Email Marketing Best Practices

Virtually every company has invested in having the ability to send emails to their customers.

In fact, MarketingSherpa’s 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark report ranks email marketing as one of the top three marketing tactics. On average, companies with over 100 people allocate 9% of their marketing budget to email alone, and those with fewer than 100 employees up the ante to 16%.

The fact is, email still works really well. But the world is changing. The inbox is fragmenting like never before. Marketers have to deliver their messages in more formats to multiple devices. And their messages have to be more relevant, delivered more frequently, and somehow still make it into the “most important” section of their buyer’s inbox.

In reality, much of the email marketing you see today is pretty terrible. Messages are untargeted. Their delivery is ill-timed and poorly formatted. It’s no wonder that engagement—the holy grail of email response rates—is falling along with declining open and click rates.

Other traditional marketing tools—such as CRM, landing pages, social media, and web analytics—only compound the problem. Because they don’t integrate with the email solution, email is left in a silo. It suffers from limited segmentation, and creates excessive amounts of administrative work for marketing teams who endeavor to connect their processes and consolidate reporting manually. Costs quickly escalate for ad hoc solutions that deliver poor ROI, and revenue flounders because companies deliver inconsistent, unpersonalized experiences to their customers.

The answer is to use email solutions that do more—coordinating with other tools, delivering more dialogues that build relationships and engage buyers (not companies) on their timetables. That’s where marketing automation software comes in.

Download our free resources below to learn more about email marketing best practices, and when it's time to upgrade to marketing automation.