The majority of B2B marketers are using email to communicate with existing customers, be it to build relationships with their customers or to up sell/cross sell additional products or services. And the future looks good too - with most businesses citing that they expect their email marketing budgets to continue to grow.
The research also showed that B2B marketers are planning to use email more selectively in the future, which supports the increased confidence B2B marketers have in email as an effective marketing tool. Denise Cox, Newsletter Specialist at Newsweaver said, “These results match Newsweaver’s own experience. More and more of our B2B clients are taking a sophisticated approach to their email and applying better segmentation and targeting to the emails they are sending out”.
The survey also highlighted the rise of spam and spam filters as being amongst the biggest challenges facing businesses today. Cox advises, “Individual companies can work to overcome this issue by striving to send emails that don’t fall into the perceived-as-spam category. They can do this by providing anticipated, permission-based, timely, relevant emails - rather then sending untargeted one-size-fits-all, unwanted emails.”
“The results of this survey highlight the importance of email in the B2B marketing mix,” says Joel Harrison, Editor B2B Marketing Magazine. “B2B marketers are embracing email and we will see it grow to become a key part of any B2B marketing strategy,” he added.