In January 2019, Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC) partnered with Ascend2 to work on an email marketing survey to create Email Marketing from the Enterprise Perspective. This research report exclusively represents the opinions of marketers from enterprises with over 500 employees that responded to the survey.
Those who responded held an array of different positions within their companies and worked in B2B, B2C, and both. The respondents can be broken down by segment:
Role in the Company
Owner/Partner/CXO: 12%
VP/Director/Manager: 35%
Non-Mgmt Professional: 53%
Primary Marketing Channel
Business-to-Business: 27%
Business-to-Consumer: 42%
B2B and B2C Equally: 31%
Let’s look at the report found about email marketing:
Primary Objectives
Most of the enterprise email marketers surveyed view increasing engagement (70%) and improving brand awareness (62%) as the primary objectives of an email marketing strategy. Companies are always working to increase open and click rates, so engagement remains an integral focus of their approach.
Critical Challenges
While those surveyed all felt that there were a number of challenges email marketers must face, a majority (58%) considered increasing engagement to be the most critical.
Objectives Versus Challenges
Looking at how the enterprise email marketers surveyed view the differences between objectives and challenges can provide insight into what areas to prioritize in an email marketing strategy. For instance, a strong majority of respondents (70%) thought increasing awareness to be a primary objective, and 58% also found it to be a critical challenge.
Effective Types of Email
A strong majority of those surveyed (74%) felt that personalized messaging made for the most effective type of email. More than half (53%) also thought that an email dedicated to a single topic worked well.
Effectiveness Versus Difficulty
According to the survey, personalized messaging ranked the highest as an effective type of email. 74% of respondents thought so, even though 42% considered it difficult.
Conclusions
Based upon the survey’s results, you can see that enterprise email marketers place a great deal of emphasis on increasing engagement. Why? Because if you increase engagement you are also likelier to build more brand awareness and see improvements in lead generation and conversions. A more engaged recipient is one that will be likelier to welcome further communications and show more interest in your brand and in making a purchase.
According to the survey, many marketers thought personalization to be difficult, but an even larger number found it to be an effective approach to email marketing. Tailoring your emails to your recipients as best as you can speaks more directly to what might be concerning them. This email then has a higher chance of its recipient opening, reading, and clicking through on it.
So, making your emails personalized and more engaging can lead to more success. How do you do this? You can make your emails more relevant. Use your customer data to have them speak more directly to your audiences. Also, above everything, offer value. Give our audiences solutions or information that helps them solve their business problems.
What else can you do to make your emails more effective and successful? Find out by taking a look at “3 Ways to Make Your B2B Emails Stand Out.”