Tina Stewart was recently published in CMO.com read the article: Digitally Connecting Through Surround Sound Marketing

During the last year, we’ve seen more B2B marketers get serious about email marketing and social integration. According to the B2B Outlook 2011 report, nearly 79% of B2B marketers plan to increase their online marketing spend in 2011 and one-third indicated that more than 50% of their budget will be used for online initiatives. Email marketing and social integration isn’t just for B2C.

Yet, many companies still hesitate to take the plunge. Why you ask? It’s all about being able to measure ROI. In the past, tools were limited and it was difficult to get real quantitative or even qualitative results. Today, that’s changed. At Lyris we use a variety of tools to measure the results of our own digital marketing efforts and every one of them gives us valuable information that we can analyze and use to improve our own BtoB marketing efforts. As Nello said in June, what gets measured gets improved, so read on to learn how we measure our own campaigns and some tip for how to make it work for you. Like what you read? Have questions? We want to hear from you – leave us comments or reach me on Twitter (@socialTIS).    

KPI’s to Measure ROI on Everything Digital

First things first: Setting up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). By identifying what we wanted to achieve based on industry standards and using competitive analysis against like-sized companies, we developed a solid dashboard showing where we were and where we wanted to go. For social media, we look at number of followers, likes, re-tweets and sentiment. For web traffic, we focus on time spent on pages, depth of reading pages, and key entry and exit points. For digital advertising and online campaigns, we map the connection that drives our demand generation programs. And, for our own email marketing campaigns, we look at A/B testing on messages, format, graphics, deliverability, open rate, click through rate, heat maps and content. We also learn a lot from studying the link between our audience receiving an email, then visiting one of our social sites, and the amount of time and depth once they’re on our website. For example when someone clicks through to our site from Twitter, we are seeing more than a 4X increase in time spent, a 90 percent increase in pages read and a 20 percent lower bounce rate, which tells us that social is sticky and closely linked to revenue.

Together all of these metrics provide valuable insight into what is and isn’t working and we review monthly, weekly and often, daily to make adjustments.

Email Resonates with B2B Audiences

By measuring everything we do, we can tailor our programs based on performance indicators. As a marketing group we deliver leads from our campaigns to our sales team and all of our marketing demand generation programs are mapped directly to our CRM. Overall, email performs the best in terms of nurturing leads and customer retention. A few tried and true tips to ensure your email is performing at its peak:

• Deliver Relevant Content and Nurture Your Leads
  Avoid the “delete” filters that many customers have set up for B2B communications by making sure that every customer is offered the chance to indicate what they want from you through a welcome program and a preference center. Capture data on what they care about as they move through the buying cycle. Landing pages, preference center updates, newsletters and short surveys are a great way to “nurture” the relationship to conversion and the data you can extract from web analytics, html click throughs and A/B testing provide a wealth of information to fine tune your message. The more you personalize the message, the better. Be concise, have a strong, measurable call to action and make sure that your subject line communicates the value of your message.

• Educate Your Audience: Instill Trust in You and Your Brand
  Most successful B2B digital campaigns educate and inform to deliver value. When you understand what your audience cares about you can deliver relevant and informative content. Newsletters, white papers, case studies, tutorials, blogs, videos, webinars, etc. all provide opportunities for you to educate and not “sell” your audience on how you can help them with their business challenge. The linchpin to keep all the content together and get the message out is through a smart combination of email marketing and social media. 

• Socialize Your Emails
  Since an estimated 63% of B2B marketers plan to increase their social spending in 2011, you can assume that if you aren’t focusing on the social channel your competitors likely are.  One suggestion – integrate social into your email campaign by including a simple, shareable fact about your industry or infographic that contains interesting data can. The result: tweets, re-tweets and extensive social sharing.  Embedding social links into email communication makes it easy to share information and leads to increased brand awareness.

Tying it all Together

By taking the time to get to understand what your audience cares about and delivering relevant content that meets the objectives of busy B2B decision makers, you will ensure that your message is read and your call to action taken. B2B decision makers are data hungry and want to build relationships that will deliver long-term value. Take the time to educate them, give them valuable, shareable information and they will be more likely to engage and build a longer term relationship with you – both online and off.

Want to learn more? Join us for the webinar  on 2011 Email Marketing Trends and Truths that I’ll  be hosting with Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. later this month.

I will also be participating in a panel session at the ClickZ Connected Marketing event August 17th, 4:45-5:45pm — Integrating Email into Your Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy. And, I will be speaking at the DMA in October at the DMA Solutions Showcase Monday, October 3rd, 11:15pm to 12:15pm.

About the Author

Tina Stewart (@socialTIS) is Senior VP Of Marketing at Lyris.