E-mail marketing to in-house lists is the most popular marketing channel for reaching engineers and industrial professionals. This was one of the findings in a recent study published by GlobalSpec. The chart below shows the different online marketing tactics that manufacturers and industrial companies plan to use in 2011.
Email marketing has been a staple of industrial marketing for a long time. However, many of these marketers are now experiencing declining open and click through rates.
With all the buzz about social media, blogs and RSS feeds, are email marketing and eNewsletters dead?
Not so fast!
IMO, they are and will continue to be very useful provided your content is relevant.
That’s the standard advice you are likely to get from most marketing consultants. It’s easier said than done as you’ve probably already discovered.
The solution – use dynamic content to boost relevancy of your emails and make them highly personalized in order to truly engage with your audience of engineering, technical and industrial professionals.
As we head into November and the start of the Holiday Season, B2B marketers are getting into their budgeting mode. With the cloud of economic uncertainty still hanging over many industries, it is not surprising that B2B marketers are shifting their 2011 budgets more towards lower-cost inbound eMarketing tactics.
MarketingSherpa asked more than 900 B2B marketers how they expected their marketing budgets to change for 2011. The chart below shows the breakdown between different marketing tactics and the projected increase/decrease for the next year. Read more →
While working on an email campaign for a client who markets to manufacturers in the Process Controls and Automation industry, I was asked if there was an easy way to combine web analytics with email marketing.
He was already using Google Analytics (GA) to monitor his Web site. However, there really wasn’t a good way for him to track site activity after each email campaign went out.
My client wanted to gain a better understanding of Web site interactions that could be tied to a specific email and help him refine his landing pages to improve his lead generation efforts.
The problem with basic email metrics of open and click-through (CTR) rates is that they are very limited in their usefulness. Here’s why: Read more →
In today’s “do more with less” industrial marketing environment, email marketing continues to be a productive marketing tool despite all the reports about its declining effectiveness. According to SirrusDecisions research, the B2B buyer receives 20.3 email campaigns per week, up from 15.4 per week in 2006. And that reality of the flooded inbox is very evident from steadily dropping response rates of only 1% to 3% range for traditional email marketing.
The old email marketing strategy of batch and blast or spray and pray is no longer effective. However, there’s no denying the low cost of email marketing. Therefore B2B and industrial marketers continue to favor email marketing over other direct marketing channels.
Today, it has matured to the point where marketers can deliver highly focused email campaigns to the right audience at the right time and in the preferred format.
Savvy B2B email marketers are being very creative in order to rise above the noise, get their lists to open their emails and take a desired action. They are combining video, audio and sophisticated tracking tools to deliver email campaigns with highly customized messages that engage prospects in their preferred format and measure interactions beyond just open and click-thru rates and well into website behavior.
Some B2B marketers tend to think of Marketing Automation as the silver bullet that will solve their lead generation crisis. Of course, Marketing Automation alone cannot live up to those hyped up expectations and has to take the brunt of the blame.
That is unfortunate because Marketing Automation software is a very useful tool and in my opinion, a necessity these days. However, B2B and/or industrial marketers must learn to use it correctly in order to harness its true power.
Let’s get one thing straight from the get go, if you are in a declining market with low demand for your products and services, no amount of automation will help you generate new leads. You need to rethink your business model first and fast.
Marketing Automation software is widely used to execute key marketing functions like lead scoring and routing, nurturing via drip marketing, creating email campaigns and landing pages, tracking, measuring and reporting using a unified dashboard. There’s is no question that marketing departments do become a lot more efficient by automating many of these marketing tasks.
However, is improving efficiency enough to justify investing in Marketing Automation? Or do we need to show a verifiable ROI? To most C-level execs that really means answering the question, “How much revenue did it generate?” It is the second question that seems to cause the most problems. Read more →
Lately, social media seems to garner all the attention in the media and blog posts with very little mention about email marketing. This long time staple has become the Rodney “No Respect” Dangerfield of B2B and industrial marketing.
I’ve read several articles about the impending death of email marketing because of the steady decline in open and click-through rates (CTR). Are those predictions a little premature? Can we deliver a powerful 1-2 punch by combining social media and email marketing? I came across two research studies that answer the last question with a big YES!
The first study done by AWeber (aff. Link), was a survey of small business owners and found that the two most common tactics used in 2009 were tweeting e-mail newsletters and sending out blog entries to e-mail lists. In 2010, almost 50% of small businesses will include “follow us” links in their e-mails, and about 44% will include share options in their messages. (See charts below). Read more →
Do you know the key component of email marketing that generates more high-quality leads and drives sales? Marketing gurus tend to talk about opt-in pages, sign up forms, calls to action and interactive squeeze pages to boost your click through and conversion rates.
However, for email marketing to be a true driver of sales, your need something even more valuable and every email that you send out should have it. What is it?
Creating an irresistible offer or incentive – one that is so strong, it compels your reader to part with his/her name and email address.
Just adding a sign up form in the sidebar of your site or blog stating “Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter for the latest news and handy tips” may be a direct call to action but is it really an irresistible offer or incentive? Read more →
Auto-responders have been around for a long time and in B2C marketing they have been used to engage customers, convert them into repeat buyers, to up-sell and cross-sell and to increase the value of every customer on a continual basis. In short, B2C marketers think of auto-responder as a killer app.
How about in B2B marketing? Unfortunately, they are used rarely other than sending out an automated thank you for subscribing to a newsletter or registering for a white paper download. I think B2B marketers can learn something from B2C marketers.
Auto-responder is an automated marketing follow-up solution that can dramatically improve conversion rates and ROI. In today’s Web 2.0 world, engaging customers and prospects over time with relevant messaging is critical. There is a new term for it, “engagement marketing.” (Source: Silverpop).
This is a follow up to my post “E-Mail Marketing is Alive ‘N Kickin'. Adding Social Media features will add to the value of e-newsletters.
Email Marketing and Social Media, Part 1: Adding Social Media to the Email Newsletter is an article written by Anna Billstrom on MarketingProfs.com. She has written about how you can do just that in easy to follow steps. Check it out.
Silverpop has introduced a new feature called Share-to-Social. Using links contained within your email messages, recipients can quickly share your message on one or more social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, adding their comments, including images from your message, and more. This opens up a whole new range of possibilities for viral marketing that can make your messages more effective and more targeted than ever before.
