The Evolution of Email Marketing

The evolution of email marketing

In 2012 it felt like we couldn't escape the constant reminders by journalists, bloggers, marketers and even consumers that social media had reached adolescence. Some even touted the idea that social could make email marketing obsolete; a bold and presumptuous concept when you consider that email is still the primary source of lead generation for 9 out of 10 B2B marketers. Whilst email marketing may not have received the accelerated public growth adopted by social, it has begun to evolve – so what can it offer in 2013?

The relevance of email

The aforementioned figures were revealed by Forrester and sat alongside stats declaring that 70% of marketers see email as either ‘critical’ or ‘very important’ with more than half of them using emails as a primary source of, (in descending order), lead generation/nurturing, enhancing or building brand awareness, driving sales and strengthening thought leadership.

The ultimate B2B marketing tool

Industry wide, B2B marketers reported an average deliverable rate of 84% and a further 13% average click-through rate. Not only are these figures extremely positive, but website forensics can provide marketers with hitherto unprecedented access to customer analytics and reporting which can be tied back to ROI, mainly through the process of lead-scoring; a convention still presenting teething problems for the social revolution.

“New and growing businesses are stealthy in how they embrace email. You will hear marketing automation, cloud-based marketing platforms, digital messaging, CRM, and the like, but the companies valued highly and/or raising a ton of money or being acquired, feature email front and centre’ (S.Jenkins, Clikz 2013)

So what’s next for email marketing?

More and more professionals are now using more complex email marketing systems and choosing marketing automation platforms in order to enhance email lead nurturing campaigns. Marketing automation offers more complex analytics, allowing marketers to track customer behaviour which ultimately leads to more efficient output as brands can fine tune their communications, content and daily activities by interpreting this unique data. Furthermore, these platforms can streamline the entire process with CRM integration, automation of campaigns and filtering mechanisms. What’s not to love?

Marketing Automation

So why do we think Marketing Automation is critical to the longevity and survival of email marketing? Firstly, the adoption of marketing automation is expected to increase 50% by 2015 and thanks to the ease in which customers now have access to the plethora of information about your company, the average sales cycle has increased by 22% over the last 5 years - all the more reason to join the party. Moreover, to counteract this paradigm shift in buying behaviour marketers must now adopt a more sophisticated lead nurturing approach to keep up with this revolution in buying behaviour.

Evolve to prepare

So in summary, it’s safe to say that email marketing is not ‘dead’ and social certainly isn't the straw that will break the camel’s back just yet. However, to keep up with the shift in consumer behaviour email marketing has to continue its evolution to become more sophisticated and integrate with your existing end-to-end marketing efforts including web, social, CRM and offline channels.

Finally, Gartner predicts that by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationships with an enterprise without talking to a human. If this is the case, can you afford not to have a platform in place to ensure that you make the most of inbound leads so that your sales teams can target the right customers at the right time with the right content?

Should B2B and B2C be Compared?

The editor of B2B Marketing, Joel Harrison, recently attended a round table with the Marketing Society, where the main topic was based on creativity. Delegates questioned if the level of creativeness achieved in B2C campaigns can be transferred to B2B marketing, as this was thought to be an issue. Key examples referred to as B2C successes were the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ campaign for Compare the Market and Cadbury’s Gorilla campaign.

As Harrison describes in his blog “B2B doesn’t need to ‘do a meerkat’ – it would be irrelevant and unnecessary. B2B needs and does focus on driving relevant, appropriate, timely and salient marketing activities to its niche audiences”.

Harrison clearly identifies how B2B marketing is crucially about timing and relevance, in order to generate sales. Businesses can integrate marketing automation solutions to improve the effectiveness of both of these elements. The technology enables marketers to tag and track website visitors, with information about their activity being relayed directly to marketers in real-time. Marketers can use this information to send automated, targeted emails relevant to prospects’ interests at a time when they are ready to buy. Consequently this improves lead generation and allows sales to achieve their targets while businesses can identify a clear ROI.

Visit Profunnel for more information on marketing automation.

Email Marketing Provides Greatest ROI

The annual Email Marketing Census 2012 published by Econsultancy this week shows marketers believe email marketing delivers a better ROI than most other channels.

With results compiled from over 800 respondents, the census finds that 70% of the companies considered email marketing to generate either an “excellent” or “good” ROI. The findings also highlight how using an email service provider for more than just “basic broadcast” has had a positive effect on businesses’ ROI. By putting effort into segmenting their email campaigns and integrating email marketing with CRM and web analytics, marketers are 32% more likely to find their ROI to be either “excellent” or “good”.

The census also highlights how many marketers are not taking advantage of more sophisticated forms of email marketing – only 28% said they would send a trigger email to a sign-up or site visitor. These figures clearly identify the benefits of installing technology to assist with lead generation and increase customer sales. Profunnel offers intelligent email marketing solutions to work with other business functions such as web analytics, social media and CRM. The platform can assist company owners with complex marketing campaigns by placing focus on only warm leads. This improves productivity of marketing and sales teams meaning a greater return on investment is achieved.

Visit Profunnel for more information on email marketing.

Marketing Budgets Increase for Q3 of 2011

For the first time since the second quarter of 2007, there has been a rise in marketing budgets across all sectors, according to the latest IPA Bellwether Report.

Although overall business optimism is at a low, the latest predictions for the third quarter of 2011 for marketing spending have ended a three-quarter episode of decline. 21% of the companies surveyed have reported an upward revision of their marketing budgets.

The largest increase at 16.6% has been accounted for online spending while sales promotion has also seen a rise – the first time in nearly four years.

The results show that businesses are attempting to override the negative financial period and realise that those companies who exert the greatest spend on their marketing, will be in a much stronger position than their competitors.

An investment in B2B lead generation and marketing automation can provide the winning formula for staying ahead in your industry - Profunnel offers a solution to strengthen marketing and sales productivity. The technology can track and monitor visitors on your website and focuses sales people on the warmest leads through real-time alerts, with the data integrated into the CRM. With the alerts regarding prospects’ interests, conversion rates and sales improve as sales people can react quickly to the information and approach prospects or current clients about their last website visit. Overall, the lead generation software streamlines marketing and sales activity and allows you to clearly identify your marketing ROI.

Visit Profunnel for more information on lead generation

Social Media Week – Is Your Business on Board?

Social media is never out of the spotlight and next week sees Social Media Week taking place around the world from 19^th-23^rd September. Social Media Week was established back in 2009 in New York. Now the event will be marked by 12 cities around the world, including Glasgow for the UK, with thousands of attendees – highlighting the surge in importance, popularity and usability of social media across all industries.

Clearly social media is now an integral factor in most businesses, particularly in terms of marketing. Although it’s easy to adopt this tool, it’s essential to use social media correctly and to ensure the applications are relevant to business identity in order to produce effective results.

Profunnel can provide social media marketing solutions to enhance your company’s productivity when using the applications. By integrating our demand generation platform, you can track your social media activities giving you a better understanding of your ROI. The solution also allows you to monitor inbound traffic from various social media sites, increasing your lead generation. These leads will be tracked through the sales cycle to illustrate the financial impact social media integration is achieving for your company.

Please visit Profunnel for more information on social media tracking

Spend, Spend, Spend on New Technology

As reported on Fresh Business Thinking, a recent survey conducted by Netgear shows small businesses are planning to spend more money on innovative IT over the next 12 months.

The survey questioned 300 business owners and IT managers from SMEs and found 35% of the respondents plan to ‘make more strategic IT investments’ in comparison to last year.

Investing in new technology is crucial to businesses that want to remain current in their industry while making the company more time and cost efficient.

For businesses looking to improve the technology in their sales and marketing departments, Profunnel offers the latest lead generation software to maximise the production of new business opportunities. Profunnel’s demand generation solution integrates and automates the lead management process, meaning visitors to the website will be tracked and tagged. Sales and marketing teams are then provided with information on warm leads generated by the intelligent lead scoring system. The teams can then approach these warm leads through targeted email marketing – capitalising on the relationships they have started to build and increasing the new business brought into the company.

Visit Profunnel for more information on lead generation.

What is the Key to Business Success?

The current economic climate has created some issues for businesses. However in recent financial findings, some organisations are making real progress. In the latest financial year businesses such as Sports Direct have reported a significant rise in profits – so the question arises as to why some companies are prospering despite others failing. In retail, the crucial factor is to deliver the right product, while in B2B the simple answer is ‘timing’ – targeting prospects and current customers at the right time and with the right information.

In order to get the timing right, it is important for organisations to research and gather data about customer activity on their website. Often perceived as time consuming, with the right technology in place, marketing and sales teams can benefit greatly, leading to an overall improved revenue for the company.

You can read more about this here

By integrating Profunnel’s intelligent software, businesses can track visitor activity on their website – from the initial visit right through to their final purchase click – tracking when and where they access the site. The system will also improve your lead generation with real-time email alerts being sent to the sales team enabling them to spend their time on warm leads. From here, the sales team can create and deliver personally targeted email marketing campaigns – confidently aware that the prospect will receive relevant information, which is more likely to attract them to the company and keep them coming back.

Visit Profunnel to find out more information about Web Forensics.

Businesses Must Build Trust with Customers for Successful Marketing

As reported on Fourth Source, a recent study by the Direct Marketing Association, (DMA), shows how there has been a significant drop in the number of consumers willing to offer personal details about themselves when interacting with online businesses.

The poll of over 1,000 consumers found that more than 1 in 3 are choosing to withhold identifying information, resulting in real problems for marketers and consumer data capture.

For example, in the last six months there has been a drop by approximately one third in the number of people prepared to give out their name, address or email.

Executive Director of the DMA, Chris Combemale, suggests that marketers must find alternatives in their methods to capture consumer data. 54% of the respondents believed trust in a company is paramount in deciding to disclose personal details, therefore marketers need to build trust with the customer first before proceeding to contact them for further information.

Profunnel has developed intelligent marketing software to aid marketers with trust and engagement with customers. Our demand generation software will help you to easily track and analyse visitor activity from a single platform. The tracking device will follow your visitors, highlight their interests and alert you of when and where they access your site – improving your lead generation. This information will allow you to tailor email marketing campaigns to suit these interests, forming a trusting relationship which can ultimately turn visitors into customers.

For more information on demand generation, visit Profunnel.

Rise in Sales and Marketing Recruitment

As reported in The Drum, recent research conducted by Financial News shows more companies are planning recruitment in sales and marketing than any other area.

The survey found that 83% of company chief executives are prioritising hiring sales and marketing professionals for their businesses over any other profession. Interestingly, this figure is up by 69% in comparison to the same survey carried out last year.

However, it’s one thing to ensure your company has a strong, effective sales and marketing team, but another to implement the right tools to drive business success.

The assistance of tailored online marketing solutions can make a real difference to generating new business and maintaining current customers. Profunnel’s demand generation software can enable your team to manage a range of marketing techniques from a single platform. The technology allows you to easily integrate all of your marketing and sales efforts into your CRM. Additionally it can improve your lead generation by tracking visitor activity on your site and alerting the sales team with relevant information regarding their interests in order to maximise new business generation.

For more information on demand generation, please visit Profunnel.

Social Media Leads the Way

It is no revelation that social media networking has become a major ingredient in business marketing. The development of various networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, are now usually incorporated in any business strategy – creating opportunity to seek online lead generation and to generate prospects.

However, social media marketing must be carried out in the correct way in order to be effective. It is crucial to interact and engage with social networkers – tailoring your approach by providing expert knowledge that is relevant to the target audience. People will value this knowledge, forming respect, which will effectively generate positive interest, build connections and aid your lead generation.

Having developed a unique ‘Social Media Tracking’ software package, Profunnel can support your business, offering a helpful link between monitoring your B2B lead generation and identifying your ROI with the latest marketing software.

Why not find out more about the demand generation services Profunnel offers.

Planning for the Future

The confidence of business was restored a little this week with George Osborne’s budget - the Telegraph reported that the new measures will encourage investment and boost the amount of funds for companies keen to capitalise on growth opportunities.

This boost should pave the way for further development and success, and for sales and marketing it means making the most of the opportunities being opened up.

By integrating lead generation technology into your plans, business can not only improve the understanding it has about the behaviour of its customers, but it can also quickly respond to their needs. This information allows organisations to improve their targeting, conversions, and ultimately ROI.

As the days of Labour rule have vanished so has email blasting. Sales and marketing needs to understand its online customer is vital to the company’s sustained growth - from responses to e-letters and social media activity, businesses can develop a digital fingerprint to tailor its communication and focus on hot prospects.

Find out how lead generation technology needs to be on every company’s budget this financial year.

The Social Side To Lead Generation

With sales and marketing having to squeeze more results from constrained budgets, the companies that have enjoyed most success are the ones who have taken up the challenge and done something new, embracing new technology and opportunities. Key to success in this field is the ability to co-ordinate sales and marketing activity – increasingly influential in this is lead generation technology, providing a far greater insight into customer behaviour, sales patterns and communication.

While some companies have just got their heads around the Internet, the incredible rise of social media has changed the playing field once again and it is now integral to the online strategies of many companies.

With its growth, organisations are recognising that social media cannot be ignored – but they need technology that will incorporate social media tagging and tracking solutions if they are to truly understand and act on the full potential sites such as Twitter and Facebook offer. Today’s lead generation technology brings this value, enabling companies to identify, track and nurture customers through the full range of sales and marketing channels, building stronger relationships and maximising new opportunities– click here for more information.

How To Get Involved in Demand Generation?

With more channels now available for marketers and the targeting of key decision makers becoming more difficult, there is a need for marketers to reassess their activity to ensure it is up-to-date in today’s business environment.

The B2B market has changed dramatically - buyers now have access to your company and your competitors at the click of a button. So how do you stand out from the crowd? It’s all about having the necessary information available – who is your potential buyer, what are their interests and where are they in the buying process.

Lead generation technology provides the intelligence in the new world of B2B marketing. By providing the information about potential customers, their interests and where they are in the buying cycle, it allows marketing and sales to work together to drive forward new business.

Why is it more successful? The importance of relationship building cannot be undervalued. By creating campaigns and nurturing leads, users are able to build relationships and develop trust with potential buyers, which in turn leads to more successful outcomes.


Take a look at the latest lead generation technology - it can achieve far more than you may ever expect.

It may be cold outside, but don’t rest on your laurels…

In today’s Telegraph the Centre for Economics and Business Research has suggested that the snow disruption will cost Britain's economy £1 billion for every day that the icy conditions disrupt travel and business operations such as retail.

With the cold weather continuing, many have decided to write off this period and look ahead to the New Year, but in terms of sales it’s worth being proactive. Despite the impact the snow has had on business operations, many people are still in the office planning and budgeting for 2011, so take advantage of what may be a quiet time to follow up warm leads and start building opportunities for the new year.

The leads are out there, and marketing automation software through Profunnel can help you nurture them for the future, so don’t rest on your laurels while the cold continues to bite – make the most of this time so you’re in a prime position for 2011.

2011 – Make It A Year of Growth

According to a survey by Deloitte more than 90% of businesses in the UK have predicted growth in revenue in the New Year.

Deloitte’s annual Entrepreneurship UK report revealed that over 50% of business leaders that were surveyed forecast that there will be at least 10% revenue growth in 2011. This figure highlights the positive shift in UK business compared with 2009, when 20% of entrepreneurs predicted declining revenues in the oncoming year.

With more companies predicting growth this is a great opportunity for businesses to boost their sales effort and increase revenue. There are many different ways to achieve this, from implementing new approaches to lead generation, more effective online strategies, next generation email marketing and social media campaigns, to strengthening customer relationships through more targeted communications.

With the business outlook for 2011 looking more positive, why not find out more about how new approaches to lead generation can help grow your business and increase your revenue?

SEO is Only the Beginning

Web activity and maximising online visibility through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become a critical component in lead generation for businesses in all sectors. But strong SEO is only the beginning for companies.

While SEO is an important marketing tool, it cannot be solely relied upon to increase sales. Attracting visitors to your website is the first step of the new business chain – but once they are there, how do you make sure they keep on returning and ultimately purchase your product or service? The key to this is building understanding of these visitors – where they have come from, what they are interested in on your website, where they are in the buying cycle and more.

So how can you achieve this? Next generation web forensics (tagging & tracking individual activity) enables companies to really understand potential business, nurture it, communicate more effectively with individuals, and manage those relationships. Not all web forensics offers this ability, so now’s the time to get ahead of the competition, find out more about improving your Lead Generation

Email Marketing Continues to Grow

According to new research by Econsultancy, the email marketing industry has increased by 15 per cent year-on-year. The research revealed that email marketing is worth £336 million to date this year.

There are many reasons for this increase in email marketing, but one of the most fundamental is that companies are now finding that email marketing can be successfully, easily and cost-effectively integrated into their overall marketing activity. From big business to SMEs, companies are embracing email to support both tactical and strategic marketing campaigns.

Add to this the latest tracking and tagging technology, which allows companies to monitor customer response and action on every element of an e-shot, and now we are seeing email marketing becoming far more targeted and personalised. The result is increased lead generation for companies and improved ROI – elements no company should turn their back on.

Click here for more information on email marketing software

Summer's Over....

With the summer holidays coming to an end many businesses are ready to take decisions, make investments and implement new activity to support them through the coming months. Areas that seemed to be on hold can suddenly come to life as key decision makers return from the beach to the office.

It’s now that sales communication and knowledge is key – getting your message and credentials in front of the right people at the right time. Make sure your sales team plans their activity carefully – making use of the latest technology to understand what makes visitors to your website tick and alerts you to follow up those contacts who are coming up to a review.

As businesses swing back into the fast lane, it’s vital to be ready to take advantage of the opportunities, but you’ll only be able to do this if you know about them. Marketing automation technology can be the key to unlock this sales potential – for a demonstration of how it can help you click here.

Strong Turnout for Webinar as Businesses Look to Support Sales Activity

Last week saw the running of Profunnel’s latest Webinar, hosted by MD Matthew Hall and Kevin Miller – a leading US authority on lead generation for businesses.

Over 120 business people took part, attracted by the opportunity to discover more about the latest technology and the support it offers for their sales and marketing activity.

Kevin spoke about his experience and how Profunnel’s approach can help nurture customer relationships, enabling a more personal, targeted approach for sales. Co-ordinating with CRM systems, sales calls, on and offline marketing activity and more, Profunnel’s technology offers a far stronger and more integrated process that is proven to build revenue streams.

The response from participants was extremely positive, with a Q&A session allowing them to find out more about how Profunnel can help their sales teams, particularly in the current market.

More Webinars are planned for the future, but if you’d like to register to find out more click here.

Big Brother Watching?

It may seem a bit Orwellian, but the new era of web forensics can give you an incredible insight and understanding of your customers - and in the current market that knowledge may be just the edge you need to win business.

Web forensics is all about getting to grips with the ‘journey’ your customer makes through your website – how they are interacting and using the site to meet their requirements. It now goes way beyond the basics and instead allows you to tag individual visitors, tracking them through their activity and the sales process. This information is invaluable to sales people and marketeers, helping them understand individual motivations, target communication and increase conversion rates.

The key to success is to make sure your forensics solution gives the control and analysis your team needs to improve customer communication and sales – not just the basic analytics, but something much more powerful. You may feel like Big Brother watching visitors to your site, but the truth is that you will be able to deliver a better, more tailored service to each and every visitor.