B2B enewsletters are a great way to promote your company and website, by periodically sending valuable information to your customers and potential customers. Valuable information will help you provide good customer support and keep your products and brand top-of-mind. There are two important parts to measuring the effectiveness of your B2B enewsletters: who your audience is, and what they’re reading and looking at within your enewsletter.

Audience

Hopefully you’re only sending your enewsletter to people who have requested that information be sent to them (current customers are usually safe). This is termed opt-in. Whether they have or not, you need to make sure there is always a link in your enewsletter for people to unsubscribe or you may be accused of sending out spam email (which can have legal repercussions). If you require your audience to confirm their request to be added to your email list, that is termed double opt-in. How much of your audience falls into these two categories is especially important if you have outside sponsorships or advertisers so they know that your readers really want to get your message. This is also important if you’re looking for an outside enewsletter to advertise in.

Interaction

Now that you have your enewsletter written and sent, how many people are actually looking at it? What are people reading and how do I tell if it is sending any traffic to my website? There are three basic stats to be aware of: number sent (or released), number of opens, and number of clicks. Number of sent/released will show you how many people the enewsletter is going out to (sometimes referred to as the circulation). Number of opens is typically measured by putting a small invisible image within the enewsletter (this is often done automatically by the enewsletter vendor), which triggers a count to a server. This should only be used for a general idea of how many times the enewsletter has been read, because this count is not triggered if a person’s email is not downloading images (either because they have it set to do it, or for some programs the reader has to click a button to request the images). If a reader does have images turned on, this can also be triggered if they happen to click on the email while going through their inbox. Number of clicks is where all the action is. The reader actually had to click on a link (and your vendor should be able to tell you what they clicked on). For links to your site a good web analytics program should be able to track these coming in from your enewsletter.

Next we’ll dive into more detail about the content you should consider for your enewsletters.

Technorati Tags: enewsletters, B2B enewsletters, permission marketing, B2B permission marketing, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Permission Marketing is only advertising to people who have told you they are interested in your products or services. This gives you a much smaller audience, but one who is much more likely to purchase your products. Interest can be shown in many forms: a website visit, an email, a phone call, a booth visit. Don’t forget to include your past and current customers - the ultimate form of interest!

Once you have a list of contacts, one of the best and unobtrusive ways to engage your potential customers is through a regular enewsletter. eNewsletters are a great way to keep your brand and products as top-of-mind and to give valuable information in the form of announcements, case studies, support information, and related topics. Keep in mind that your audience is people, so content should be short and to-the-point and most importantly - valuable! An enewsletter should be regular to have the most impact - at least monthly, and more often, such as weekly, is better (just don’t go overboard - most enewsletters don’t need to be daily).

Spam laws require that you have an unsubscribe link in your email - and it is best to only send emails to people who have requested information (most types of shown interest above are safe). A good enewsletter vendor will be able to handle these, as well as subscriptions, and stats.

On Thursday we’ll discuss what enewsletter stats are important and what they mean to you.

Technorati Tags: permission marketing, B2B permission marketing, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

eNewsletters and eBlasts are a great way to keep in contact with your customers and potential customers. They offer an easy way to send out news and promotions, although they are best-received if they provide valuable information. The best way to send out and manage these emails is through a vendor. I have been using iContact for sales training eblasts for over a year, and they are one of the most cost-effective vendors with great features that I have found.

If you want to get started quickly, they have over 300 templates to choose from, and it is easy to import your contacts as a group. I easily created my own template and had a test eblast out in about 10 minutes. They check your eblast for spam flags and can also send a text version. Their tracking will show you how many sent, opens and clicks you have and, more importantly, who did what. I’ve also had great experience with their tech support through online chats, email and over the phone. I had a problem with some emails not going through (to our own company email!) and it took them a bit to work through it, but they were very professional about keeping me updated throughout.

iContact’s great features (full feature list) come priced for how many recipients you have, starting at just 500 contacts for $9.99/month (with discounts if you pay annually), which makes it actually affordable for even small businesses. Pricing steps up in a fair manner: 1000 contacts for $14/month or $151.20/annually (full pricing). I recommend iContact if you’re a small or medium-sized business looking for a full-featured and affordable email marketing vendor. I would even recommend looking at it you’re a large business without special requirements.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, B2B email marketing, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

So far we’ve taken a look at several social network software vendors: Leverage Software, Community Server, Prospero, Small World Labs, Pluck and Ning. These vendors run the gambit from very expensive to free, but their core functionality is very similar. Differences come mostly with integration into your own current website, single sign-on, and analytics.

If you’re a small company or not sure how social networks are going to work for you, Ning is an excellent place to start since you can get an ad-driven version for no cost. You can then upgrade to a non-ad version (and run your own ads), but keep in mind that Ning is for smaller networks and does not offer integration with your own website.

For larger companies, my current forerunner is Small World Labs, with their full set of features, modular implementation, and php-based system. Their 3 price-points make them very affordable and their offerings can be tailored to meet the needs of your specific social network. Content from your website can appear within the network and content from the network can appear on your website - effectively pulling your website into the network. Most importantly, I feel this option offers the best opportunity to scale cost-effectively if your network takes off.

I just came across GroupSwim who built community software that can be used internally, externally, with customers, users, developers, or audience. This may be very useful for B2B companies hoping to interact with their customers, so I’m going to try to get a demo set up for next week.

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Community Server by Telligent powers some large communities for NFL, National Geographic Magazine Online, Intel, Microsoft Game Studios, Mazda MX-5, and MySpace forums, among others. Community Server touts ease-of-use and has a community of its own with a documentation wiki and support forum. The software is powered by .NET, which can be downloaded and installed or hosted by Telligent. Standard community fare comes out-of-the-box: blogs, forums, profiles, private messaging, photos and files. Functionality and capabilities can be extended through add-ins and customizations (capabilities list). There is support for single sign-in with your website and analytics through Web Trends or Google Analytics (possibly other tag-based packages).

Three packages offer different included functionality and pricing (full list of features). Additional licenses can be purchased to extend the number of most of these functions.

Professional:

• $2000 + $500/year support
• Supports approximately 1 million page views per month and 25,000 members per server
• 2 websites
• 100 blogs
• 100 forums
• 200 photo galleries
• 1,000 shared files
• Unlimited content mirroring (displaying content on the community through RSS feeds)

Enterprise:

• Contact for cost, support included
• Supports approximiately 10 million page views per month and 100,000 members per server
• 3 websites
• Unlimited blogs, forums, shared files, photo galleries and content mirroring
• Enterprise email integration (to allow users to send and reply to messages on forums and blogs)
• Distributed jobs to support high traffic sites

Hosted:

• Starts at $199/mo for up to 250,000 page views per month, additional at $0.009 per page view
• Includes everything but add-ons
• 25 blogs
• 25 forums
• 500 shared files
• 50 photo galleries
• 100 content mirrors

I like the community aspect Telligent has created for support of their software, but I personally would not want to support a .NET application, even hosted (personal preference). There also does not seem to be any out-of-the-box functionality to integrate the community content into your website (although you can integrate content from your site into the community through an RSS feed). The Hosted and Professional packages are close in first-year price, with Professional offering more of everything, but also requiring you to install and host the community. The Hosted package is a very good deal for a business looking to start a social network without much cost, as long as you’re not looking to integrate the community content into your own website.

Technorati Tags: social networks, B2B social networks, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting