Buddhist Marketer

B2B Email Recipients Are People Too

Let’s say you’re a bidness that markets to other bidnesses.  Do the principles of marketing change as a result?

Negatorz.  Think about it:  bidnesses are run by bidnesspeople, and as one puppet said to another in one of the Muppets movies, “Peoples is peoples.”  What does shift are things like psychographic insights and push/pull-points, but the marketing fundamentals are, well, fundamental.

In this corner, we have an email from job search site Monster.com:

Not bad, right?  Subject line mentions that the offer won’t be around forever, which is a great “act now” motor-vator.  The sub-optimal part of the “stuff that helps people decide whether to open an email” includes:

• I’m not sure who Monster is.  Is it a truck rally?  An adjective that describes the scale of my friend Tommy Fitz’s barbecues?  Now, Monster.com I know.  I’ve seen the ads and had a drink or two on their dime at an online marketing industry party or two.  But neither the from nor the subject lines refer to a Monster.com; they simply refer to an unknown Monster.  An email recipient should know exactly who’s sending them an email and their tolerance for doubt is very low.
• I’m not sure which Anittah Monster is looking for.  Is it potential-job-searcher Anittah?  Small biz owner Anittah?  As a human, even one who thinks about her biz 25/8, I tend to assume that emails are meant for me as a human.  Thus, even if I knew it was Monster.com, my assumption is that they’re looking for the potential job searcher, not the small business owner.  And since I already have a job, in a way, I assume that Monster.com has nothing to offer me.  Delete!
• ‘Limited Time Offer’ is good but not great.  How limited, yo?  Non-glittering generalities need to be avoided in the “stuff that helps people decide whether to open an email” (or, for that matter, “stuff that helps people decide whether to click on a Google AdWords PPC ad”).