Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Is email marketing over?

Is email marketing over?
by Richard Fouts    July 30, 2012
A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Yes, if you use it as a generic outbound tool. No, if you use it as a partner to outbound marketing.

For example, a Survey by Pardot finds that nearly 70% of B2B marketers don’t think of email marketing as a primary lead generation tool. Why? The answer is fairly obvious, but I’ll review it anyway.

Email marketing, from your buyer’s perspective, is outbound spam. And – they will do anything to avoid it (TiVO, spam filters, caller ID, junk folders and the DELETE KEY are all evidence that buyers don’t want to hear from you). After all, the term junk mail didn’t come from nowhere. Marketers still send junk mail, they just do it electronically.

The Pardot survey shows a majority of B2B companies (65%) allocate less than 25% of their budgets to email marketing, while only 9% are devoting more than 50% of their budgets to email efforts. The survey also indicated that 70% of B2B marketers do not consider email marketing to be a primary lead generation tactic. Why not?

Marketers, hip to buyers that don’t want to hear directly from them, are moving more investment dollars to inbound marketing, then using email to move new leads through the sales process or to re-engage dormant leads.” So while email is alive and kicking, it’s just being used a different way.

For example, the survey also shows more than 60% of B2B marketers use email for drip nurturing. Of those, 65% personalize their messaging to align with how a prospect responds.


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