B2B Marketing Blog

Email marketing. An endangered digital species? Fact or a myth?

Who doesn’t love to gossip in the midst of this cold season, holding a comforting cup of steaming hot coffee? Whether it’s at the office or a the nearest caff, people are talking about something that you haven’t heard about.

Well lately, the story that’s been circulating through the digital marketing grapevine is that email marketing is a dying trend. You’re probably raising your eyebrows and wondering,

“Is that really true?”

Topics: Email Marketing Marketing Technology

5 Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

This blog was written by Jessica McGreal and was first published by our friends at B2B Marketing, who have kindly allowed us to share it with you.
 

I’ve just managed to get on top of my inbox. It took quite a large chunk of time (I won’t say how many hours). I’ve responded to those ‘I’ll reply tomorrow’ flagged messages, the forgotten-about starred memos and the mass of unread (and now deleted) marketing messages. Although I feel pretty triumphant, I know it will be overflowing again by next week.

Email has become a large part of every professional’s daily routine – whether we like it or not. A mountain of 123.9 billion business emails whizz around the web every day, with the average professional sending and receiving 131 emails every 24 hours, according to a study by Radicati.

Email can be a powerful marketing channel when used correctly. An Adobe report has revealed engagement via email is still the most desirable form of communication between businesses.

Topics: Email Marketing Inbound Marketing

The 3 ways you have to change your B2B email strategy for events

You might be a bona fide B2B email strategy guru, but do you know what it takes to tweak those strategies to make them suitable for event marketing? Find out...

Topics: B2B Marketing Email Marketing Event Marketing

How to ramp up response rates in your email marketing for events


Do you sometimes find yourself on autopilot when creating email marketing for events? Do you churn out the same old communications for every campaign (dates for diary, discount reminder, agenda announcement...yawn)? If you're nodding along and feeling a touch guilty, don't worry, you are not alone. This is a very common state of affairs in events businesses. You're busy. Like really busy. And email is the thing you do most of, so it's not surprising that a few shortcuts and a lack of thinking creep in. But, never fear, help is at hand.

Topics: B2B Marketing Email Marketing Event Marketing

Email benchmarks in the event industry worth knowing

Undoubtedly, the most common question I am asked when speaking to event industry leaders is: “Do you think our open rates and click through rates are above or below the benchmark for the industry?

While I haven’t officially surveyed the conference professionals that I know, I have many conversations to draw upon, and in my experience email is still hugely important to event companies. They really care about the results they are getting and want to know how they measure up to competitors and peers.

Now, when it comes to actual figures, I believe you have to take them with a pinch of salt. Many marketers like to think that they are already taking the right approach, and simply want to be assured of this. In addition, if you were to ask your marketing manager what kind of results they are seeing you will likely induce panic, and cause them to demonstrate only their best performing pieces for fear of criticism. 

But, based on my experiences across the board within the event industry, here are the metrics you should expect to see:

Topics: Email Marketing Event Marketing Conference Marketing

Best bits from salesforce's state of marketing in 2015 report

Salesforce recently published their 2015 report on the current state of marketing, and naturally it has given me plenty of food for thought. The report is a thorough and comprehensive overview of what marketers say about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies and metrics for 2015. Yes, it goes into great detail, but there are definitely a lot of valuable insights in there for curious marketers. With a focus on the UK, and B2B marketing primarily, I’ve summarised what I believe to be the salient points.

Topics: B2B Marketing Email Marketing Event Marketing Conference Marketing

Ten terrible email marketing habits event marketers adopt

If you read this blog, you know my view on how event marketers use and abuse email marketing, and I’m afraid to say it hasn’t altered just yet. If anything, I realise that there are several fundamental forgotten points that I just had to make. If you’re a B2B event industry insider, and you use email as your main marketing channel please listen up, because your approach so far is not good, not because I say so, just because click-through rates in our event industry are appalling!

Email marketing click through rates in the events industry range from 0.5% to 1.5%

Topics: Direct Marketing Email Marketing Event Marketing Conference Marketing

Can auto signatures outperform your B2B email marketing tactics?

Event marketers like to think they’re pretty savvy when it comes to all things email-related. However, from my experience, most of them seem to forget to leverage one fundamental (and free) marketing channel that could be put to use in growing awareness of their brand, their blog and ultimately their own profile. What is it, you ask? The personal auto signatures, of course!

Topics: B2B Marketing Direct Marketing B2B Marketing Best Practices Email Marketing Event Marketing

8 great ways to grow your event email marketing database

Email is the holy grail of event marketing, and that doesn’t look set to change just yet. Chances are you’ve got a healthy and reasonably responsive email database, but event companies can’t afford to rest on their laurels – growth is key, and sustaining a consistently increasing number of sign ups is a must. There are a number of ways to go about this, but if you try even one of these tips in the next couple of weeks we’re certain you’ll see the kind of results which will undoubtedly aid your event email marketing strategy for 2015. 

Topics: B2B Marketing Email Marketing Webinar Marketing Event Marketing

11 Tips to Craft the Perfect Event Marketing Email

Email marketing is still the majority of event marketers’ go-to tool for promoting their events, and with good reason. When done right the results can be astounding, but in the hands of an old school marketer , email can be an overused (and even harmful) tool.

We’ve observed that the pattern is pretty much always the same: 12 weeks out from the event, marketers start blasting. They don’t segment their lists, meaning they end up sending a blanket email which attempts to provide something for everyone and as a result is pretty lengthy and vague, and try to cram in as much information as possible. The cycle is then repeated until the event takes place, causing recipients to disengage and in some cases even unsubscribe completely.

Topics: B2B Content Marketing Email Marketing Lead Generation

10 tactics for subject line success in B2B email marketing

So we’ve talked about what not to do in email marketing – now let’s address the positives. There are plenty of quick and easy techniques you can employ to ensure the content you so lovingly crafted actually connects with the prospects you intended it for! 

Most of your B2B prospects will receive countless messages about products and services, new content, conferences, discounts, offers, webinars etc. on a daily or possibly hourly basis (depending on how freely they share their email address). As a result, the key to increasing and sustaining your open rate is to stand out by being relevant, interesting and showing a genuine desire to help. Here are our best B2B email marketing tips to improve your metrics and ultimately win more quality leads:

Topics: B2B Content Marketing B2B Marketing Best Practices B2B Marketing How to Email Marketing

Two B2B email marketing metrics that matter for Senior Management

As a busy director, you probably don't have time to get bogged down in the detail of marketing reports. But since your  company is likely to be heavily reliant on the emails you send to your database, not knowing exactly what the  metrics show (or which ones really matter) can lead to lengthy yawnworthy meetings and little clarity on how your team, marketing and tactics are truly performing.

Topics: B2B Content Marketing B2B Marketing Best Practices Email Marketing

B2B Email Marketing tips from around the web for event companies

Recently we've been running a series of marketing audits for various conference companies and to be honest have been surprised to see that a lot of B2B email practices from 15 years ago are still being used today.

Topics: B2B Marketing Best Practices B2B Marketing How to Email Marketing Event Marketing Conference Marketing

Words that kill your email conversion rates in event marketing

2 for 1, discount, early bird, free, offer, save, exclusive, last chance, still time…these words are the back bone of so much event marketing copy. Some of them were probably in the list of “powerful” words you were issued with when you started marketing.

Topics: B2B Marketing Email Marketing Event Marketing Conference Marketing

Email Marketing in Events: The subject lines that will make or break your next event

Arising from our previous post New Rules For Subject Lines in B2B Email Marketing where we looked at some of the key trends affecting email performance that emerged from the 2013 Adestra Subject Line Analysis Report: “Keywords for killer subject lines”, we found a lot of good information that it gave us room to focus on the sub-set of the results that particularly affects you - B2B event marketing and B2B publishing.

Topics: Email Marketing Event Marketing Conference Marketing

New Rules For Subject Lines in B2B Email Marketing

Time out of the office is great to rest and have a good old read of all the things you didn't get around to - a taste of my festive break! As a bit of a marketing geek I love to catch up on what's out there on the web and for me one of the best reports from last year was the Adestra Subject Line Analysis Report: “Keywords for killer subject lines”

Topics: B2B Marketing Email Marketing Event Marketing