Listed here are B2B Email Strategies that produce prospects and leads. Includes email industry statistics and results, plus tips from an email marketing professional, founder of BrightWave Marketing, who shared his suggestions at iMediaConnection in How to Deliver on B2B Email Campaigns.

Talk Benefits to Your Audience: Or, What’s In This for Me? Glitzy graphics-heavy emails with tricky subject lines may work well with tech heads (who must have every new electronics device), with online gamers (who are already hard-wired for video image messages) and with casual browsers who don’t feel information overloaded by their email In-Boxes.

But, with busy, time-pressed business entrepreneurs — who search for inventory and margins in the wholesale products supplier chain — email marketers must cut to the chase:

Subject Lines: What’s in this email for the receiver?

· Can they buy turnkey product display cases that Discount Retailers simply drop into store aisles, with pre-labelled inventory codes? (Saves time, warehousing space, inventory-tracking)

· Can they source hot new jewelry items at 70% below-wholesale prices? (Trendy, in-demand jewelry at profitable resale price points)

· Are you offering brand-name apparel irregulars that can be resold with minimum retailer effort (Liquidation lots of already de-labeled, defaced brand labels/UPC tags; No minimum orders, or smaller liquidation purchase lots, for downstream retailers and auction power-sellers)

Benefits to your email recipient should be a simple, concise statement in your email Subject line. Forget your company name: It goes in the body of the email, not the maximum 8 or 10 words in your subject line, because your corporate name probably doesn’t convey an upfront benefit to the reader. Note also that the subject line displayed in the receiver’s email In-Box is Step One: Should I Read It? Should I Delete It Unread?

Avoid Mobile Email Triage: An increasing number of business managers use mobile devices and personal data assistants — Blackberries; Mobile phones with Internet access to pick up emails, source products and services online, to schedule the work day; iPhones; wireless laptops, etc.

Mobile Email Triage (hat tip to G. Simms Jenkins, the CEO of BrightWave Marketing noted above) is a busy manager taking a few moments during a meeting break or airport layover to scan Subject Lines of dozens of new emails in their In-Box … deleting most of them on the fly.

Reasons for Triage Email Deletes:
· Weak, unfocused message in the Subject Line
· No compelling immediate benefit to the receiver
· Waste of valuable time on attempt to download graphics-heavy email

Make Your Point, Fast: “Above the Fold” for web pages and email display screens is the first short one or two paragraphs of copy (plus images that load in) before the viewer has to scroll down using a down navigation arrow in the browser screen.

Your company’s
· Benefits,
· Value Proposition (time-saving ordering, pre-coded inventory, below-wholesale price points, newest trendy product, sale/discount), and
· Call-to-Action (Click here for 20% Off Discount Coupon; Get a Free Price Quote, Shipping Included; See Detailed Product Specs)

must display in that above-the-fold space of the email screen.

No long lead-ins. No flowery or cute language. Don’t assume an email recipient will read everything, start to finish. In fact, break up an email message into bullet points, subheads and short paragraph messages to make it scannable, at a glance.

Email, Emailed Newsletter Research: Timing, Open Rates, Time Spent, Click-Through Rates, Deletes:

· Specific product emails get highest response rates when sent Sunday through Tuesday; Emailed Newsletters receive the best responses on Friday through Sunday.

· Emailing Delivery Rates average 93%.

· Email Open Rates average 26.7%.

· Click-through from Emailings average 6.9%.

· Revenue/Purchases per email delivered = $0.25.

· Average Click to Purchase Rate = 5.1% (See also Click-through Rate, above. One interpretation — Less than 7% of email recipients clicked-through from the email; and just over 5% of that click-through segment made a purchase.)

· Email Marketers Primary Objectives: Retaining Customers; Acquiring New Customers.

· Reducing customer defections by only 5% can boost profits by more than 25%.

· Readability: 51 seconds (average) to read an emailed newsletter after it’s opened; 19% of e-newsletter readers surveyed read the entire newsletter after scanning it.

· Email Receiver Red Alerts: 72% of consumers surveyed were more suspicious of HTML emails they received that had broken images than they were of SPAM emails sent in “phishing” (fraudulent) online scams … if the phishing emails displayed without error.

Above email marketing research results were compiled from DoubleClick Trend Reports, Lyris and Millward Brown email marketing specialists, Harvard Business Review and Jacob Nielsen, Web Usability Pioneer. See also: Email Statistical Research from the Email Stat Center .