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With MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 coming up next week in Las Vegas, we wanted to take a moment to take a look at a common email question.

It’s a touch-and-go economy, are my competitors still investing in email marketing?

The answer is a resounding yes, according to research from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report by W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS.

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As you can see in the chart above, nearly one-fifth of email marketing budgets are set to increase more than a whopping 30% in 2012.

And if your budget is decreasing, I’m sorry to tell you that you are in an exceedingly small minority — we found 67% of organizations expect to increase their email budgets in 2012 with only 3% indicating that a decrease is in the works.

In another recent survey, this one exclusively focused on B2B marketers, we found that email marketing was one of the top three investments in B2B marketing budgets.

“Email marketing is commonly viewed as a cost effective marketing channel; however, that should not imply that significant investments in this tactic are uncommon,” Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MECLABS, explained about her B2B-focused research. “Expenses in email marketing include list rental, email deployment programs, email deliverability services and list building initiatives, to name a few.”

Need help justifying your email marketing budget? Turn to your metrics. The third section of this MarketingExperiments Web clinic will help you determine how to listen to your numbers – Optimize your Email in Three Steps: How one marketer tripled revenue from their house list.

What are your most pressing email marketing questions?

You might know all about budgets, but odds are, if your daily tasks include email marketing, you probably have a lot of questions. If you’ll be at Email Summit 2012 next week at Caesars Palace, you can ask industry experts and your peers these questions first hand.

If you can’t make it, however, here’s a convenient proxy. Jim Ducharme, Community Manager, GetResponse, is bringing a camera and a mic and will be harassing us … um, I mean, posing email marketing questions to event speakers, sponsors and attendees, and wants your help deciding on what questions he should ask. He’ll even give one curious email marketer a Sony Bloggie Touch camera just for suggesting a question.

Related Resources:

Email Summit 2012 in Las Vegas on Feb. 7-10, 2012

Email Research: Top 3 tactics to grow your list

Email Marketing: Show me the ROI

More than 580 MarketingSherpa case study and how-to articles

While gathering presentation material for the upcoming MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 (February 7-10 at Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas), I had the chance to reach out to Jen Doyle, Senior Research Manager, MarketingSherpa, to get some additional background on lead re-engagement and nurturing.

Jen was the lead author of the 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, and was very helpful in finding a couple of relevant charts for me, providing some additional comments on what this research means for B2B marketers.

73% of all B2B leads are not sales-ready

The first lesson Jen offers is almost three quarters of all B2B leads are not sales-ready. This means Marketing needs to engage with those leads in some fashion to move them down the buying funnel. This also means it’s possible for leads to “go cold” somewhere between entering the funnel and becoming sales-ready. Those are the leads Marketing needs to reengage with.

Here is the first chart of MarketingSherpa research Jen provided:

Chart: Average percentage of total lead volume that is sales-ready

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And here is Jen’s commentary:

The above chart is the demonstration of why all leads cannot go directly to Sales.

At the time of original lead conversion, an average of 27% of those leads will be qualified to the point where they are ready and willing to engage with Sales.

The remaining 73% are not there yet. When these leads are prematurely sent over to Sales, they are not receiving the experience they desire and will look elsewhere for it.

Besides, do you really want your Sales team spinning their wheels making dial after dial where nearly three-quarters of those leads are not ready?

So, a large majority of B2B leads are not ready for Sales. This is where lead nurturing campaigns come into play.

The usual touch point for lead nurturing is email. These campaigns are greatly enhanced by utilizing marketing automation software to track and score those leads, and send triggered email based on demographic, firmographic, and probably most importantly as the lead moves closer to be becoming sales-ready, behavioral information. Behavioral information would include website visits, whitepaper downloads, webinar participation, and similar activities that indicate the lead is getting ready to buy the product or service.

With that in mind, this second chart is not good news for many B2B marketers:

Read more…

Growing your email list has benefits beyond the obvious increase in size. For example, new subscribers are often more active than older ones. They just signed up for your emails and want to click and open them.

For this reason (and many others) you should always strive to grow your email list. Doing so will help keep your engagement numbers healthy and ensure your brand is connecting with new prospects.

Growing your database can seem daunting, though, with the number of tactics at your disposal. Thankfully, marketers have been running list growth campaigns for years. Here is a chart of 10 popular tactics, starting with the most effective on top. The chart is pulled from the all new MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

The Most Effective Tactic: Registration during purchase

More than 90% of email marketers say adding an opt-in request to the purchase process is at least “somewhat effective” at growing email lists. This tactic is also the only one to have more than half of email marketers (61%) saying it is “very effective.”

Digging deeper in the Benchmark Report, we find this tactic was only the sixth-most used among the 10 listed. The tactic is vastly more popular among e-commerce marketers (59% use it) compared to marketers in other industries:

• Professional or financial services: 31%
• Software and software as a service: 28%
• Education or healthcare: 26%

Most Effective Tactic #2: Online events (webinars, etc.)

Offering content or something else of value is a common way to build an email list. We’re seeing online events prove to be effective incentives. More than 90% of email marketers say they are at least “somewhat effective” at building lists and 41% say they are “very effective.”

Online events appear to work best in the software sector, with 46% of email marketers there saying the tactic is “very effective.” That number drops to only 24% in the e-commerce sector, which is understandable. When was the last time you attended an event to buy something on Amazon?

Most Effective Tactic #3: Website registration page

Website registration pages are, far-and-away, the most popular tactic for growing email lists, with 75% of email marketers using them. Their popularity remains above 70% across email marketers who target consumers, businesses or a mix of both.

Adding several calls-to-action to join your list throughout your website is an effective tactic, and you can greatly improve results by following best practices. Kodak, for example, captured 33% more email subscribers by updating its email capture form, adding more opt-in requests, and adding a capture form to Facebook. (The team overhauled its welcome emails, and added social subscribers, too.)

Related Resources:

MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report

Email List Growth: Finding low-cost and no-cost ways to grow your database

Email Research: The 5 best email variables to test

Email Marketing: How to sprinkle subscribers with a well-timed welcome in 5 steps

MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012

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Triggered emails are rarely discussed as a standalone tactic. Buzzwords like “marketing automation” and “shopping cart recovery” are everywhere, but the automated messages behind them seem to be taken for granted.

After 2011, I am no longer taking triggered emails for granted. I interviewed scores of marketers that used them to achieve fantastic results by:

• Nurturing their newest leads
• Notifying customers that products needed service
• Encouraging visitors to return to a website
• Incentivizing customers to refer friends
• And much more

Through these and many similar campaigns, I have noticed that triggered messages have tremendously higher engagement rates than most other emails. Why is that?

  Read more…

You test subject lines. I know you do. Nearly every email marketer I ask tests subject lines. You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve heard: “Yes, we test our emails. We test the subject lines every week.”

The fact is the subject line is only a tiny fraction of what you can test. It reaps only a tiny fraction of what you can achieve. There is so much more. Let’s look at the five most effective variables you can test in email campaigns, pulled from a chart in our brand-spankin’-new 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

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Read more…

As a native New Englander, I’m accustomed to swings in climate conditions. However, this past month’s weather pattern offered something different. More than 16 inches of snow fell in late October, causing my children to trick or treat in their snow boots. A week later, the temperature reached the low 70s, as if Mother Nature gave homeowners one last chance to clean up their yards before winter settled in.

Part of my Fall family chores is to empty water from the irrigation lines to our lawn sprinkler system.

In MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Strategies Workshop, I use the analogy that automated lawn sprinklers systems are very similar to automated email campaigns. I admit that I would in no way have a green grass if I did not have a sprinkler system set to water the lawn every Tuesday and Friday. If I used a hose and sprinkler set, I would most likely be reactive and only water when I noticed the grass turning brown. I’d also be inconsistent on the length of time I watered my tiny meadow.

With the irrigation system, I can select the day, time of day and duration of the water. It works so well that I save time and money, and I can set it and forget it.

Automated emails for higher open rates

I don’t recommend you “set and forget” automated emails, but they are similar in their efficiency, as these campaigns are triggered to be sent on defined sets of rules based on dates, events or behaviors.

Because of their timing and relevancy, automated campaigns achieve higher open rates than traditional email messages. In fact, in the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, we discovered 43% of marketers found emails sent based on triggers to be very effective, leading all other tactics including segmentation based on subscriber behavior and use of loyalty programs.

The research also found 80% of organizations sent automated emails, with automated messages making up an average 22% of the overall email volume. The chart below shows the most popular automated email messages sent by marketers.

Chart: Manners matter most with automated email messages

Q. What type of automated, event-triggered, lifecycle email messages does your organization deploy? 

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Read more…

Does Walmart feature lower prices than your store? Is there a services company in India, or a manufacturer in China that can undercut your price in your B2B industry?

If you are not the lowest-priced offering in the market, you need a differentiator to justify your premium price. Why should customers pay more for the honor of buying from you?

I’ve written before about how a good story is integral to marketing a company that is not the low-price leader. But in this blog post, let’s take a step back. That story needs substance. Where is your substance?

Well, I’ve recently been thumbing through a new book that has an excellent example of one place you can find the substance behind your story – The End of Business as Usual: Rewire the way you work to succeed in the consumer revolution by Brian Solis.

Brian will be a keynote speaker at Email Summit 2012, and every attendee will receive a copy of this book, courtesy of ExactTarget.

  Read more…

I enjoy contributing to webinars. They give me a chance to immerse myself in research and talk shop. They also force me to shut off Outlook, Skype and anything else that might distract me, which is great when we have a good co-presenter. I can give them my undivided attention (which frankly isn’t possible when I’m an attendee).

Last week, I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar on email deliverability with Tom Sather, Director of Professional Services at Return Path, the webinar’s sponsor. Sather is a top-shelf deliverability expert, and he presented data from a global study his team conducted during the first half of this year. I was glad I paid attention.

Sather noted the average inbox placement rate (the percentage of emails sent that make it to the inbox) is somewhat low across the globe.

Global deliverability stats

• 81% inbox placement rate
• 7% spam placement rate
• 12% missing rate

This data was compiled from about 140 ISPs across the globe, Sather mentioned. As you can see from the webinar slide below, emails in North America fared a little better in the study. Read more…

You have likely experimented with social sharing buttons in your emails. You know, they’re the buttons readers click to share your emails on Facebook, Twitter or another social network.

And how’s that working for you?

All kidding aside, many email marketers struggle to get the audience to use these buttons. As you can see in the chart below from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, “social sharing buttons” are one of the least effective tactics you can use to build your list.

Read more…

I always start an interview with general questions. I ask about the company, the marketer’s role, and the company’s marketing in general. It helps frame the case study or tactics we’re about to cover.

I sometimes ask, “What are your top marketing channels?” This helps me understand the team’s priorities. Some say ‘catalogs’ or ‘telesales,’ but the two channels I most often hear are email marketing and search.

Again and again, marketers say one or both of these channels are the primary drivers of their success. That got me thinking about the similarities between email and search engine optimization (SEO)/pay-per-click (PPC). I came up with three: Read more…