Is email marketing still successful?

By Daisy Truman

This week we are focussing on a different area of B2B marketing and asking the question: is email marketing still successful? Email marketing has been used for a number of years by a number of different organisations, and we’re here to tell you that email marketing is just as successful today than it has ever been.

Does it still work?

Email marketing has often been scrutinised as an outdated way of conducting marketing campaigns, but more often than not, this is down to the execution of a campaign rather than the platform. It is fair to say that email marketing still holds a place as a significant way of generating leads for your organisation.

Information gathered by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) shows that 99% of people check their email at least once a day. This alone shows that email marketing is an effective way of reaching potential clients. Alongside other marketing services like telemarketing, this can become a really useful way of keeping in contact with potential leads and previous clients.

How does it still work?

An important part of ensuring email campaigns are successful is adapting to changes that have been made both technologically and psychologically.

Since email marketing became a common method of marketing in the late 80s/early 90s, technology has changed dramatically, meaning the way email marketing is done needed to also change. For example, email is no longer bound to a computer at a desk, in an office.

A major factor of effective email marketing is that your content is mobile-friendly. It can be easily forgotten, but business owners and consumers alike are increasingly checking their emails via their smartphones. Ensuring your email content can be opened on a number of devices will prevent data going to waste.

Ofcom’s 2018 Communications Market Report has stated that people in the UK now check their smartphones, on average, every 12 minutes. A large number of people now have access to their work emails on their phone, meaning that this has become a platform that can potentially reach a client every 12 minutes.

Successful email campaigns also take into account the content in the messages and how important this is in order to be effective. In Adestra’s 2017 report, ‘Email Strategies for Success: Getting the best out of your email marketing’, they recognised that the most important thing to aim for in email campaigning is ‘improving email personalisation’. This will enrich the content that is being sent and often increase a recipient’s response rate.

What is marketing automation?

Another huge change that has been made to the ways email marketing can be carried out is marketing automation. This has made an impact in both B2B and B2C marketing, as it allows for marketers to send and manage their data. More specifically with email marketing, software like Adestra, Hubspot and MailChimp offer a space to edit and manage various areas of your campaign like time of day and content, as well as easily check the effectiveness of your campaigns i.e. the percentage of emails opened by recipients.

Leave it to the professionals.

Although email marketing and marketing automation services can be a hugely successful way of generating leads, it can also be very tricky to get right. Often, companies will spend money or time gathering data and not have the skills to generate a useful campaign out of it. However, if you are interested in starting email marketing, you’re in luck. A number of B2B marketing agencies (including ourselves) and our sister company Really B2B, who focus on helping organisations grow using marketing automation, offer email marketing either as a stand-alone or an accompanying marketing service.

In addition, marketing agencies will often have more insight into current trends and changes happening in email marketing, therefore are able to keep on top of these on your behalf.

 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how MarketMakers or Really B2B can help with your email marketing, strategy, or automation then please give us a call 0845 468 0880.

Tags: B2B Marketing, Business Development, email marketing, Marketing automation