294 Billion. That is the number of emails sent per day in 2010 according to Radicati Group. With 6.91 billion people inhabiting the earth, that works out to 43 emails per day, per person. In reality though, only about one-third of the world’s population are email users. Still, with volume like that, it’s no surprise that the question for marketers has evolved from “should we use email?” to “how should we use email?”

Unfortunately, the answer for many has become untargeted, non-personalized batching and blasting. In fact, it’s estimated that 90% of today’s email is considered spam. Cutting through all of that clutter requires thinking past the send button to leverage a mix of tactics that will drive significant measurable results from all of your marketing, not just email. Use this guide as a checklist to compare your current email marketing technology against four core areas where marketing automation extends the power of email – audience targeting, automating marketing tactics, enabling sales and measuring results.

Uncover a Well Behaved Audience.

Marketers are a biased group. We pour our time and creativity into what we do – and when it comes time to select an audience for a promotion, we tend to go big. It’s not only ego that drives mass blasting, though - many lack a better way to target. Think about how you pull contact lists now. Is it based primarily on demographic or static data? If so, you’re missing out on a vital indicator of someone’s likeliness to act …how they’ve behaved in the past.

When you can target your offer based on what someone has demonstrated an active interest in, they’re more likely to engage. Sadly, most email providers are unable to track past offer response and web activity, so segmenting on behavior just isn’t an option. The result is massive, de-personalized email blasts– cause of low open and click through rates.

“Campaigns that target based on Web-site user click-stream data generate conversion rates that outperform untargeted broadcast campaigns by nearly 4 to 1.”

- Forrester Research

Don’t Duplicate, Automate

Write down the process you went through executing communications for your last webinar or event. Are there similarities in the tasks you performed?

These steps remain more or less the same each time, right? The content may change, but the time between invitations is likely pretty similar. Why spend time scheduling reminders to execute the next step, recreating the same process every time?

Want more like this?

Want more like this?

Insight delivered to your inbox

Keep up to date with our free email. Hand picked whitepapers and posts from our blog, as well as exclusive videos and webinar invitations keep our Users one step ahead.

sign up

By clicking 'SIGN UP', you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

SIGN UP

By clicking 'SIGN UP', you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy

With marketing automation, you can trigger communications based on actions and build a re-usable process/ workflow for events, webinars and other repetitive tasks. By automating these manual tasks, marketing can stay in touch in a consistent manner (known as lead nurturing). Some email providers can trigger communications based on a limited set of actions, but but they fall short on both the breadth of triggerable actions, as well as the ability to automate outreach after that first touch.

Siemens PLM, an Eloqua customer, was able to reduce the time it took to execute marketing campaigns from an average of 100 to 10 hours through the use of automation.

Empower the Sales Team

When sales is left without insight into the digital activity of their prospects, they’re calling blindly - hunting for a needle in the haystack with the most qualified prospects possibly stuck the bottom of a very long call list. SiriusDecisions benchmarks show that on average, each lead is called 10 times with only a 10% chance of connecting! This inefficiency is costly and a main point of tension between sales & marketing teams.

Some email service providers now offer CRM integration - which is a step in the right direction – but there is so much more that marketing can do to help align with sales to drive efficiency and results.

Hold back cold leads - let sales focus on calling the leads most ready to buy. “Score” leads based on each person’s level of fit for your product/services and their engagement (digital body language). Those not yet ready to buy, or missing valuable profile data stay with marketing to be further profiled and nurtured until they are sales ready.

See Beyond the Click.

If you were to break measurement & reporting into two categories–info I need to do my job better, and info my boss needs to show marketing’s contribution; where would email open & click-through rates fit? It's certainly not for your boss. And, what about you!? Does watching the click-through rate like a hawk really give you the insight you need to spot patterns of success, or be inspired about new ways to help grow sales pipeline? Probably not.

Email may make up the majority of marketing communication, but it is not the only way that a buyer interacts with your business - so why would it be the main measure of your success? Closing the loop on dollars spent and dollars made – across all channels – is the only way to gain one view of the truth into the tactics and strategies that guide marketing’s contribution to the bottom line.

So, how does your email marketing compare?

Some of the most successful marketers on earth, from the fastest growing brands rely on Eloqua to drive 7x the inquiries, 4x the leads and nearly 3x the revenue of the S&P 500 average by extending the power of their email marketing strategies. Their science for success includes a winning mix of finding the right audience, automating continual touch-points based on buyer interests, aligning with sales, and measuring and optimizing their efforts for predictable revenue generation.