B-to-B Marketing: 13 Ways to Change Your Approach for 2014
It’s planning time for many companies as they build their marketing programs for next year or at least begin to think about them. Our agency specializes in working with companies who have some degree of engineered content in their products, helping them create powerful campaigns that communicate at an engineer-to-engineer level. So when a client asked how they should think about the coming year, we rattled off a few suggestions that we’ll share in this and future blogs.
- I wish it were as simple as just email marketing.
The fact is that email marketing is no longer the slam-dunk in B-to-B marketing that it used to be. Click-through rates today average 1.5%, a far cry from the 6% of just a few years ago. No matter how personal or relevant, no matter how much you tailor the message to the recipients’ stage in the buying cycle, no matter if you put stars and symbols in the subject line (the latest tactic), people are simply too flooded with email to respond to campaigns the way they did in the past.
A client told me recently she came to work one day with a single goal: to get her email inbox down to 1500 unread emails! She’s not alone, and I’ve heard other clients complain of being hundreds of emails behind. So although we still send out more than 2 million emails a year at our agency, and although that still is at the top of the list for what’s MOST effective on an ROI basis, it’s not what it used to be, and we’re going to have to develop new techniques to supplement the lead flow that email marketing used to provide.
Throughout the next couple weeks, we will be posting the 13 Ways to Change Your Approach for 2014. Sign up for our blog to see all 13 tips