By Sergio Balegno, Research Director

Email Tactics Rated as Highly Effective, by Target Market


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A key difference in the strategies used to target consumers and businesses is the need to align content delivered with the buying process. The business-buying process is usually long and complex. Delivering content that is not only relevant to the recipient’s business segment but relevant to their current stage in the buying process is critical. This is why a larger percentage of B2B marketers view the delivery of relevant content highly effective.

Effectiveness comes with a price. The high cost of using too much staff time and effort for some tactics can more than offset their value. This is especially true in the understaffed and overburdened marketing departments so typical in today’s economy.

In this chart we see that "delivering content relevant to a segment" ranks highest in terms of tactical effectiveness, but it also requires a great deal of effort -- a barrier to adopting this tactic. "Email campaigns to house lists" offers the greatest value because the high level of effectiveness comes with a much smaller price tag in terms of effort required.

When an inefficient tactic is also high maintenance, the decision to reduce or eliminate it from the program becomes much easier.

For additional research data and insights about email marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.