Using email for marketing promotions is not a new idea. But it is an idea that has had its "ups and downs". The surge of "spam" emails obviously resulted in a lot of business for internet merchants when it first was developed. But spam also became one of the most despised examples of internet marketing abuse. And it spawned an entire industry of software developers providing shields to customers so they could stop the onslaught of incoming email marketing messages. The outcome is that for many legitimate businesses, email marketing as a way to gain new customers and increase sales online died. It was abandoned in favor of other online marketing techniques that were not so disliked but that delivered satisfactory return on the investment in internet marketing.

The last thing you want to do is to send a "spam" email that only angers your current or prospective customers. That can produce the opposite of the desired affect by building alienation between your business and clients or customers. Those damaged relationships might never be repaired. This is one reason that many respectable businesses abandoned email marketing for a while.

But just as you can't keep a good man down, you can't keep a good marketing idea down for very long. Smart internet businesses have found a way to breathe new life into the old technique of email promotions. That new life came through the development of business to business (B2B) email marketing. The goal of this new approach is to identify the ways that the previous wave of email marketing went wrong and avoid those traps and pitfalls entirely. In doing so, the development of B2B email marketing has evolved into a highly efficient way to promote your business and realize the true potential of email promotions while avoiding the abuses that drive people off.

Avoiding the Spam Trap

The reason email marketing turned into "spam" is simple. The heart of the old paradigm of email marketing was sending out many thousands of emails to a huge email list of people or businesses that you never had contact with before. B2B email campaigns are focused on existing business relationships or potential clients that you develop through contacts or referrals or by other means so you are not sending a "blind" email to a random email inbox that may or may not exist or to a customer who probably never heard of you and has no interest in your products or services.

Under the old paradigm, you might send out 10,000 emails and feel gratified if you get 100 responses and get business from 10 of those responses. That is incredibly inefficient and it has a basis of assumption that you don't mind offending and alienating 9900 other people who you just sent "spam" to. It is also highly inefficient because as spam filter software has become more effective, you may not even get the 100 responses because very few of your emails actually get through to the potential customers. That is a waste of everybody's time.

The heart of the success of any B2B email campaign is you start with a valid and well established email list that are businesses who are ready to respond to your inquiries. They may be clients who you have worked for before but you have not had any business for them in a while. They might be clients who you built a relationship with outside the internet and you are bringing them into your cyber family through an email contact. Or they might be prospective clients who contacted you through your web site by signing up for a newsletter or sending you an inquiry.

Whatever the reason, you know each of those email addresses is a real client who you have done business with or who has shown every indication they will do business with you. That makes B2B email campaigns tremendously efficient.

B2B Emailing Marketing is Effective

You already bypassed one of the biggest problems with email promotions which is seeing your emails die in spam filters. You do that with targeted email campaigns as we just discussed. Because most if not all of your emails get through to your intended clients, your chances of response and achieving the goals of the email skyrocket.

But there is another aspect of B2B email marketing that makes it more effective than marketing to the general public and that is who you are talking to. Business people speak a different language than the general public. When you make an email contact "business to business", that email has a high probability of getting through to your contact. That business person is probably sitting in front of his or her computer and the chances that your email will get opened and read are quite high compared to traditional email promotions.

You write your email speaking business person to business person. You write as through you are writing to a colleague, not just any old customer. And because that business person already is aware of who you are and is interested in your products or services, your chances or redeeming each and every email for real business are high. That is far more effective and cost justifiable than any other internet marketing technique.

B2B Email Campaigns Just Fit

It takes more time and thought to develop a good B2B email campaign. But that investment is well worth the effort. Much of the investment you make in customizing each email campaign is made in tapping the power of an email campaign so it delivers maximum value to your total marketing program. Because B2B emailing marketing programs energize your existing client base and generate new customer inquiries so reliably, this form advertising is a potent way to supercharge your conventional marketing campaign or your other internet business activities.

B2B email campaigns will deliver a higher measurable success rate that will result in traffic either in the form or phone calls from your business clients, visits to your retail locations or internet visitors to your corporate web site. So before you "fire up" that email marketing plan, take the time to review the current programs going on in your conventional and internet marketing programs across the business. You will find dozens of ways to use the energy of that B2B email campaign to generate much better results in any internet marketing effort your business is preparing to launch.

You can use B2B email campaigns to generate enthusiasm for promotions that you want to use to increase your sales volume in every part of the business. By including coupons or other appealing "come ons" with the email, that assures a higher response rate even in marketing efforts outside the internet. And by including links to targeted pages on your web site, a well designed online business presence can translate the increased interest in your business and the resultant internet traffic into sales.