Industrial MarCom Blog

Email marketing — what was old is new again

With the current buzz about social media, you’d think email marketing, the old standby of b-to-b marketing would be a forgotten strategy.

Not so fast according to many marketers as they plan their 2010 budgets. Email marketing is once again playing a prominent role as more and more companies seek the most effective return on their marketing spend.

80% of marketers report that email is their strongest performing media buy ahead of search and display ads according to Datran Media.

And here’s a report from shop.org stating, “Email is delivering sales at an average cost per order of less than $7, compared to $71.89 for banner ads, $26.75 for paid search and $17.47 for affiliate programs.”

If you are in the industrial sector, you may need to modify those numbers a bit since they are from the State of Retailing Online report.

Here’s a chart from MarketingSherpa’s most recent Email Marketing Benchmark Guide.

(Click on chart to see larger version)

 

Bottom line – don’t cut back on email marketing. It is relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing tactics and with some testing, tweaking and following best practices, it can yield very impressive results. ROI is easily measurable and is a powerful selling tool to existing customers, which may be the key to your survival in this economy.

How to Measure Social Media ROI

Lately, B2B marketers have really taken to using social media marketing. As everything else in this business marketing, measuring ROI is vital.

However, there's a lot of confusion over how to measure ROI for social media. I recently read a post by Paul Gillin, www.gillin.com where he provides 10 simple tactics to measure social media's ROI.

1. Focus
2. Know what works
3. Understand influence
4. That was a trick question
5. Make everything unique
6. It's not just about your site
7. Coax conversations back to your site
8. Monitor the competition
9. Use one big-picture metric
10. Give it time

Head over to his original post to learn more about the above points.