Multichannel Marketing for B2B Marketers

Ready for another gloomy update on the decline in email metrics? Open rates worldwide fell from 14% in the first half of 2007 to 11.2% in the second half of 2009, Emarketer reports.

There are many possible causes: cluttered inboxes, the use of mobile devices and the blocking of email images. But we wonder if the economy wasn’t partly to blame.

Clickthrough rates suffered an even more precipitous drop—from 2.9% to 1.6%. And most of that took place in the second half of 2009. The culprits include clutter and list fatigue.

These are depressing findings. But they’re not true for everyone. And emailers can improve their metrics by observing direct marketing basics. continue reading…

Wayne Nagrowski

Wayne Nagrowski thought that he had seen it all. But he learned something new when an email list rental client wanted to Base 64 encode, or personalize, its opt-out links for every recipient.

“It was a hurdle we’d never encountered,” Wayne says. “But our programming staff was able to figure out what was needed within a few hours, do the manual labor on the data and get the campaign out in the same day.”

That’s the kind of service Wayne routinely delivers as a list management account person at ePostDirect. A specialist in the general business market, a field that encompasses sales/marketing, HR, training and corporate owners, he serves two groups of clients—list owners and mailers. continue reading…

It’s every emailer’s worst nightmare. You rent a list of conference attendees, but it tanks because of a 50% undeliverable rate. Then you learn that the file isn’t even on the rental market—you’ve been sold a stolen or fake list.

Guess what, pal? You’ve been burned. And there’s no way to get a refund because the bogus email marketing company doesn’t seem to have a street address. Even worse, your service provider fires you for spamming, and now you’ve got a bad email reputation. continue reading…

Is there anyone more slow on the uptake than the poor British direct marketer? Send an inquiry to one, and you’ve got a 25% chance of never getting a reply, according to a study by the British DMA.

The DMA emailed 100 companies to request brochures. A quarter failed to respond. And the average reaction time for those that did fulfil was 3.6 days (although that’s a slight improvement over 2005). continue reading…