Rethinking Email For Demand Marketing

With an integrated, data-driven email approach, B2B marketers can deliver a personalized and highly relevant experience at each stage of the buyer’s journey. The targeting, treatment and timing of email should be designed to support program objectives to activate, validate and accelerate demand. Compliance with data privacy regulations and contact email preferences is critical as it impacts tactics involving the storage, processing and transfer of prospects’ personal data.

Since the early 1990s, email has been a key delivery mechanism in the B2B demand creation mix. In recent years, however, email has evolved far beyond the traditional batch-and-blast or broadcast approach — and the challenges attendant upon that approach (e.g., low response rates, high opt-out rates, privacy issues). Email marketing capabilities now include not only multichannel integration, but also a seemingly infinite number of options for personalization and customization — using combinations of data points and logic, content and offers, and creative testing and optimization. In this report, we describe three sets of best practices that characterize an audience-centric, data-driven approach to the email delivery mechanism.