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Measuring Effectiveness of B2B eNewsletters – B2B eNewsletter Statistics

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.

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B2B Social Networking – Ning

I’ve been taking a look at social networking sites for the B2B industry. I rediscovered Ning today. When they were first launched they were a free-only service that was geared towards only the consumer Internet audience. Now they’ve added a paid service to remove or run your own ads, increase bandwidth and storage space, and use your own domain name.

As a network administrator, you have full control of exactly how your network looks and acts – ability for blogs, rss feeds, video, audio, photos, forums, and outside plugins. You have ownership of the content on your network, with the ability to backup any code and content within it. Ning does not currently interface with outside registration services (would love to see them support OpenID), but you can import and export your registered users. There’s also the option to create a closed network so that only the people invited can get in.

In just 5 minutes I was able to create a B2B social network that I’ll eventually tweak and link up to this site. If it grows, I can change to the paid options at any time. If you’re looking for a social networking tool for your B2B Website, take a look at Ning. It may be an easy, good and cheap way to add social networking to your site.

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Ning
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B2B Content – SEO vs Customer-Centric Design

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms will tell you that you need to have keyword-optimized pages on your website in order to appear in Google’s search results for those keywords. Customer-centric design requires that your website be designed with your customer foremost in-mind. Can these co-exist? Can you have the best of both worlds?

Yes and no. Search engines put a good deal of weight on how often content is updated on the site and for each of the keywords in question. Keeping keyword-optimized pages updated can be (and usually is) a full-time job. Have you ever been on a keywords-optimized site as a customer who is trying to find something? Often it is difficult to wade through all the content written only for the search engines.

Customer-centric design means keeping your customer in mind. What are your customers looking for when they come to your website? Do most of your customers come from search engines? If so, taking a SEO keyword-optimized approach may make sense.  Or do you use other advertising methods such as web ads, print ads, word-of-mouth, blogging, conference appearances and speaking engagements? In these cases, it may make more sense to create landing pages for each of these audiences instead.

How do you get the best of both SEO and Customer-Centric Design? Create customer-centric pages optimized for what your customers are looking for and how they came to your site. Take SEO keyword optimization into account when you design those pages and your overall website. Both your customers and your wallet will thank you and, if done properly, this approach will lead to better search engine ranking for the long term.

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