Email may become the B2B marketing medium of choice, with marketers investing more budget in this channel and sending more emails more frequently than ever before. This is according to new research by B2B Marketing in association with Newsweaver, which suggests that far from being put off by issues relating to spam and inbox overload, business marketers are actively seeking to increase their investment in this medium.
Eighty seven per cent of respondents to the survey said they regard email as an ‘important’, ‘very important’ or a ‘critical’ part of their marketing activities whilst only 13 per cent regard it as ‘not important’.
A similarly large majority confirmed that email is on the increase: 77 per cent said they were sending more email campaigns than 12 months ago, whilst 67 per cent said the volume of individuals they are targeting through email is on the rise. Sixty eight per cent of B2B marketers send out at least one email marketing campaign a month, although volumes remain relatively small, with almost half (47 per cent) sending out less than 1000 emails a month.
Perhaps more significant, 50 per cent of respondents have increased the budget they allocate to email marketing within the last 12 months, whilst only seven per cent have decreased their budget. At present though, the proportion of budget allocated to email remains relatively small with two thirds of respondents spending less than ten per cent of their total marketing investment on this channel. Eight per cent currently allocate zero budget to email.
There was additional good news from the survey regarding the versatility of email. The medium has come under criticism regarding its applicability to meeting different marketing objectives, with some observers suggesting it is useful for loyalty activity (for example, customer newsletters) but increasingly little else.
B2B Marketing / Newsweaver research demonstrates that email is actively being used by business marketers to achieve a variety of objectives (see Figure 3) including building brands, prospecting and upselling. On the same theme, 62 per cent of respondents suggest that the versatility of email is actually increasing, whilst only 11 per cent believe it is becoming less useful as a B2B marketing channel.
At the same time, the research does demonstrate that open rates are significantly higher for emails to existing customers: for emails to all general recipients (including prospects) two thirds of respondents expect an open rate of 30 per cent or under. For emails to existing customers only, 55 per cent of respondents expect an open rate of between 20 and 50 per cent. This trend is reflected in expectations regarding response rates.
Spam is clearly a major area of concern for the future of B2B email marketing, with respondents nominating it as the top two issues within this medium. Interestingly these relate both to spam itself as well as its side effects.
Whilst 27 per cent of respondents cite ‘the rise of spam undermining the medium’ as the chief concern, 22 per cent regard the impact of ‘spam filters blocking legitimate marketing messages’ as the biggest issue.
Finally, when asked what the future holds for B2B marketing email, respondents demonstrated that whilst we are likely to see an increase in volume and the budgets allocated to it in future (41 per cent of respondents) a slightly larger proportion of practitioners are aiming to use it in a more targeted fashion.
Fifty six per cent of those surveyed said that they will use email ‘more selectively’, suggesting that B2B marketers themselves are concerned with not contributing to the spam problem and focused on setting their own house in order.
It also confirms that B2B practitioners appreciate the importance of targeting and also the relevance of communications within all mediums.
This year has been hailed as ‘the year of email’ and the results of this survey confirm that at the very least it is the year email increased in value and importance in the B2B marketing mix.
This research shows that B2B marketers are becoming more confident in their use of email and the future looks good with most businesses citing that they expect their email marketing budgets to grow. These results match Newsweaver’s own experience with more of our customers using email for customer retention as well as for prospecting activities.
However, the research highlights the rise of spam and spam filters as being amongst the biggest challenges facing businesses today. Individual companies can work to overcome this issue by striving to send emails that don’t fall into the ‘perceived-as-spam’ category. They can do this by providing anticipated, permission-based, timely, relevant emails rather then sending untargeted one-size-fits-all unwanted emails.
A key point to note is that a high number of B2B marketers are currently using in-house desktop solutions for their email marketing. Whilst these solutions do meet the needs of a very basic email campaign, they could be creating delivery problems that marketers are not aware of, such as having their emails blocked from delivery.
In terms of what is on the horizon, the majority of B2B marketers see the versatility of email increasing and plan to use email more selectively, which supports the increased confidence marketers have in email as an effective marketing tool. By being more selective, marketers will also be taking a more sophisticated approach to their use of email and applying better segmentation and targeting to the emails they are sending.
