Email remains a powerful tool for b2b marketers. Best estimates indicate that email marketing will enjoy $1.5 billion in sales in 2011. Clearly, email marketing remains a crucial tool for b2b marketers.

But how are b2b marketers using email? As prospects are increasingly bombarded by emails, have marketers changed their tactics in order to break through? B-to-B State of Email Marketing: Best Practices takes a hard look at these questions along with the key performance metrics, budgets, and industry trends. The report also looks at how email is increasingly being integrated with social media platforms, a trend that no b2b marketer should ignore.

B2B State of email Marketing Report answers these and other questions:

• What is the state of b2b email marketing?
• How are marketers budgeting for email marketing?
• What email strategies do marketers find the most effective?
• What metrics are used to judge success?
• How are marketers integrating email with social media?

Email Marketing at a Glance

Here is one example of the more than 35 charts and graphs that tells the email marketer exactly where to prioritize. In an age of metric-overload, B-to-B State of Email Marketing: Best Practices underscores which measurements are important and why. You will find the benchmarks for all the key metrics from click-through to conversion rate.

Excerpts from 'B-to-B State of Email Marketing: Best Practices'

On relevant content

Relevance has always been an important facet of email marketing, and it continues to be a top priority for email marketers, as our study bears out. More than half (56%) of respondents, who were asked which broad challenges and opportunities face the b2b world over the next 12 months, said delivering highly relevant content was on their to-do list in 2011. Of course, it's easy to say that you want to deliver relevant content. What's much harder is actually doing so. Companies can make sure their content is relevant by tracking their email programs, which is one reason that measuring ROI on programs took the second spot on this question, with 44% of respondents citing that answer. Deliverability, which was cited by 34% of respondents came in third.

On tactical goals

One surprise, according to experts, is the focus on customer acquisition rather than customer retention or even brand awareness. Typically, b2b companies have smaller, more relevant lists that are used for nurturing. However, close to half (43%) of survey respondents said the most important purpose of their email marketing program was customer acquisition – not customer retention, which garnered a mere 28% of responses. One analyst said this breakdown may be directly associated with the recession. “It may be because, after the recession, there was a large amount of customer churn,” said David Daniels, co-founder of industry research firm The Relevancy Group. “Companies are trying to backfill their lists and make up for all the people they lost.”

On budgets

There's good news for a significant majority of email marketers, with 51% of respondents saying their budgets will remain the same for 2011, and 45% saying that budgets will increase this year. Only 4% said their budgets will go down. But this may not tell the whole story, according to one marketer. Bri Shaw, eBusiness Project manager at food re-distributor Dot Foods Inc. said her email budget remained the same for 2011. However, the company actually added a new position – a customer marketing manager – who will work closely with her on the email marketing program. “They are going to be very involved with email, helping to figure out exactly how we can best target our customers,” she explained.