked those because they are obviously quite different industries, and we felt they’d give quite different responses. And in general, they did, although there was a lot of similarity.

And that we did was we registered most of the time. Where possible, we went for a registration for a newsletter or email updates or things like that. Some companies, you have to register to create a my website section and then a couple. The only way we could actually register was by downloading something. So we did that.

And whenever, you know, emails were sent through to confirm email addresses, obviously, we clicked the confirmation links where we had to register with more detail, we entered kind of random interests, roughly 50% of the products or services, and then we waited. We didn’t actually do anything, so we weren’t going out trying to trigger interactions on the website. We were literally sitting back and waiting. And we waited a month to see what we received.

So basically, Freddie had his inbox. It was gradually filling up with emails, and after a month, we analyzed the data.

And actually, to be completely transparent, there may have been a Orlando Norris motor racing driver who did the pneumatics research, because we ran that first as a trial, and then we brought Freddie in for the next two markets.

And of course, you know, some people are going to say we may have missed some emails because of spam filters, etc, and that’s probably true, but we did our best to make sure that we gathered everything, we pulled stuff out of, you know, junk folders and things. So hopefully the analysis is pretty good. It’s certainly, you know, the best data we’ve seen in terms of what’s going on.

So let’s talk a little bit about data first, and let’s talk about whether marketers are actually collecting data.

So interestingly, although we wanted to get email updates from all these companies, we actually weren’t able to get email updates from everybody. So pneumatics wasn’t too bad, you think, for a, you know, what might be considered a bit of an old fashioned industry, you know, somewhat mechanical. They may not be, you know, one of the leaders, but actually, 93% had a sign up form that was fairly easy to find, so we were able to sign up on most of those in the semiconductor sector, 24 out of 30, so only 80% had obvious sign up forms.

One of those sign up forms didn’t appear to work. Gave us an error message. So that’s not good. You know, we’re sub 80% actually looking to collect data. And then materials handling guys, I mean, about a third of you have got sign ups. And again, one of these forms didn’t work, gave us an error so if you’re looking at this, actually, there’s a lot of companies, you know, particularly when you get to semiconductors, and particularly material handling, where people are not actually collecting the data.

So that’s the first challenge. If you’re not giving any of your website visitors an option to sign up, there’s no opportunity to do this.

But then, do people actually send emails? Well, we had 26 pneumatics companies. We’ve registered for only 50% sent an email, sent an email at all So acknowledge registration, and only half of those sent more emails after acknowledging registration. So. Yeah, so we’re down at about 25% who actually made use of the data once we filled in a form, and only four of them sent more than two emails. And actually only two sent communications into the second month. So from a sample of 30, only two, you know, continue comms into a second month.

So that’s really interesting. A lot of people are not using the data they’re getting.

If we look at and I’m sorry that there’s an error here. This is not pneumatics. This is semiconductors. Semiconductors were much better. So although they didn’t have quite as many companies offering sign ups, almost all the companies sent at least one email. 70% sent more than one email. So the vast majority of companies were using the data, and actually, over the period of a month, three companies sent more than 10 emails. So we’ll talk a little bit about that, because obviously, that’s interesting. Some companies are sending quite large volumes of emails, and maybe some are sending a little too many.

And then lastly, the materials handling, only 34% as I mentioned, had sign up forms, and only half of those sent emails. So about 15% of the companies collected the data and sent an email, and actually only three of the five sent more than two so we tried roughly 30 companies to try and sign up, and only about 10% actually sent more than two emails.

So again, marketers here are not making use of the data. They’re not actively pushing to collect data. And I would say, even when there were signups, sometimes it was pretty hard to find them. You had to work quite hard. And, you know, once the data was collected, their marketers weren’t necessarily using it.

Now there could be, of course, a link between the fact that, you know, we’re not getting many signups, therefore we’re not going to focus much on email marketing, and marketing. I’m not sure the solution, if your sign up process is not optimized, the solution is to go and not bother sending emails. That sounds like a bad idea to me. It sounds to me like what you really should be doing is fixing that sign up process.

And I think although we’re not going to dig into any depth in terms of how people create sign ups on websites. I think that’s super important to understand that that’s a major opportunity for optimization.

So we’ve established that, you know, a lot of marketers weren’t really using that data, but some were, some were doing quite an interesting job. So let’s have a look at what we received.

So we received quite a wide range of emails. Now, obviously some of them were different sign up routes, you know. So some were downloading a white paper, others were signing up for a newsletter. Others were registering for, you know, a customized section on the website. So lots of variety. But actually, there were some really clear trends no matter what we signed up for. So we found that quite interesting.

So the first thing is, it was really polarized as to how many emails companies sent. So the general trend is companies didn’t send much. And actually, I’ve got to be honest, if they sent anything, it was probably less than we would have wanted if we wanted to date. So there’s a real opportunity to send more emails for most companies, but in each sector, there was a company that kind of bucked the trend.

So pneumatics Ingersoll Rand sent 11 emails. Infineon sent 20 emails. In the semiconductor sector, which is pretty impressive, given that it was a period of about 31 days, so almost equivalent to an email every working day. MPs and Qualcomm also sent a route amount 13 each, and even in materials handling, where we’ve said most of those companies aren’t collecting data, one company, boymer, actually was pretty proactive in terms of sending emails, and sent seven over the course of a month, so, you know, almost two a week.

So that was the first learning was that it’s very polarized. Some are really pushing and using the channel, but most companies are not. And it feels to me, the companies that are not are missing out. And we’re not saying, you know, go to sending 20 emails in a month, and we’ll talk about Infineon later, but we are saying, you know, perhaps one email a month, it’s not really going to break through and make a big difference.

I think part of the problem is the content that’s sent. This is a breakdown for pneumatics, and it does look slightly different for some of the other markets. But if we look at pneumatics, we had a lot of product promotion. So people basically pushing particular products, which is that 52% blue color, only 10% were shows and events. That was quite different. When we looked at the. The electronic semiconductor world, and some companies in particular, really, really like webinars in semiconductors.

So 10% for events, physical events, 13% so total of 23 for webinars and events in pneumatics, as I say, more in semiconductors, and more certainly for some companies, probably less on the physical events for semiconductors. And then the last number I want to look at is that 16% the light blue, which is what you’d call thought leadership.

So actually, only 16% of the emails were really, you know, things which established expertise or credentials of the company. They weren’t really, you know, sending a lot of content that made me think, you know what, this company is trying to educate me, help me do better in my job. And so I think that’s a big opportunity, and that was reflected across all those markets where it tended to be more, you know, sales, marketing, rather than thinking about, how can I help and educate the person who’s just registered?

So it’s a real opportunity that’s missed out.

Now let’s go and have a look at what we actually received, and let’s talk about some of the emails we received.

So there was an interesting mix of welcome emails. So some of them, I think were quite good. So Festo here, you know, sent a pretty interesting email that talked about the Festo community and a little bit about the business lattice. On the other hand, that is very transactional and very functional and literally just telling you that you’ve created. It a somewhat similar thing for st micro electronics, and then a slightly different approach, this time, from one of the materials handling companies, mecalux, where the first thing you got back was, we received your inquiry. Can’t see any notes. Are we able to assist with anything?

Not really the best email in the world in terms of sales email, but I’ll talk about this later. I think it’s very underused. You know, once people sign up for email, the marketing team kind of feels that they own that contact and don’t like giving any access to sales I’m not sure that’s a great idea. I think being more proactive with useful and helpful sales emails would be great.

And of course, the problem with this is it’s very vague. It’s really throwing everything back to the person who registered. And so it’s not again helping that that person helping them by understanding what they’re interested or anything like that. So I think this was probably a newsletter registration, which is why they didn’t know what we’re interested in, why there was no notes. But, you know, maybe something a little bit more helpful might be a good first step from the sales manager, rather than just sending a How can we help you? It feels a bit like walking into one of those, you know, rather over enthusiastic shops, where someone walks up and says, How can I help you? And 90% of the people immediately say, no, no, no, I’m fine, because they don’t want to be sold

to

and then lastly, this is interesting, and actually understand, this is one of Napier’s campaigns. Microchip was unique. Microchip was the only company that sent a sequence of emails actually sent seven emails explaining why there was a benefit in signing up for my microchip, how you use it, and what information can get. So it was a really interesting kind of educational process around the signing up to create a my microchip account. And I think that’s certainly something that more companies could do.

There are a lot of companies with quite painful sign up procedures. I mean, people like, I think it was Qualcomm and Nvidia where you really had to work sign up, and then kind of, you were thrown into this, you know, login area. It’s like, get on with it yourself. Good luck. You know, no support. Whereas walking you through the benefits, I think, is a really good idea.

So different ways to do welcome emails, I would say, think about how you do them. There’s certainly things you can do that are much more than just welcome you’re registered a couple of the registrations for contents is some two examples of the download emails that give you a link back to the report or the eBook that you downloaded. They’re pretty straightforward. They’re not really telling you very much.

And I think again, this is an opportunity where maybe walking through some other related content or other materials on the website that might be interesting, that could be really helpful, and it could start building engagement with this contact, rather than just throwing them the link to the ebook The. They’ve probably already downloaded, and then saying, you know, good luck. Get on with it. And let us know if you’ve got any questions.

So again, think about that, that first interaction, how much you can give people back, rather than just being transactional.

Now, one thing I found quite interesting, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later. Is, and this is particularly the case in semiconductors. Apparently, when you sign up on a website, the only thing you’re interested in is webinars. And it was really, really interesting that we had a huge volume of promotions around webinars and very little around written content. Even when we signed up for ebooks, we weren’t necessarily being recommended, you know, similar ebook content.

So Fortner, we’re a company that actually did this, and they actually sent links to interesting content that I think would be super helpful. So this includes, you know, some Gartner research. They’ve obviously spent some money on this, and they’re actually using it and really promoting it. And then there are a couple of other people, I mean, boymer, who did send some other information, which linked through to written content. And a bit of a strange layout here with a missing photo that didn’t load. We did try a couple of times to get this email to work, but it’s obviously broken, but it did actually. They did actually route you through to some related written content.

Analog Devices. And I think analog devices were particularly good because, like microchip, they kind of walked you through what you could do. And you can see here on this email, it’s leaking you to different areas of the website and trying to point your signpost the things that are going to be useful for you in your job.

So again, it’s thinking about the person that you’re reaching and trying to help them, trying to make it easier for them to work with you.

There was some written content through newsletters. So whilst it wasn’t promotional specific written content, there were some newsletters. You can see here. The newsletters don’t necessarily look that different. Interestingly, the count newsletter, the first email you get tells you how to visit the count website, which is kind of strange, because obviously you’ve been there to register. But fine, that’s okay, you know, includes pictures, maybe not the best layout in the world.

One thing we did see is that actually a lot of the newsletters being sent. Don’t include a lot of graphics. They will have either a logo or a banner at the top that’s downloadable, but they don’t include graphics around the stories, so they don’t include pictures of the product.

So we’ve got one from NPS there. We got a similar one from Infineon and then boymer as well, where they have another email here as part of their newsletter, and again, no images. So an interesting trend there is obviously something we’d suggest, if you were considering this, that you test to work out whether pictures make a positive difference or not. But it’s certainly something to consider, presumably with the number of people who are running without images in their newsletter. It kind of suggests that they that at least some of them have tested it and found that it

works.

I mentioned webinars, yeah. Synopsis, not the most exciting email that you send. You also do, roughly, you know, a webinar or two a week, and so synopsis just keeps sending you, effectively the same email with a list of upcoming webinars. If the content is great, I guess that’s good, but there’s not a lot of sales or promotion around this. You’ve really got to, you know, take a guess from the headline, what it’s like that’s very different to the typical webinar or event promotion, this is an event promotion here where people have a lot more explanation about what’s going on.

You can see here a webinar from Qualcomm, and again, you’re really trying to sell it. And I think this is the way most companies are going, and the way most companies are seeing the best registrations, is really giving information about the webinar so people feel confident it’s worth their time. A similar one from Infineon.

An interesting difference here from Emerson. Emerson actually creating a conference, and they’re giving people the opportunity to present at the conference. I think that’s quite good. It’s an interesting way to really build more engagement with customers, and I think it’s probably better than just having this spokesperson from a company just talking at you all the time, rather like this way. In our I guess.

And then lastly, something very different, a very simple, very plain email from St. The one thing I would say is the title actually is pretty descriptive, more descriptive than the synopsis ones, I’d argue. And it was actually something that stood out in the inbox. When we looked at it, we really noticed it because it was so direct and so clear.

So a very different tactic, maybe, again, something worth you trying.

If we look at product promotion in most industries, there wasn’t much you know. Quarvo sent something which is about their new product announcements, but in the materials handling, where obviously there’s fewer new products than the semiconductors, there wasn’t a lot of promotion of products.

In pneumatics, there was, and we can see here we’ve got email one an email from another company and an email from yet another company. All of them look actually remarkably the same and remarkably kind of similar. And I think this is a big risk. If you were working in a pneumatics company, maybe you remember that, you know, one company is red versus the others being blue. But it’s really hard to differentiate.

And I think that to some extent, you know, there’s some issues here with, you know, following rather formulaic and rather dull layout. So maybe thinking of new layouts would be good. And also arrows you can see here actually managed to get the name wrong, which is a little bit worrying as well.

I mentioned sales emails, and I think this is an underutilized tactic. I think this is something people should do more of. I’m not quite sure whether you should repeat the person’s details a bit like I know where you live, kind of threat here, but you know, they’re repeating our details, but I think reaching out and saying, Can I help? You know, this is the reason why I’m trying to help is really good.

So we got one here, actually from a channel partner, rather than actually the company we’ve registered with. This is the email we got from mecalux I mentioned earlier. And then there was a similar one from card X. Card x was, you know, I think again, quite good. They have a little bit of a reason to talk to them, why they’re really good. And then it gives you a contact as well.

I think there’s, there’s more you can do. To be fair to these companies, we weren’t engaged on the website, so they weren’t able to gather data about what products were interested but I think if you can, you know, really drive relevant, interesting sales emails from, you know, some a real person rather than a marketing type email address, and offer you an opportunity to call it’s always worth doing. So I definitely think that’s the case.

I also think it’s particularly good. If you look at the Mecca Lux, you know that they made it really clear how to contact in terms of the telephone, I’m not sure. On the email signature with card x, it’s that necessary to publish the email address, we kind of know, because all we have to do is reply to the email you sent.

So sales emails, interesting. Would love to know your theories on whether they make sense or not, but I think there’s definitely an opportunity there fun emails.

Well, this was nice and short. There was only one. So we analyzed, I think, you know, roughly a couple of 100 emails over around 75 companies sending emails. And there was only one email that wasn’t basically either trying to promote the company, send a newsletter, send marketing information, only one thing that was slightly different.

And this might be something you want to think about, whether it makes sense or not, whether your audience would like it is a different issue. And you could argue that the Snapdragon insiders, that’s going to include a wide range of people, and they’re maybe not all very corporate, so maybe, you know, to be fun fair, they can have a bit more fun than some other brands. But again, it’s an interesting idea, and something I think that would be well worth thinking about.

We got a couple of emails that were a bit, you know, corporate positioning. This one I’ve picked out. So when you register with NPS, the first thing you get is, why choose NPS? And I’m not sure this really works. It’s not something I’d recommend. It feels to be kind of salesy.

If I’ve inquired by putting my email in, I don’t think you know what I want. Is a reason as to why I need to buy from you straight. Away. I’m obviously interested. So you don’t need to do that. And it’s kind of, you know, fairly bland. We’re doing really well because we’re growing very quickly. Kind of message rather than, this is why we’re going to help you do your job.

So again, it would go back to, how can we really engage people and help them do their job? And so this is where I’d point to community emails. And we’ve got a range of community emails. I mean, the Silicon Labs, one not beautifully laid out, but I think really clear and really helpful, giving an indication of what the community can do to help them. The Renas, one very different layout, but again, very similar. You know, offering you help and community support. And also, Qualcomm, again, with Snapdragon, they have an email around Snapdragon insiders. It’s very vague as to what’s being offered. I would say that about the email, but I think you know the idea that these three are really trying to offer a community and trying to give benefit to the person who’s registered, I think are all very positive.

So hopefully that’s given you some ideas. I mean, maybe it’s triggered some questions, in which case I’d really encourage you to just ping a question into the Q and A or into the chat, and I’ll be very happy to answer them at the end, so please do put them in.

But before we get to the questions, we’re going to have a bit of fun. And I apologize to the companies I picked out here, but there are a couple of examples of where I think emails could be better.

So the first one here, we’ve got an email where we’ve got a dark red on black text, which is very hard to read, probably not passing accessibility. We’ve got different fonts being displayed. You actually can’t see anything in terms of the email until you display the pictures, so all the text isn’t visible until the pictures are displayed. Actually, the email is not compliant with privacy legislations. And to make it even worse, the mobile layout is not great. You know, a kind of ugly, square picture and very small writing. And again, this hard to read Black, black and red, low contrast.

So I would say, think about your layout. Think about things like accessibility and readability. Make sure you’re compliant with all the legislation and make sure the HTML works. I mean, test it in in different places. You know, those of you that are super smart and super geeky about fonts will notice the font worked fine on my iPhone, but didn’t work in Outlook, so the font was inconsistent in Outlook. So that’s something that you know, clearly just needs a bit of work.

What else can we pick on? Well, Qualcomm. I’ve said some good things about Qualcomm. I’m going to say some bad things. Qualcomm had a number of from addresses, which, frankly, even as a marketer, I found confusing. Qualcomm technologies, this is one of theirs. They sent us a thank you. In fact, Qualcomm technologies, as an email address, sent me three thank yous for signing up, which is very nice, but probably over the top and nothing useful.

So I’m not quite sure why they did that. We then had Morris, who sent some information about a competition. We’ve got Qualcomm Wi Fi, we’ve got the Snapdragon insiders program, we’ve got Qualcomm Technical Marketing, and we’ve even got do not reply when we first register, and then another do not reply when we first register.

So this is really hard, and more important, importantly, what you want to do is establish credibility for email from addresses. So by using multiple email addresses, you’re going to make it hard to get into that inbox. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that you really limit how many from addresses. And this, you know, I would contend is way too many addresses to be sending email marketing from it kind of feels like it’s been done more for Qualcomm’s convenience than necessarily from anything else. But you know, that’s a personal view.

I did mention about sending too many emails. So last week, fortunately, I wasn’t feeling lonely, but just in case I was Infineon sent me some emails.

So on Monday, they sent me an email about a webinar for Gan. On Tuesday, they sent me an email for another webinar with a partner, iar, and another webinar about smart power. And then on Wednesday, they sent me another webinar, this time about USB and yet another thing. This was actually an event, not a webinar. So I mean, I’m guessing the events team and the webinar team are probably the same. But anyway, this is a physical event in Africa which is quite. Distance travel and another webinar, just to make sure that I got three emails on Wednesday, so we’re now at six emails already for the week, and on Thursday, yes, you’ve guessed it, we’ve got another webinar.

And actually that wasn’t the end of it. They sent another email through to me as well. This actually wasn’t a webinar. This is a product that they’re promoting. So maybe this is someone slightly different, but the events team managed to send seven emails across four dates. We’re only at Thursday.

So what happened Friday? Oh, sorry I missed this. Yet another webinar. I’m sorry. And then on Friday, nothing. So obviously someone at Infineon has read that response rates are lower on Friday, so don’t send emails on Friday. I suspect response rates are lower after you’ve sent the eighth or ninth webinar for that week.

So really make sure you manage how many emails you send.

They’re not the only one sending too many emails. We also had one company who initially sent three single emails and then after the first three emails every time they sent duplicate email one minute after the previous one. So we received two copies of every email, which is interesting. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but clearly, it’s important to fix your systems.

And then lastly, I’d say, deliver on promises. I got two emails from dimatic to confirm my email address, which is great, you know? I mean, I’m all for making sure that people are really opted in. And then I got this email saying, Thank you. We’re going to keep you up to date, and then nothing to keep me up to date.

So yeah, deliver on your promises if you’re going to keep us up to date on current industry trends, technologies and innovative solutions, then send us some of those, and don’t just send me an email saying you’re going

to

do it.

So what can we conclude from all this? It it’s kind of been a whistle stop tour, and I appreciate it’s been kind of quick, but it’s not hard to be one of the better email marketers. Lots of marketers either aren’t bothering or they’re making silly mistakes, and I think that’s something that you can very quickly, you know, eliminate get your systems working. Don’t send duplicate emails. Don’t send 13 emails in a week, and make sure that you’re, you know, sending good quality stuff.

I think a lot of people are not thinking about data, you know, and quite a few people will probably say, but you know, glibly, yeah, absolutely. Data is the most important thing we have, and then not really actually walk the walk. So, you know, there’s a lack of opportunities to sign up for emails, and typically there’s poor campaigns. When you do sign up, there’s too much of a focus on selling, and whether that’s selling the products and services you make or the events. I mean, pneumatics was very focused on buy our products semiconductors. Were very, very focused on webinars, particularly in Finn thank you for all those webinar emails filling my inbox.

But you know, I think there’s way too much focus on, what can we sell to the person? What can we get them to do, rather than how we can help? How can we help them?

And then the last thing to say is, and don’t be Infineon, because that is clearly crazy, but there clearly is an opportunity to increase frequency for most companies. So a lot of companies are sending maybe one email a month, maybe fewer. I’ve got to be honest, I don’t remember the marketing emails from companies that send me one email a month. Companies got to send it more frequently.

And so I think you know, if you can get the scheduling right, more frequency is good. Obviously, it’s a challenge where you have multiple divisions of a company all wanting to send emails, and so you need to make sure there’s a central organization scheduling that and preventing, you know, people from receiving multiple emails per day.

And one thing I would say is we did work with a client, and they said this a little while back, and they said we’re only sending one email a month because people will opt out, because we don’t want to, you know, abuse the trust. And we said, look, just try to just, you know, we’re not asking you to do a lot. Just try two emails a month.

And this client eventually did try two emails a month, and interestingly, the number of people opting out went down. It didn’t go up. It went down. And I’m not talking about number of people per email. I’m talking about number of people per month. So by sending two emails a month, we actually saw the opt outs more than half per email. So whether that’s you know, completely statistically valid, I don’t know, but it’s the same thing we’ve seen. We’ve seen a lot of other clients who send, you know, quite high volumes of emails, and we don’t see high opt out rates.

So generally speaking, if someone’s signed up for content, they actually want content. So make them happy. So. Yeah, so in terms of recommendations, well, I mean, I think obviously try harder to gather contacts. I think use email, it’s still a good channel. We know that where we use email, it works. Well, don’t make the silly mistakes, so be careful and think about how you can add value to recipient. This is not about just selling to them. You know, it’s not about keeping business units or product managers happy. It’s about providing a range of content that’s going to be useful.

You know, people are into Gary Vaynerchuk, where he talks about, you know, sending three helpful emails before you send the sales email. I mean, we weren’t even close to that. We weren’t even close to one helpful email for every three sales emails. That means almost 100% selling or promoting different things. And I get that webinars can be helpful, but ultimately it’s still promotion. You’re still requiring people to do something before they get something of value. Try and give them something of value.

Obviously, don’t be able to be afraid, to communicate more frequently, and lastly, test to see what works with you, for you, and testing is important, so I hope this has been interesting. We’ve gone through an awful lot here. We will be making the slides available so you can go and have a look in more depth that’s probably going to happen next week. So you’ll better see you know more data next week.

We also, at this point, typically talk about the next webinar. What I’m going to do is I’m going to do something a little bit different. So Freddie, would love to hear from you about the next webinar. So actually, if you could send an email to me, Mike at Napier, B to b.com and let me know what topic you think would be useful to be covered, I’d really appreciate that you know whether it’s something about ai pr, media relations, email marketing, you know, AI answer optimization, marketing automation, anything around research.

If you want us to look at doing some research like this, we’d be really happy to do happy to do it, and we’re going to take a look at the requests. And obviously, if you attend this webinar, we’ll email you with details of the next one. So hopefully, if you send me a suggestion, Mike at Napier, B to b.com you’ll be able to get the webinar that you really want to see.

So we’d really love to do that and do things that you would find interesting, right? I appreciate your time. I know this has run a little longer than normal. We gathered so much data, I wanted to try and make sure we covered it all. But I’d be really interested to know if anybody’s got any questions.

So in the platform we’ve got, you can paste questions either into the chat or the Q and A, and I’ll be able to see them. And we’ve got a couple of questions already that I can see.

So the first is, can we get a recording of the webinar. Yes, because of holidays, this is almost certainly going to go out next week, but everybody who’s attended the webinar will get an email that links the recording, so you’ll get available to the recording, and also a link to the slides as well. So that will be available.

I’ve got another question, which actually I think I covered earlier, but it’s worth answering. So the question is, why do I think that so many markers don’t really bother with email marketing? Is it because they’re not getting a lot of registrations, so they’re not getting a lot of new contacts?

I think that’s a great question, and I think probably it’s true, judging by how hard it was to find ways to register on the website, I actually think that for some websites, they’re getting very few registrations. Is probably why they’re not bothering but it really is the case of, let’s fix the problem rather than the symptom. The symptom is not getting a lot of registrations. The problem is the website’s not designed, right?

So really think about, you know, creating compelling offers for people to register on the website. And I’m not just talking content offers, you know, download this white paper, if you put your details in. I do get it’s hard, you know. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I totally understand it’s hard to get registrations, even for great pieces of content, but I think it’s so undervalued because it’s difficult. Data really is a valuable, valuable part of what we do as marketers, and so gathering more data, even if it requires a lot of work, that’s really important.

So I think that’s the case. And I also think there are situations, a good example being pneumatics, where, clearly, they’re sending a lot of events. You know, a lot of physical events were promoted. There’s obviously going to be leads gathered there. You need a good follow up there. It’s very little effort then to make the website follow up be equally as good as the trade show follow up. So I think to do that is really important.

Okay, and I’ve. Got one more question. If anybody’s got anything else, please paste it in. If not, I’ve got one more before we finish, and that’s to give an example of some of the things that people can do to actually help rather than just sell. And I think that’s a great question.

So the answer is, is that if you look at the content you’ve got on your website, there’ll be stuff that’s designed to sell products, but hopefully you’ve got educational content. If you haven’t, that’s certainly something you should be looking at and look at things that you can write, or videos you can create that are going to actually help people in their day to day job.

So help your customers and prospects in their day to day job. What’s going to make it easier for them? Don’t just sell, but make it helpful. The important thing to say is that you know you can click through from an email. You can track those clicks so you know who’s looked at those videos or looked at those blog posts. So this is why I was so surprised that the promotion of sort of written content on the website the blog posts was so poor, because a lot of these companies have got quite good content, and they’re not promoting it in their email campaigns. So I definitely recommend doing that.

Okay, I can’t see any more questions. I really appreciate you all staying with us for the whole period of time. It’s a bit longer. We normally try and get these webinars done in half an hour. If anyone does have any follow up questions, please, please feel free to email me. Mike at Napier, B to b.com We’ll also, in the future, probably producing some reports.

There is already a report about the pneumatics research that’s available. If anybody wants it a lot more detail into pneumatics, just send me an email Mike, and they for B to b.com and we’ll get you that report sent across. And obviously, what we’ll do is, when we create the reports around semiconductors and around materials handling, we’ll also make sure that we share those with you, so if you’re interested, we’ll give you some links to those when they’re available.

Thank you very much. Really appreciate your time, and I hope you all have a great rest of the day. Thank you.

Bye.