According to a new report from Salesforce Research, reported by the Marketing Charts staff, covering 21.3 million full-time B2B professionals, the average annual churn rate for any single persona is 17%. (“churn:” combined horizontal and vertical movement inside organization and external… invalidating email address)
Salesforce turned to LinkedIn, exploring data from more than 7 million records over a period of 4 years to better understand the lifecycle of a persona. One of the key points considered was that many individuals undergo both horizontal and vertical changes within an organization, meaning that they may keep their email address but still be removed from a target persona.
Average Annual B2B Churn (combined horizontal and vertical movement inside organization and external… invalidating email address) | |||||
Product Focus | Marketing | Sales | HR | Finance | IT |
Hightech | 23% | 20% | 20% | 18% | 19% |
Retail & Consumer | 22 | 24 | 19 | 17 | 18 |
Medical | 20 | 18 | 17 | 16 | 16 |
Source: SalesForce, June 2017 |
In terms of verticals, manufacturing and transportation shared the lowest churn rate (15%), followed by finance (16%). The retail and consumer products sector, by contrast, had the highest annual churn rate (22%).
Churn rates were higher for individual contributors (20%) than for managers (17%) and those at director levels and above (15%). This was true across verticals.
B2B growth rates were determined by examining how many new individuals enter into a vertical each year, says the report. In others words, the percentage of personas who are new to a vertical compared to the prior year.
On a vertical basis, retail and consumer products (19%) had the highest growth rate, while finance (13%) had the lowest.
The marketing department had the highest growth rates across verticals, Specifically, annual growth rates for the marketing department were:
Growth rates were higher for individual contributors (16%) than for more senior levels.
Considering the importance of email to B2B marketing, and the report’s estimation that it takes a B2B email database 4.2 years to completely churn, the study’s authors offer some takeaways and recommendations, including to:
The full report, which includes more data and recommendations, can be downloaded here.