Ackura Blog

B2B email marketing services have been designed so that a central office can create and manage email marketing campaigns that its subsidiaries, branch offices or retail outlets can personalise, so that the overall message is communicated to their audience embracing both centralised brand and localised messages.

Two Tiered Marketing

To best describe B2B email marketing, let’s take as an example a car manufacturer with a nationwide network of dealerships:

For the brand there is a message and ethos that the central office (Parent) wants to protect and communicate through their marketing to branches (Child), but they also need to embrace local variations to messages depending on the location of each branch.

Using PromoSender, the Parent maintains brand control of main design whilst the Child adds localised messages to suit the local audience.

Eg. In the United States the messages used to sell a car in New York could be very different to the messages used in California. Ie. The Californian message maybe localised to emphasise the importance of fuel economy, whereas the NY message might focus more of driving style and comfort.

Email Marketing for Two Tiered Campaigns

A second key requirement is that “child” accounts maintain their own separate and secure opt-in / opt-out recipient databases.

A two tiered B2B email campaign is, therefore, the most cost effective method of marketing a brand that is looking to share a message with an audience that is not located in a single area: The Parent creates the main strategy and message that is then sent to its branches or resellers who then send on with localised messages to their individual mailing lists.

With B2B email marketing services such as PromoSender, the Parent creates promotions and is able to control the extent to which these promotions can be customised by the Child organisations before being sent to the customers, making it easy to centrally manage approved messages used by subsidiary users.

The diagram below shows how the PromoSender two tiered email marketing service is structured:

As with any marketing campaign, analytics is very important, and keeping informed of distributed email marketing campaigns run through Child organisations could be nigh on impossible without centralised analytics.

By having multiple branches or resellers all using a B2B email marketing service such as PromoSender, centralised reporting is a snap with each Child collecting and sharing their own analytics with their Parent organisation.

There are a number of things to remember when creating templates for HTML emails, and I’m going to try and go through a few of them with you, the things we’ll cover are:

1. Remember not everyone uses Outlook
2. Remember the reading pane and preview
3. Send a text only to gain greater audience reach

Ok so let’s run through these in some more detail.

1. Not everyone uses Outlook

An important thing to remember when creating your HTML email is that there is a large number of email clients that you will need to test on to make sure that everyone can read the information in order to get your message across. Some of the more popular email clients are Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook (& Outlook express), AOL, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, Entourage and Eudora. Because of the various rendering differences in these clients you are unlikely to get your email looking exactly the same in all of them. It can also be a time consuming job to test in all these email clients but the payoff is worth the hard work considering that the person receiving the email could be your next client.

2. Remember the reading pane

When you are reading your emails, be it in Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo etc do you open the email full screen? More than likely you are reading it through the preview pane. This means that when the user clicks on your email it’s likely that only the top 500 pixels of the email can be seen. It is therefore important to use this valuable real estate to get your message across.

If possible it is better to avoid using images in the head of the email as they won’t be automatically downloaded unless the sender is on your safe list. Using images means that the impact made by those first 500 pixels will be limited because it relies on a user action (downloading the images) before it can be seen.

3. Send text only to get greater reach

With the advent of the web being viewed on mobile devices we mustn’t forget that users are likely to read their emails on the move. An easy way to cater for several types of viewers is to send a multipart message whereby there is a HTML version sent as well as a text only so that covers all. The content can me exactly the same but you will just have to remember that any images that have a call to action will need to be changed into text links in that version.

The other advantage of sending a text only version is that it becomes more accessible to users that only use screen readers for example, there is much less information for the screen reader to get through in a text only version.

We’ll be following this post up with some more detailed information about creating HTML emails in the coming weeks but if you need any more information please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Welcome to the PromoSender blog. The purpose of this blog is to bring you news of new and upcoming features, and help you make the most out of your email marketing campaigns. But first I want to give you a bit of an insight into PromoSender, how we came to develop it and what sets it apart from all the other email tools out there.

There are two Ackura tools used for email marketing, MessageSender and PromoSender. Quite understandably the question that we hear most is “what’s the difference?”

MessageSender is everything you’d expect from an email marketing tool – powerful yet simple to use features that enable to user to create, edit, send and track HTML emails; manage recipient lists and see real time reports on their campaign.

With PromoSender you can have all the functionality offered by MessageSender, with the added ability to create accounts for subsidaries and resellers. PromoSender allows the parent organisations to create and manage child accounts and send them customizable promotions to aid their email marketing campaigns while maintaining brand consistency.

The parent can control the extent to which these promotions can be customised by the child organisations. You can also control how long these promotions are made available to child users and to which groups the promotions are made available.

This makes it easy to manage centrally approved messages and promotions to subsidiary users.

Each Child account has it’s own its own recipient database which is secure and inaccessible by any other participant organisation (including the Parent User).

A diagram showing the Structure of Parent and Child accounts in PromoSender (click for larger image)

As the Parent user, you will be able to track all Child user mailing activity (not including access to recipient data) to allow you to keep track of the number of emails sent by Child users, either for feedback or invoice purposes.

The child accounts may be used by the reseller or subsidiary in the same manner as any other Email marketing tool, they will be able to add their own templates in addition to the promotions provided to them from the parent user. They will be able to track responses and manage their recipient lists.

PromoSender was initially developed for a large nationwide wholesaler so they would be able to assist their resellers with email campaigns for specific product promotions. We reallised that this model will work for a range of business including Car Dealerships, Government Organisations, Franchises and more.