80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers – a rule that should be familiar to any B2B executive. While its importance isn’t in dispute by anyone, finding the 20% and optimizing your sales funnel to focus on them can be difficult. Especially when trying to identify which of your prospects might join that 20% in the future.

Identifying Big Purchasers Before the Purchase
Oftentimes it is critical to identify prospects who may turn into large buyers before they have purchased a single item or service. So the question becomes: how do you find and target the 20%?

Endai’s solution is the Email Engement Score. The Email Engagement Score is a method to quantitatively track and prioritize sales efforts to target the most engaged and receptive prospects, allowing you to segment your list by behavior instead of less predictive methods like demographics and self-reported data.

How Does The Email Engagement Score Work?
The Email Engagement Score is generated by aggregating user actions and assigning a value to certain behaviors. For example, opening an email is an action that represents interest in your company or product. Clicking on a link within the email is an even stronger signal of interest, or engagement.

By assigning meaningful values to actions and analyzing individual behaviors and responses to your email marketing campaigns, your sales team can get a significantly better understanding of where to focus further outreach. You can also segment your mailing list by behavior instead of metrics with traditionally poor predictive rates such as company size, job title, or annual revenues.

Why Segment Lists By Behavior?
The Relevancy Group, in a report published October 2010, points out that untargeted or poorly targeted email campaigns cost as much as 3.6 times more than similar well-targeted and highly focused campaigns. Since few predictive mechanisms are nearly as accurate at gauging subscriber interest or commercial intent as well as behavioral analytics, incorporating the Email Engagement Score into your sales process and segmentation strategy is an invaluable way to bring down costs and boost the ROI of your outbound marketing efforts.

Besides direct ROI gains, a less often mentioned benefit of proper segmentation by user behavior is the strong competitive advantage this can confer to your marketing team. According to that same report, less than 40% of marketing teams currently employ behavior segmentation, giving those B2B companies that do a clear opportunity to reach leads with much more relevant and engaging information and content, and outmaneuvering competitors’ efforts.

The Key Takeaways
As more companies jump completely on the outbound email marketing bandwagon, ROIs are naturally going to decrease. An influx of mail has consistently been shown to decrease open and click rates, as prospects become inundated with messages.

The solution to this loss of customer attention is to continue to build more and more focused email campaigns that place the right sales message in front of the right customer at the right time.

One of the strongest advantages of email marketing is it’s ability to record and track recipient behavior, in order to identify what that right message is, who it should go to, and when. By paying attention to the Email Engagement Score, your marketing and sales team can 1) identify which customers represent the biggest potential revenue streams for your organization, the 20%, and 2) identify what kind of messaging those customers are most receptive to.

This allows you to cut through the daily email clutter and reduce your marketing overhead, boost your ROI from email, and ultimately grow revenue in an intelligent way based on quantitative, hard data instead of hunches.