Email is a prime tool for collecting B2B data, second only to websites. And it’s part of an increasingly potent channel mix, according to B2B Data-Driven Marketing Strategy, a study released
last week by Synthio and Ascend2.
Among practitioners at 114 companies, 54% agree that they are significantly increasing their effectiveness in collecting data via channels. Another 45% say
they are marginally improving.
Overall, 93% say data-driven marketing is effective. And 73% strongly agree that having a good data-driven marketing strategy is crucial to achieving
success.
In addition, 64% rate their data driven marketing as very successful in helping them meet their objectives. Another 29% say it is somewhat effective.
Email tops most
other channels when it comes to data collection. The respondents rate these avenues as effective:
- Website/ecommerce — 52%
- Email communication — 49%
- Social media — 46%
- Mobile apps — 37%
- Organic search — 32%
- Paid search — 27%
- Display ads/remarketing — 25%
The most important objectives are
- Basing more decisions on data analysis — 49%
- Acquiring more new customers — 42%
- Enriching data quality and
completeness — 37%
- Integrating data across platforms — 37%
- Attributing sale revenue to marketing — 37%
- Aligning marketing and sales teams —
34%
- Segmenting target markets — 34%
The challenges are almost the same:
- Integrating data across platforms — 51%
- Enriching data quality
and completeness — 46%
- Acquiring new customers — 37%
- Aligning marketing an sales teams — 36%
- Basing more decisions on data analysis — 36%
- Segmenting targeting markets — 32%
- Attributing sales revenue to marketing — 30%
Of those polled, 54% use a combination of outsourced and in-house resources to
implement a data-driven marketing strategy. Another 39% outsource it, and 7% use in-house teams only.
At the same time, 45% agree that implementing a data-driven strategy is extremely
complicated. And 43% say it is somewhat complicated.