A B2B email campaign is very different from a B2C campaign. According to Simms Jenkins there are three major differences:

1. Your tone should be much like it would be in a face-to-face meeting with your prospects: direct, professional and in a manner that makes your audience want to do business with you. Don’t waste your time building up to the pitch — state why you are sending this message and what’s in it for the recipient.
2. The message should clearly articulate the purpose and value to the subscribers while making it easy for them to identify and act on any call to action. Don’t bog them down with too many cross promotional messages or secondary marketing messages. Allow them to scan the email and find out what’s in it for them.
3. Your main measurement analysis should not be based on opens and clicks but on how many leads are generated. Careful attention should be paid to forwards and any additional email subscriptions generated from the campaign. A high open and clickthrough rate but lack of leads could mean you put up too many barriers to capture the lead. Ensure your landing page and relevant gateway pages (for example, the white paper sign-up page) are easy to find and utilize. This may take some coordination that goes outside the realm of a typical email manager.

Simms lists these 10 best practices in B2B email marketing:

• Know your audience: If you are mailing to IT network administrators, an image-heavy newsletter probably will not be well received. Instead, send a text-only message. Follow the cues of what your audience is like and don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.
• Mobile email triage is real: An increasing number of business executives use their mobile devices/PDAs to perform email triage. This means that if you have a weak message or lack something compelling or of immediate value to your email, you may have the busy exec delete your email while in a meeting. On the flip side, a unique email with a relevant purpose may get saved for the executive to read in the office.
• Make it easy for the mobile audience: Click here to read on your mobile phone is becoming more commonplace on B2B emails and may help you escape mobile email rendering snafus.
• From & Subject lines: Emails from a CEO to a fellow executive tend to resonate. Ensure your From line is from someone who matters. Combine this with a short Subject line that can break through the clutter while demonstrating a reason for the user to read this email.
• Short and sweet: Whether read on an iPhone or laptop, make your message count. That means make sure it gets read. Long emails without clear calls to action will get skimmed and deleted. Make your value proposition above the fold and obvious to the people that will browse over your email looking for a reason to read (or delete).
• Don’t oversell: Too many promises, customer raves or pricing information may overwhelm your audience and diminish your opportunity to have people click on a link where they can find the details of the service or product being offered.
• Respect the audience’s time: Frequency is a significant issue for all mailings, but if a business subscriber doesn’t respond to the first two messages, it doesn’t mean you should send to him even more frequently.
• Test: I received seven different emails from a lead generation company in the span of five minutes this morning. The emails actually contained decent messaging and links to at least one relevant case study. They had me until hello occurred seven times. Someone was asleep at the wheel when the campaigns were segmented and set. Do your due diligence before an email is sent as these campaigns did more damage than good.
• Offer something unique: A white paper can often work, but they are everywhere, aren’t they? Provide access and perks that are gold to the C-suite audience. For example, one client attempting to register business executives for an annual event tested pricing breaks versus admission to a VIP event. Remember, the B2B audience usually isn’t spending its own money so you can guess which offer performed better.
• Remarket: Create a follow-up campaigns based on how each user responded (or didn’t) to the initial campaign. Using your metrics can guide you to a better and more relevant strategy.

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Most email marketers do not view soft bounces as being a major cause for concern, so rarely, if ever, have any specific strategies been in place for dealing with them. Soft bounces are a very strong indication that one or more ISPs were concerned enough about the reputation of the IP address you are using,  your mailing volumes or the level of SPAM complaints you are generating to temporarily block your campaign.

Over the last two years our agency has begun to take soft bounces very seriously indeed. Compared with soft bounces, hard bounces are relatively straight forward – there are far fewer reasons for their occurrence and only one way of dealing with them, which is to remove them from your list.

The reason so many people don’t treat soft bounces seriously enough seems to be because most definitions of a soft bounce are outdated.  

Here are but two typical examples of the definition of a soft bounce taken from well respected sources:

• A soft bounce just means the recipient’s email account was ‘temporarily unavailable’. Maybe their server was busy, or the recipient was away on vacation, or their account was too full.
• A soft bounce occurs when the recipient’s mail server replies with an error other than 5xx, or never replies at all. An example of a soft bounce error could be caused by a server that overloaded or a user whose mailbox is full.

Most current definitions of a soft bounce do not really convey any sense of urgency or importance, worst of all they seem to indicate that the bounce had nothing to do with your mail marketing practice at all. After all what can you do to stop someone’s server crashing or being taken down for maintenance or a subscriber’s mailbox filling up while they are on holiday?

Some ESPs set the default for removing soft bounces at 10 or more and best practice guidelines typically suggest removal after 3 subsequent bounces, further reducing the sense of urgency.

General definitions of a soft bounce and guidelines for dealing with them haven’t changed for at least five years!

In this time inbox sizes have dramatically increased so ‘mailbox full’ messages are highly unlikely to occur; Gmail currently offer 7GB of storage! I don’t know anyone who has exceeded their Gmail or for that matter Yahoo or Hotmail storage limit and even if there are such people, they are hardly representative of the average consumer. Even if you have a large number of people using their work email address, how many companies start bouncing potentially valuable communications without letting the user know that their inbox is due a spring clean.

I also suspect that bounces caused by overloaded ISPs (Hotmail etc.) or corporate servers are not as common as the definitions quoted above would seem to indicate.

This means that the most likely cause of soft bounces is ISP blocking.

The way ISPs deal with spam has become much more aggressive and incredibly sophisticated. For a start they are very quick to start blocking emails when they identify suspicious patterns of behaviour from a given sender, IP address or range.

Typical causes of blocking are: lack of authentication or accreditation; poor or unproven IP reputation; fluctuations in the volume of messages sent from the IP address you are using and spam complaints attributed to your IP address. It’s important to bear in mind that you may incur soft bounces because of the behaviour of companies sharing your IP address, making the way your ESP handles its shared IP addresses very important.

Emails blocked in this way are recorded as soft bounces, so your soft bounces are important indicators of how ‘Spammy’ ISP’s think you are at a given point in time. They are an indication of a drop in reputation for the IP address you are using, uneven mailing patterns and/or an increase in the level of SPAM complaints your email is generating.  All of these things are things that you and your ESP can do something about!

The purest definition of a soft bounce is ‘A delivery failure with a 4XX/Transient bounce code’ examples of which are:

• 421 Grey listing = Re-try now and send again
• 451 no reverse DNS = Re-try now and send again later after you fix your DNS

Soft bounces should be regularly investigated because we believe that they are more likely to be caused by temporary ISP blocking than temporary problems related to individual subscribers.

I would strongly recommend that anyone wanting to get a better understanding of where soft bounces fit in the overall scheme of deliverability should read the excellent 4 part series of articles on ‘How Email Works’ by Dennis Dayman of Eloqua

Dela Quist
Alchemy Worx

This article was written by Dela Quist CEO of Alchemy Worx and is based on an article in the current issue of Email-Worx a fortnightly newsletter for people interested in email marketing issues.

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Spring has come a little early for Google, as their spring cleaning continues with the dropping of radio ads from AdWords and AdSense announced today, the company announced today.

The dropping of Print Ads last week and search box from Gmail, now this, will Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management be having a garage sale?

When the program first launched, Google saw the product as a sound and smart investment.

“Google Audio Ads brings efficiency, accountability, and enhanced ROI to radio advertising by providing advertisers with an online interface for creating and launching radio campaigns. You’ll be able to target your customers by location, station type, day of the week, and time of day. After the radio ads are run, you will be able to view online reports that tell you exactly when your ad played,” Inside AdWords noted.

But three years later that has all changed.

“So we have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and focus our efforts in online streaming audio. We will phase out the existing Google Audio Ads and AdSense for Audio products and plan to sell the Google Radio Automation business, the software that automates broadcast radio programming. Advertisers will continue to be able to use Google Audio Ads until May 31 and broadcasters will be able to publish inventory to Google until that date as well. We will work with partners to make sure that there is as little disruption to their business as possible and will work to find a buyer for the Google Radio Automation business,” the Traditional Media blog stated.

At least they have given people some notice. I have a friend that just spent some money on developing radio ads to use on the product – has a little over three months to get a return on that investment. Meanwhile Google very subtley added the announcement that 40 employees from that product group would be laid off.

“We regret the impact these plans will have on the Googlers working on these projects. We hope to find other roles for the majority of the people concerned and will work to make that happen over the next couple of months. However, given that we are exiting the broadcast radio ad business and selling the Radio Automation business, we expect that up to 40 people may not be able to find other roles at Google.”

In 2006 Google bought dMarc – the radio automation software company – for $102 million, we will have to see what they get when the divest themselves of it.

by Frank Watson

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