B-to-B Email Marketing – Still the Best for ROI

By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter

I keep harping on building your own internal customer database. One of the reasons is that if you’re selling online, that list could be gold for you. 90% of the marketers surveyed by Accenture and the Blackstone Group said email marketing was what they used to promote their commerce activities.

Another interesting stat is that of these marketing executives, 23% said that email marketing drove at least 25% of overall revenues. Some say that email marketing accounts for more sales than all other digital advertising.

If you want accountability, consider this:

Heidi Cohen gives us several reasons why email trumps social media:

  • Email provides directly measurable ROI – You know immediately how many opened and read your message.
  • Email is content format agnostic  It’s user-friendly and you can use text, images, videos, audio, PDFs.
  • Email can deliver both long and short content – Content can vary from a link to several pages in length.
  • Emails – you can control delivery – Whether it’s now or delayed.
  • Emails can be read on anything – Smart phones, tablets, laptops, no apps required.
  • Emails build customer relationships – Once someone allows you to communicate with them, it represents a certain level of trust.

If you like this post, you may want to read:

Email Marketing-Still a Top Performer.

Email Marketing-Is this the Best Way to Reach Professional Tradesman?

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Should Marketing and IT Departments Work Together?

When was the last time you and your IT department willingly collaborated on a project? The truth is, probably never.

The reality is in today’s environment, the customer is taking control of the engagement, and marketing’s challenge is how to get to the customer faster and more efficiently (customer-centric). Customers are turning away from companies who can’t provide the experience, channel of engagement and immediate service they need.

The CMO Council recently did a study sponsored by Accenture called Driving Revenue Through Customer Relevance, that outlines ways CMOs and CIOs can achieve Agile Intelligent Marketing together.

Now marketers may not be known to be the sharpest pencil in the box, but we do have a good sense of what the customer’s needs are (and all needs are not the same), while IT is usually all B/W.

According to the report,”CMOs must take a greater ownership of the customer experience and assume a leadership role in embracing digital marketing practices, data-driven strategies and new marketing process integration platforms across their organizations.” Technology now underpins and shapes the entire customer experience. IT departments need to take strides to be a stategic enabler rather than an operational cog.

The reality is working with or without IT, marketers are doing tactical things with e-mails,website analytics, lead generation, etc. with the ever-increasing pressure of ROI on marketing dollars no matter where they are spent. Beyond the spend, you need to look at what’s really the end game? It’s to get a new customer or make an existing one happy.

The moral of the story is for Marketing and IT to play nice. Remember, your pay checks come from the same account and together you can make a better impact for the company.

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