Behavioral email for B2B sales

Behavioral email marketing requires the ability to observe and act on user behaviors, triggers and events to identify quality prospects and leads. By employing behavioral email lists you can create a highly effective lead-qualification tool for your B2B business.

Building an email list.
To create your list, your organization needs to earn user's interest. Consider trying to capture the interest of users through tradeshows, networking events, advertising, PPC, your website and by creating meaningful blog content that attracts the interest and attention of new prospects.

Why build an email list?
Not all contacts are ready to buy. Many B2B buyers are casually exploring new solutions and products. By capturing their email and employing behavioral segmentation to create distinct email lists, you can deliver meaningful and relevant content to interested subscribers. This list is a prospecting list from which leads are born for B2B marketing.

What kind of content?
Don't just bombard your email list with sales pitches and pleas. That is a clear turn-off, which will only lead to unsubscribes. Instead, create helpful, interesting, useful or entertaining content that your list will enjoy. Try to reduce the number of unsubscribes and increase the click through rate from your emails. By watching these simple metrics, you will get a sense of how your content and email subject lines are performing over time.

Where does behavioral segmentation come into play?
My using an analytics application that tracks the behavior of your contacts, you can identify some pretty interesting metrics on each contact:

• Segmentation based on how prospected answered form questions (industry, interests, company name, company size, job title, budget, purpose for reaching out, etc)
• Pages viewed by contact
• A timeline of lead activity
• Calls-to-action clicked
• Email open and click rate
• Workflow processes completed
• Social media engagement
• Lifecycle stage
• Return visits
• First touch source
• Last touch source
• Is the contact a member of a group or list already?
• Any contact property data
• Has visited a particular URL or series of web pages

Please give me an example of how I should segment my B2B marketing list
Here's an easy example. Let's say a prospect reaches out and answers a couple required questions on a contact form. If they give you a purpose for their inquiry (take a free trial, download a whitepaper, etc), then you can identify them as a lead. This may put them into a possible Lead list within your CRM.

However this data gets far more interesting when you rank all the potential answers within a point system and also assign points to website activities (downloading a whitepaper or clicking on a call-to-action). By compiling this information automatically based on their behavior and answers, you will have a very strong segmentation list for on-going email marketing. Leads with high ratings may be ready for sales content, whereas prospects with low points may need to be nurtured with more educational or general help content until they indicate their sales-ready stage.

Additionally, by building such segmentation lists, your B2B campaigns can identify the particular needs of your contacts. This will allow you to deliver more relevant content and drive them further into the buying process.

Some benefits of behavioral segmentation

• Create more relevant content and messages based on your contacts' interests and behavior online
• Provide more context to your emails
• Identify the best prospects and leads
• Identify when a lead is sales ready (not all are)
• Trigger workflows to provide marketing automation to nurture leads into a sales-ready state
• Lead generation from prospects
• Group contacts by likeness or interests
• Communicate with groups of contacts based on their lifecycle stage with your organization
• Filter out poor quality leads