Commentary

Email And The B2B Trouble Arc

Here is some good news for email vendors in the B2b space. The most effective lead-generation device — hands down —is  email, according to a study by KoMarketing and Ascend2. In fact, 50% say so. In contrast, 47% say that content marketing is second, but that’s a far more difficult task, with 52% indicating executional difficulty compared with 26% for email.

Why is email so easy? Probably because it’s the more tactical component. Content is much more difficult to get right. Go down the list through content and social media, and you’ll see a steadily declining effectiveness scale and a rising difficulty arc. Things even out a little when you get to SEO, Webinars, landing pages and paid search. But email remains the most popular channel — and the least troublesome.

Who does the work? KoMarketing reports that "75% of complex sale marketers outsource all or part of their lead-generation tactics. The more time and resource-intensive a tactic is  — such as content marketing, social media and SEO —  the more likely an organization is to require outside assistance to execute it."

Here are the B2b objectives, as reported by KoMarketing:

  • Improving the quality of leads — 78% 
  • Acquiring new customers — 52%
  • Increasing quantity of leads — 38%
  • Measuring performance/ROI — 35%
  • Automating marketing processes — 28%
  • Converting website visitors to leads — 25%
  • Reducing cost to acquire leads — 23%

Similar if not identical results came up in a recent ManTech Research Council survey. Here are the main objectives of the 275 B2B marketers polled (rounded off):

  • Driving traffic and leads — 39%
  • Acquiring and retaining customers — 29%
  • Building brand awareness — 14%
  • Increasing prospect and customer cross-channel engagement — 9%
  • Executing an account-based marketing program — 6%

The ManTech Council study doesn’t mention email per se. But here are the elements in what it calls “a vast archipelago” of technologies (in part):

  • Social media marketing — 81%
  • Web analytics — 77%
  • Advertising — 71%
  • Events — 71%
  • Content marketing — 71%
  • Web and landing page tools — 70%
  • CRM — 67%
  • Video — 60%
  • Marketing automation — 56%
  • Webinars — 50%
  • Project management — 37%
  • Mobile —36%

 And the challenges?

  • Too many technologies to keep up with — 50%
  • Problems integrating technologies — 49%
  • Cannot attribute marketing performance to revenue — 41%
  • Inaccurate data in lead and customer database — 32%
  • Cross-channel campaigns difficult to coordinate—29%
  • Spend too much maintaining technologies — 23%
  • Steep learning curve for technologies — 19%
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