B2B email marketing seems to be a hot topic these days judging by the number of articles and reports I’ve been reading.

In its cover story for November 2009, E-Mail Marketing’s Future . . . Right Now, Website Magazine editor-in-chief Peter Prestipino and Senior Editor Mike Phillips report that:

“According to a June 2009 Marketing Trends Survey by StrongMail Systems, 42% of nearly 1,000 global business leaders polled plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2009. Of those, 81% intend to increase their e-mail marketing spend.

“Spending on email marketing . . . shows no signs of slowing down, even as social networks and search engines continue to dominate the marketing headlines.”

Exact Target, in its new white paper, Is Email Marketing Endangered?, reports that according to Forrester Research, investments in email marketing will grow from $1.2 billion in 2009 to $2 billion billion by 2014.

In the same report, Exact Target also notes that the DMA reports that email marketing’s return on investment is greater than $43 for every dollar spent.

Wow! That’s some ROI!

Reasons why email usage is growing

You would think that due to social media, texting, and email inbox overload, people would use email less. I certainly find it easier to connect with people quickly through Twitter, for example. And my son, who has multiple email accounts and a phone, texts me versus calling or emailing me.

I also find texting much easier now that I have an iPhone.

However, it is precisely due to smart phones and social media that email use is up.

Exact Target reports that those who own a smart phone “are significantly more likely to increase email usage than those who don’t,” with 43% of BlackBerry owners using email more often and 41% of iPhone users increasing their email usage.

This is mostly likely because it’s so dang easy to get email on your smart phone versus having to log into a computer.

And all types of organizations and businesses are using email more. Based on my own personal experience, I now get email from my bank, my temple, my gym, and my son’s school. Plus, I get all my regular business email.

On top of that, improved email technology is adding to email’s increased use. Exact Target reports that due to Gmail’s rapid innovations, Gmail users are increasing their use of email by a ratio of 6:1 — versus 2:1 for Yahoo, which has innovated at a much slower rate.

Thanks to Gmail’s integration of its Task application, for example, I can now create a task based on something I receive via email — and connect that email to the task. This means I can clean out my email box faster and not have a bunch of “pending” emails hanging around.

Even better, I added Google’s Task app to my iPhone, making it super easy to keep track of things at literally the press of a button. (No more paper sticky notes!)

Relevant messages still king

Although email appears in our inboxes and we read it, email is not a passive medium — or at least it shouldn’t be.

To be effective, email must engage readers . . . and to this end, it’s really important that email marketers think long and hard about their opt-in policies, campaign frequency, and content.

I realized this truth last week when I spent over three hours cleaning out my Gmail inbox — and unsubscribing from tons of email marketing messages that I’m not sure I ever asked to receive and that I had been simply deleting without reading for months.

Email marketing is so *not* about developing massive email lists (to which many of the people on the list didn’t exactly opt-in) and then sending out *stuff* and hoping something sticks.

Email marketing should be about giving people content they need to positively interact with your brand company and its employees (yes, real people).

And, given that many people like me are on total email overwhelm, ensuring that your messages get read is going take much more effort and strategic thinking than developing some lukewarm content and hitting “send.”

What do you think? Do you agree that email is still a “killer app”? Do you have a case study or story you’d like to share about how you’ve used email marketing to connect with customers? If so, please leave a comment below or send me email at “info@dhcommunications.com” with “email marketing” in the subject line.

photo credit: www.istockphoto.com/Gewitterkind

I’ve been watching my e-newsletter new subscriber stats for a while now, mostly because the number of subscribers had been increasing even though e-newsletter open rates have been declining — according to most industry reports.

In the last year, the number of people who subscribe to my e-newsletter on a daily / monthly basis has doubled, as has the overall number on the list.

The number of subscribers started increasing when I added my e-newsletter subscription form to this blog — which generates more traffic now than my DH Communications, Inc. Website.

Because I have a field on my subscription form that asks people how they found me, I’m able to see which marketing tactics generate the most subscribers.

Hands down, “search” is the number one method of driving traffic and subscribers. Over 89% of new visitors to the blog came through Google organic search alone (for the period 1/1/09 to 6/15/2009).

For the time period cited, approximately 25% of all newsletter subscribers came via search.

Writing articles for other blogs, portals, and e-newsletters is the second best way to drive traffic and subscriptions. For example, an article I wrote for Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Newsletter netted over 100 new subscribers in 24 hours.

And today (June 25), MarketingProfs featured my blog post about “Plug & Play Website Templates” in their Get to the Point e-newsletter — which is driving e-newsletter subscribers even as I write!

What has surprised me the most, however, is the number of subscribers who come in from *comments* I’ve left on blogs — as well as links to this blog from other bloggers.

I’m surprised for two reasons: I didn’t really think people followed blog links, and two, blogs were supposed to supplant e-newsletters when in fact, it’s blogs driving the traffic — and subscriptions.

I’m not quite sure what ideas or analysis I can derive from my numbers except for this:

Despite the number of blogs to which I’m subscribed and don’t have time to read, I always seem to find time for e-newsletters and this is because the e-newsletter arrives in my inbox — whereas I have to open my blog reader to access new blog posts, something I don’t do often enough.

An e-newsletter is like a good sandwich — quick and easy to digest.

Done well, e-newsletters give me a quick tip or two I can use. Most important, they arrive in my inbox without me having to do much of anything — except subscribe once.

If you read still subscribe to and read e-newsletters, please tell me why. I’d love to know.

Are you tired of gloom and doom headlines? I know I am. That’s why I decided that as a public service I would post articles about companies that are growing — and even hiring! 

If your B2B company is growing, drop me a line. I’d love to hear about it. Maybe together we can generate some positive mojo to help turn our economy around!

VerticalResponse Founder and CEO Janine Popick started her email marketing company during  the last recession in 2001 — and boot-strapped her way to success. In fact, the company grew over 50% in 2008 and is on track for a “good” growth rate this year.

What follows is an interview I had with Janine recently about her company and her insight as to why email marketing is still a great tool for small business.

DH: Why is VerticalResponse growing despite the recession?

JP: What we’re seeing is that small businesses are really looking at what they have. They look at the business cards they’ve collected and the names of people they’ve met and they’re wondering how to communicate with them.

No one is cutting back on customer retention — what they’re cutting back on is their Google AdWord spend or print advertising.  So email marketing fits right in with small business owners’ mindsets.

DH: Have you increased VerticalResponse’s marketing spend for 2009, and which marketing tactics are you using?

JP: My entire team is very conscious about how they spend money. We constantly track what is working and what isn’t. We have our cost per customer pegged and we’ll pull things on the fly if we have too.

We’ve made some changes. Instead of doing a large national conference, we’re doing regional conferences because the costs are lower.

We also have a VerticalResponse community — and we’re monitoring how our customers use social media tools such as Twitter. For example, instead of writing separate newsletter content and blog posts, we now write the newsletter, provide an online version of it, and then let people Tweet about it.

DH: What do you think small businesses are looking for with regard to email marketing?

JP: In a nutshell, they are looking for return on investment — and email marketing gives them that immediate ROI they’re looking for.

We have lots of customers who are doing e-newsletters and / or selling product through email — and many still have huge open rates. One of our customers is making $14K a month selling facial products online. When she remembers to do an email campaign, that goes up to $18K month.

DH: That’s interesting, because for awhile, you heard that email marketing wasn’t working anymore and that blogs/RSS would take the place of e-newsletters. But now I’m reading about how e-newsletters are still a great way to market to customers (which is something I’ve been doing since 1999 — and won’t give up anytime soon).

JP: RSS is awesome — if you’re a tech head. But the rest of the world hasn’t adopted it. Email is still a great marketing tool because not everyone reads blogs.

DH: Ok, last question. What has been your greatest success — one that you’re particularly proud of?

JP: The day we turned profitable — which happened in 2005. I knew then that going forward I wouldn’t have to go back to my family and friends asking for money. Instead, I could give them back their money!

Thanks, Janine! VerticalResponse allows you to cost-effectively send email newsletters, campaigns, and surveys, and it integrates with SalesForce.com — making it easy to send email to your customer / prospect list without having to maintain two separate lists. Very cool, Janine!

(Thank you to Samantha Rubenstein of Atomic PR for arranging this interview.)

According to an October 2008 survey of 189 marketing professionals by Forrester Research (Making Social Media Work in B2B Marketing), B2B marketers continue to rely on traditional digital marketing methods to drive leads — including e-mail newsletters.

Yet, given the rise of blogs and other social media tactics — and overflowing e-mail inboxes — you might wonder if something as lowly as the e-newsletter is still a viable tactic.

The answer is: most definitely. Think about it. Despite the buzz about social media, email remains the #1 activity on the Internet. This means that all of us check email, read email, and respond to email constantly.

Plus, not everyone reads blogs or has a LinkedIn/Facebook account. I’ve had PR and marketing professionals tell me they never read blogs but they continue to read newsletters, something I realized based on my own experience.

Although I have this blog and Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts, I still have people subscribing to my e-newsletter every single day.

(But, just because people still subscribe to e-newsletters doesn’t mean they’re reading them. If I get tired of a company’s e-newsletter, for example, I don’t unsubscribe, I simply delete it without reading it.)

If you’re a marketer who has been putting out an e-newsletter for years, now is a great time to look it over to see how you can re-invigorate your publication, and your audience, too, with the following tips:

1. Look at your email stats for the last year.

• How many people subscribed?
• How many unsubscribed?
• How did subscribers find your newsletter or what prompted them to sign up?
• If you use your e-newsletter to get people to take some sort of action, such as downloading white papers or signing up for Webinars, what percentage of your subscribers did so?
• How often was your newsletter forwarded to others?
• How often was content in your e-newsletter posted to blogs, appear in Twitter posts, or reprinted or mentioned in other e-newsletters or trade publications?

2. Survey your readership.

Set up a simple survery using one of the free tools available, such as Zoomerang or Survey Monkey. Constant Contact now offers survey capabilities, too.  

Keep the survey short and sweet so that you don’t waste people’s time. (I like to keep my surveys to ten easy questions that can be answered in two minutes or less.) 

Ask your subscribers how often they want to receive the newsletter and what topics they want to read about. If you’re a larger company with multiple products or business units sending out one e-newsletter a month, ask your readers if they would like content written just for them.

3. Make your newsletter a priority.

Newsletters tend to fall through the cracks, I think, because they’re seen as “fluff” versus revenue generators.

For an e-newsletter to be successful — that is, to generate leads and ultimately sales — you have to make it a priority. This means you publish it on time all the time, that you continually develop new content for it (and not use warmed over press releases), and that you analyze your statistics in order to explain to management why the e-newsletter is a necessary marketing tactic.

Done right, B2B e-newsletters are a great way to stay top-of-mind with prospects not yet ready to buy and maintain relationships with current clients. It’s why I’m still publishing mine and have been doing so for the last eight years.

For additional information about email marketing, be sure to download the following reports and articles (which came to me via e-newsletters — ha!):

Exact Target: No Executive Left Behind: 10 Things Your C-Suite MUST KNOW About Email Now

SilverPop: Spam: What Customers Really Think

ClickZ: 10 Reasons to Be Thankful for E-mail by Karen Gedney

Are you a B2B marketer with an e-newsletter success story? If so, I’d love to feature it on this blog. Drop me an email at: info@dhcommunications.com

I’ve been using the new Xobni Outlook plug-in for awhile now. It is AWESOME.

Xobni helps you keep better track of your Outlook inbox and makes finding those pesky emails much easier.

When you click on an email from a recipient in Outlook, the Xobni sidebar displays the person’s phone number as well as button for sending an email to the person or scheduling a meeting.

Xobni recently began syncing with LinkedIn. Now the sidebar includes the person’s Title (or whatever the person called him or herself on the LinkedIn profile page) plus a photo!

Check it out — it’s pretty cool!

In a post on Bill Nussey’s blog (CEO of email marketer Silverpop), head of product marketing Scott Voight talks about the future of the email inbox.

At a recent Email Insider Summit meeting, Scott gave a presentation on a hypothetical “‘inbox algorithm’ that inbox providers might use to categorize, prioritize and sort messages.”

According to Scott, companies are working to provide technology that would help people manage their email overload. Yahoo!, for example, demonstrated “a future version of Yahoo! Mail that included a ’simplify my inbox’ button, which, once clicked, would reorder messages based on ‘people that are important to me.’”

Amen! I could use that, like now!

One product I recently started using that has helped with inbox overload is CA’s Anti-Spam application, which runs in conjunction with its anti-virus and firewall application. As the email comes in, the application transfers all suspected spam items to a special folder where you can indicate whether or not an email is spam. Once you check a sender as “not spam,” all future emails arrive in the inbox.

This is why it’s a best practice to ensure your marketing emails come from a real person versus an unknown sender. It’s even better if people can actually respond to your email. I keep getting emails from ICO — not only can I not respond to them, I can’t get off their list! All their emails now get automatically deleted.

What I like about the CA application is that I can tell at a glance what is spam and what is not without having to sift through dozens of emails. And, none of the emails open in the Preview Pane, meaning, I don’t have to look at pornographic material, and I can delete it all a couple of clicks. It’s definitely lowered my blood pressure!

But, inbox overload is something that marketers will need to deal with. I know I get too much email — in fact, whenever a retailer asks for my email when completing a transaction, I don’t give it out.

How has email overload affected your method of dealing with it? What do you use to deal with spam?

Last week I was a guest on IMN’s Pro & Content podcast. (IMN offers B2C and B2B companies e-newsletter and other marketing solutions.)

IMN Marketing VP, Jo Ellen Collins, and I talked about how to develop content for newsletters, blog posts, and articles.

One strategy I’ve used since I started my business — keeping track of the “mistakes” or errors I see companies make when it comes to writing marketing copy.

I realized early on I was seeing the same mistakes repeatedly. Over the years I’ve developed numerous articles, presentations, and even an e-book (due out hopefully this month!).

Another tip you might not expect: watch TV. While on vacation in Florida I happened across a news show about “dental tourism” — the new trend of traveling to another country for cosmetic dental work.

When I returned home, I emailed my client, Helaine Smith, about it. Her response, “This topic is hot!” We ended up doing a podcast and an e-newsletter about it.

You can find the IMN podcast at their site — it’s located in their Pro & Content monthly e-newsletter.

(And that’s another tip — don’t think you have to *write* all of your content. Podcasts are great, too.)

Just received this email from DM News:

Dear DM News Subscriber,

As you are a valued subscriber of DM News, we want to ensure you are taking full advantage of the services we offer. We noticed you are not receiving DM News’ Daily Newsletter. The DM News daily e-newsletter provides news, features and campaigns delivered straight to your inbox. This bulletin is part of a portfolio of products free to DM News subscribers and developed specifically to complement DM News in print.

Because we value your time and respect your online privacy, we’d like to give you the opportunity to unsubscribe to the Daily Newsletter before we upgrade your subscription to include this e-newsletter.

If you do not wish to receive the Daily Newsletter via e-mail, please click here by October 15, 2007.

Sincerely,

DM News Subscription Services

Excuuuuse me, DM News, but if I wanted your daily newsletter I would have signed up for it. I’m a smart woman and know how to sign up for an e-newsletter. In fact, I get a ton of newsletters that I do want that I don’t have time to read. I don’t want more of them.

This type of email tactic is why email marketing is getting a bad name.

What do you think?

A few weeks ago I posted about Goodway Graphics and their oversized postcard / email campaign. Due to that post, Rick Joly, the VP at Goodway, invited me to the facility where he and his account executive, Joe Murphy, gave me the run down on how their campaign worked, the results, and lessons learned.

Interesting stuff!

I’m also a sucker for factory tours — I’m not sure why. But I love ‘em. I always bring a notebook and pencil because I can come up with half a dozen story and/or marketing ideas while walking around looking at things.

The Goodway tour was particularly interesting because I had no clue about variable digital printing (VDP). They showed me their Xerox iGen machines and explained the work flow, the types of projects they can handle, and samples of their work. I came away *very impressed.*

You can read more about their integrated B2B marcom campaign — which so far, has netted an 8.5% response rate — in the latest issue of my MarCom Writer newsletter. Be sure and fill out the Goodway landing page form for your free copy of the book.

Last week I received a piece of oversized mail from Goodway Graphics. The self-mailer, measuring 18″ long x 7″ wide (folded long ways), immediately caught my attention.

In addition to being BIG, it’s also personalized with my company name. The copy reads:

The writing’s on the wall for DH Communications: Personalized communications campaigns can raise response rates by 36% and increase repeat orders by 47%. *

* Statistics based on information provided by InfoTrends, Inc.

I set the mailer on my desk and promptly forgot about it because I’ve been swamped.

However, on Friday I received an email from Joe Murphy. Subject line read, “Receive your copy of Individualized Media Essentials from Goodway Graphics.”

In the preview pane I could see the following:

Dianna,

By now you should have received our flier on One-to-One Communications. While the imagery, statistics and testimonials are compelling enough reason to check us out, the opportunity to receive Individualizedâ„¢ Media Essentials … Marketing to an Audience of One by Jim Hackett in exchange for viewing your personal website and providing minimal feedback makes it a no-brainer.

Oh, hey, I thought, is this regarding the flyer sitting on my desk?

It was . . . and it was then I noticed the offer for the free book tucked into the corner of the mailer. My only quibble with the flyer is that the main panel is taken up by a huge testimonial rather than the offer.

But heck, the personalized email from Joe got me to click through — and now I have a book speeding its way to me.

Reasons why I think this campaign works:

–> Huge creative mailer stood out in the stack of bills and regular junk mail.

–> Personalized message included the correct spelling of my name – even down to the two “n’s”! I’m impressed.

–> Follow up email came from a real person, was personalized, and got right to the point. Instead of asking me if I had received the flyer (what my colleague Michael Brown calls “performing quality control for the post office”), Joe assumes I’ve already received it and just haven’t taken action yet.

–> Personalized landing page includes a pre-filled form — all I had to do was hit “send.”

–> Joe Murphy, my new BFF, will be sending me a book and contacting me shortly.