Breaking through email clutter is a top priority for B2B email marketers: 66% say they are working to improve the relevancy of the content they deliver in email marketing programs, according to a report by BtoB Online titled B-to-B State of E-mail Marketing Best Practices.
List hygiene (42%) and email personalization (42%) are the next-most-cited improvement areas among surveyed B2B email marketers; just 21% cite integrating email with social networking.
Roughly one-third of B2B email marketers are working to improve list segmentation practices (36%) and event-triggered auto-responder emails (31%).
Below, other findings from the B2B State of E-mail Marketing Report.
Top Challenge in 2011: Relevant Email Content
Asked which broad challenges and opportunities face the B2B world over the next 12 months, 56% of B2B email marketers cite delivering highly relevant content.
Measuring the ROI of email programs (44%) and email deliverability (34%) follow in importance.
Customer Acquisition Trumping Customer Retention
More than two in five (43%) B2B email marketers say the most important purpose of their email programing is customer acquisition, compared with 28% who cite customer retention. That's likely a result of consumer churn associated with the economic recession, the report notes.
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Other key findings among surveyed B2B email marketers:
- Metrics: Click-through rates (27%), offer-conversion rates (21%), and open rates (15%) are the most important email marketing metrics.
- Budgets: 51% say email budgets are remaining the same in 2011 and 45% say budgets are increasing; only 4% say budgets are falling in 2011.
About the report: Findings are based on a survey of 414 B2B email marketers, Dec 8-14, 2010.
