Previously, I defined offer rejection and discussed why it is valuable to B2B marketing organizations. In this blog post, I will discuss how to operationalize offer rejection and highlight several rules of thumb.

Operationalizing Offer Rejection

Using the insight gleaned from the offer rejection analysis, an organization must specify how offer rejection will be operationalized. To do this, it must specify the following:

  • Threshold. The number of times an offer can be made to a contact before it is considered rejected. This varies by topic or asset type. It is important to clarify what is considered a discrete outreach attempt. For example, if a nurturing program highlights a specific analyst report to a contact and follows up with the same offer four days later to non-respondents, is this considered one or two outreach attempts?
  • Timing. How long the offer is considered rejected (e.g. one year, three years, forever?). Determine whether any events override this time period (e.g. when a contact takes a related offer several months after the offer was rejected).

Rules of Thumb

Because the scenarios can be very complex, and defining offer rejection can be time-consuming, here are a few rules of thumb to help you get started:

  • Focus on emails first. For most B2B organizations, emails are the most often used delivery mechanism. Focus offer rejection efforts on this channel first, since it will have the largest impact and will help confine project scope.
  • Outbound distribution. Most organizations use the heuristic of sending an outbound offer to a contact once (initial and followup reminder) within a timeframe that equals the solution’s buying cycle stage.
  • Dynamic Web site. Leverage personalized offers on your corporate Web site to highlight those that were previously rejected, but may now be of potential interest when a contact engages with a related offer.
  • Record accepted offers. Ensure that offers previously made to a contact are not repeated. Where content is often shared across multiple nurture streams (including the corporate Web site and other channels) many organizations often make duplicative offers, which erodes the customer experience and skews offer rejection reporting.
  • A/B test. Offer rejection (and acceptance) is highly impacted by the quality of messaging used to introduce the asset. If the messaging (e.g. the subject line in an email) is poorly constructed, the conversion (acceptance) rate of the asset will be negatively impacted. For this reason, it is important to ensure that A/B testing is a part of any marketing tactic distribution (e.g. email, postal).