B-to-B ecommerce

SUMMARY: When customers talk to a sales rep, they want straight answers from a knowledgeable person. The more you can teach salespeople about your products, the better they’ll be able to sell them.

Read how a manufacturer created an online training program to educate retail sales staff about their products -- and how they got them to actually use the training. Sales are up 14% from dealers using the program. read the complete case study

SUMMARY: A strong corporate website is an invaluable tool for collecting leads and promoting your brand. But getting to this point is difficult when trying to unify far-reaching global divisions with existing websites of varying quality.

See six key tactics a team used to consolidate several divisional websites into a new, unified corporate platform. Their approach to managing people, technology and content helped them finish the job on schedule, and create a site that’s seen Web leads grow 200% since launch. read the complete article

SUMMARY: "More than 1/2 of the companies surveyed (59%) said the value of B2B e-commerce to their organizations is increasing significantly; and 38% said it is increasing slightly." "57% of companies reported a significant increase in the transactional volume performed using B2B e-commerce." "More than half of the companies (56.4%) have annual revenue of more than $10 billion." view the complete research record

SUMMARY: A case of the flu kept Pam O'Neal, VP Marketing, BreakingPoint Systems, from delivering her talk on lead generation through email and social media at last week’s Email Marketing Summit. So we caught up with her this week to learn how her team combined the two channels to create a powerful engine for inbound leads.

Read the eight essential tactics that have helped BreakingPoint triple its revenues in each of the last two years. Includes advice on:
o Coordinating a strategy with the sales team
o Establishing a social media presence
o Creating and distributing content
o Nurturing leads with drip email campaigns read the complete interview

SUMMARY: In this week’s chart, we’ll take a look at marketing budgets as a percentage of total gross revenue for various organization sizes.

What is your marketing budget and what percentage of your gross revenue does it represent? Check out this week’s chart to see how your budget compares to other organizations of your size. read the complete article

By Anne Holland, President

If you've read more than a few articles (or heard speeches) about what lifts email campaign response rates, you've probably noticed they all boil down to the same word: relevancy.

Now, it's all very well for experts to proclaim, "Be more relevant," from the podium. But how do you actually put relevancy into action?

I was just blown away by a real-life example based on data from our own programs and wanted to... read the complete blog post