In B2C and B2B businesses, E-mail marketing has become prevalent today, thanks to Internet. Though it is practiced in consumer and business markets, the need to bank heavily on direct marketing by B2B firms gives more room for unethical e-mail marketing practices. Several business marketers have misled the e-mail practice due to competitive pressures. Ideally permission-based marketing is ethical and legal. But under pressure, some B2B firms are embracing unethical practices like presumed opt-in in their web-site landing pages. By doing so firms are rather hitting nails to their own coffins. Though e-mail promotional content is sent to many, only true prospects will show interest. Others would either report abuse or report spam, and eventually unsubscribe locking access to them permanently. Whereas true prospects will continue to subscribe as they feel so. Besides failing to convert, firms may loose established contacts, referrals and future prospects of other products. So attempts to reach many via presumed opt-in way not only prove unethical, but also go in vain. E-mail promotions, therefore, should be based on fairly received subscriptions.
Website visitors should not be mislead with practices like presumed opt-in. They shall be suitably prompted for self opt-in. Interactive marketing should be practiced to motivate visitors for self opt-in. When visitors land into web pages, immediately plunging into interaction can allow marketers understand and appraise their problems. The process may eventually convert the visitors to self opt-in. It is not only ethical and legal, but effective too as it targets the right and guarantee the sales without paying price in the form of lost relationships. B2B marketers can attract visitors and know who they are by designing website landing pages. When visitors come to these landing pages, online marketing team should plunge into discussion with visitors through a specially designed interactive program like how a marketing software company 'Eloqua' did with its popular campaign called 'Conversation.' During the course of informal interaction, marketers should try to understand and discover what visitors actually need and why they have visited the landing webpage. Based on the knowledge gained, if required marketers can make different proposals. If marketer discovers that visitor could be a future prospect, then he/she can be motivated to share contact details and persuaded to subscribe to the e-mail promotional letters.
3 comments:
Sir, but how do we know beforehand the visitors of our website? How do we identify if he/she is a true prospect at the time they are visiting the website? I think this kind of E-mail targeting can have a little liberty in sending emails to as many as possible and later identify the true prospects. After all, anyone who receives the email is given the option to unsubscribe too.
Dear Anand,
B2B marketers can attract visitors and know who they are by designing website landing pages. Please refer to our discussion on website landing pages in one of the classes.
When visitors come to these landing pages, real-time online marketing team should be able to plunge into discussion with visitors through a specially designed interactive program like how a marketing software company 'Eloqua' did with its popular campaign called 'Conversation.' During the course of informal interaction, marketers should try to understand and discover what visitors actually need and why they have visited the landing webpages. Based on the knowledge gained, if required marketers can make different proposals. If marketer discover that visitor could be a future prospect, then he/she can be motivated to share contact details and persuaded to subscribe to the e-mail promotional newsletters. In this you can practice self opt-in.
Social media marketing has a great impact on B2B sites in bringing more visitors.
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