Email marketing is a proven form of marketing where you use emails to connect with your target audience. Although e-mail marketing is the oldest field within online marketing, it is still evolving. Whereas a few years ago companies used e-mail marketing for mass communication, today e-mails are much more personal. With smart email automation software, you can respond much better to the individual needs of the recipient. And that's reflected in the results.
Not surprisingly, the use of email marketing continues to grow. 33 percent of companies will increase the budget for email marketing in 2021, also in B2B. And a staggering 52 percent of companies resolve to spend at least the same budget as last year on email marketing. On average, companies spend about €10,000 per year on this popular marketing tool, Team ITG's email benchmark shows.
The Email Benchmark 2021 consists of figures and email ratios from more than 50,000 email marketing campaigns from 2020. An important fact is that 2020 was different than usual because of the corona crisis.
Branding, more sales, more leads, retention, service: these are just some of the objectives for which email marketing is used. Its versatility and effectiveness (more on that later) explains why more than 90 percent of companies (SMEs and larger) use email marketing.
In fact, email marketing was voted the most important online marketing channel by the respondents of the email benchmark. 81 percent(!) of respondents named email marketing among the top three channels. This makes it more top of mind than website (70 percent) SEO (38 percent), social media (35 percent) and SEA (31 percent).
Another key insight in that 78 percent of marketers use email marketing to generate traffic to the website. Second mentioned by 74 percent is boosting sales, such as through cross- or upselling. Furthermore, 66 percent mention branding, 60 percent provide service (think of emails around the ordering process in an online store) and 52 percent generate leads.
Lead generation cannot be seen separately from lead nurturing, in which a company guides potential customers through the customer journey with the help of relevant content.
Leads constantly receive new content via e-mail that answers the questions in the phase in which the recipient is currently in.
The study proves once again the power of email marketing in B2B. In fact, mailings in the B2B market outperform emails aimed at consumers. The research is very useful for email marketing consultants who can take advantage of this and adapt their email marketing strategy accordingly.
B2B emails score better on relevance, are opened more often and benefit from a higher click rate. Some 34.27 percent of B2B mailings are opened. For B2C, that rate is 32.49 percent. The click rate of B2B mailings is 2.69 percent, compared to an average of 2.27 percent for B2C. In B2B, by far most clicks still come from the desktop, although mobile devices are gaining ground.
82 percent of email marketers rate the success of a campaign on the click rate. Open rate is a close second at 78 percent, followed by conversion at 66 percent. But few marketers are judged on ROI; only 25 percent look at this.
It should be clear that email marketing is among marketers' favorite tools. Logical, considering the number of benefits:
Yet email marketing also brings challenges. After all, recipients decide whether they want to continue receiving emails and can unsubscribe. At that point, you are no longer allowed to send emails, the AVG legislation stipulates. At the same time, this does force organizations to take email marketing seriously and keep the quality of the medium high. Another challenge is that it takes time to build a qualitative database. As a result, you often only see the first results after a few months. Advertising often delivers results faster, even though the ROI is ultimately a lot lower.
Marketing automation has been booming in recent years. Listed last year as the biggest trend, marketing automation has now become commonplace. These software solutions are becoming increasingly intelligent and capable of substantially improving the ROI of sales departments.
Despite the great benefits of marketing automation, it is not a quick fix. Many marketers also experience this, with as many as 60 percent citing marketing automation as their biggest challenge. What do they come up against? Personalizing e-mails is found difficult, says 43 percent. 42 percent also mention segmenting, or, "how do you classify the members of your email list in a meaningful way?
Improving email campaigns therefore has the attention of marketers, with their main focus this year on data-driven campaigns (51 percent), closely followed by 360-degree customer profile (45 percent).
The market for e-mail marketing solutions is crowded; the supply can be overwhelming. Yet there are major differences between software solutions. For example, it is very valuable to see e-mail marketing in a broader perspective. Ideally, you want to combine the data you collect using email marketing with other data so you can optimize the whole commercial process.
HubSpot is a popular all-in-one solution for marketing and sales in the B2B market. Hubspot offers not only email marketing functionality, but also a CRM system and the ability to manage your website in Hubspot. This has the advantage that you have influence over the entire customer journey, from the first contact moment to satisfied customer.
These CRM and CMS functionalities allow you to collect a lot of valuable data about your customers with which you can increase the ROI of your email marketing. Qualitative data is the basis of an effective data-driven campaign. HubSpot thus offers a solution to the main challenges of the modern email marketer; email marketing automation and personalization.