2015 B2B Marketing Trends: Email Marketing Is a Key Driver for B2B Marketing

With the proliferation of emails, it may not come at surprise to find that 73% of B2B marketers believe email marketing is still a viable and critical marketing medium for their business.

The 2015 State of B2B Marketing Report from Salesforce surveyed 2,100+ B2B marketers. 73% of B2B marketing respondents agree that email marketing is core to their business, while Fifty-nine percent of B2B marketers rate email as a critical enabler of products and services.

Email Marketing ROI

Email Marketers are either anticipating ROI or are already getting a ROI for their email marketing efforts. According to the finding, 90% of marketers where positive about their ROI for their email marketing investments. Another interesting discovery from the 2015 State of B2B Marketing report was the email team sizes. Email team sizes seem to be increasing in the B2B space with about a total of 81% of survey respondents having more than one email marketer.

Effectiveness of Email Marketing Campaigns

When surveyed marketers were asked to indicate the types of email marketing campaigns that they found effective the findings were as follows:

Newsletters still remain a popular form of email marketing campaign with about 62% of marketers actively using it.

Email Marketing Metrics

For the Measuring of email marketing success, click-through rates was widely used with 48% of marketers indicating that metric as an important way to measure success. This was followed by, conversion rates and lead generation at 41% and 38% respectively.

What Email Marketing Features Are Effective for B2B Marketers?

Content and design king in email marketing strategies with marketers indicating email design and content as the most effective and critical feature of email marketing campaigns.

Other Findings from the 2015 State of B2B Marketing report

• Most Pressing Business Challenges

1. New business development
2. Quality of leads
3. Demand and lead generation

• 84% of B2B marketers plan to increase or maintain their spend in 2015.
• 34% of B2B marketers plan to shift spend from traditional mass advertising to advertising on digital channels.

• Top 5 Areas for Increased Spending

1. Content marketing and marketing automation (66%)
2. Mobile applications (65%)
3. Location based mobile tracking (65%)
4. Social media advertising (64%)
5. Social media marketing (64%)

• Technologies Most Critical to Creating a Cohesive Customer Journey

1. CRM Tools (57%)
2. Marketing Analytics (54%)
3. Mobile Applications (53%)