B-to-B TWITTER SURVEY BREAKDOWN

With in-depth insight into how marketers are using Twitter, this report contains:

• 41 Pages
• 387 Survey Responses
• 21 Charts
• 6 Case Studies

Email marketing is considered the workhorse of b2b marketing.  Social media marketing may be all the rage, and video and mobile are coming on strong in vying for marketers’ attention.  But email remains the bedrock of customer communications, transactional messages, and lead generation, despite being virtually a legacy channel.

The reason for this tenacious persistence is that email is extremely inexpensive and very effective.  Compared to search marketing the cost per impression (CPM) of email marketing is very low.  Email is also highly synergistic with the new digital entrants –social and mobile. 

But how are b2b marketers using email? As prospects are increasingly bombarded by emails, have marketers changed their tactics in order to break through? Email Marketing: A Legacy Channel Continues to Deliver 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.

Email Marketing: A Legacy Channel Continues to Deliver answers these and other questions:

• What is the best way to deliver highly relevant content?
• How are marketers measuring the ROI of email marketing programs?
• Where will email fit in in the burgeoning world of social media?
• When to use email for customer acquisition and retention?
• Why will email marketing remain essential for btob marketing for the foreseeable future?

Email Marketing at a Glance
Here is one example of the 26 charts and graphs that tells the email marketer exactly where to prioritize. In an age of metric-overload, Email Marketing: A Legacy Channel Continues to Deliver 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 “Email Marketing: A Legacy Channel Continues to Deliver”

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 (57%) 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 2012. Growing opt-in lists, which was cited by 42% of respondents came in second.   Of course, it's easy to say that you want to deliver relevant content and grow opt-in lists. What's much harder is actually doing so. Companies can make sure of success by tracking their email programs, which is one reason that measuring ROI on programs took the third spot on this question, with 40% of respondents citing that answer.

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 one-third (32%) of survey respondents said the most important purpose of their email marketing program was customer acquisition – not customer retention, which garnered a mere 17% of responses.