After shying away from e-mail following the dot-com crash, business-to-business direct marketers apparently are embracing it again, and not just for retention.
Eighty-four percent of the B-to-B DMers recently polled by Direct say they're using e-mail for marketing, up more than 13% from last year.
While higher postage rates are a natural explanation for a boost in e-mail activity, greater accountability doesn't hurt, either.
For example, Jane Kaiser, president of New York consultancy Eclipse Direct Marketing, says she recently was able to prove to a top office-supply merchant that simultaneously sending a catalog and e-mail to customers resulted in a 25% lift in response vs. mailing the catalog alone.
Kaiser adds that she's noticed increased interest from B-to-B marketers for the fourth quarter that can't be explained solely by seasonal activity. “People are going right to e-mail for Q4,” she says. “It's been across the board.”
ReturnPath's Postmaster Network, which maintains a database of 23 million e-mail addresses of people who agreed to receive offers from third parties, also has observed a significant uptick in B-to-B acquisition mailings.
“Recently we've seen some marketers that'd been out of the e-mail list rental/e-mail acquisition space for years coming back,” says Craig Swerdloff, general manager of the New York-based Postmaster Network. “They're saying, ‘Look, we hear this is working. We want to get back into it.’”
Stephanie Miller, Return Path's vice president for strategic services, notes that in the past six months B-to-B marketers have become much smarter about their e-mail programs. “What we're seeing in B-to-B is that they're getting better at aligning the audience with the offer.” She adds that B-to-B DMers also have learned to harness the power of coordinated multichannel marketing efforts.
A renewed appreciation of the notion that multichannel customers generally spend more than single-channel buyers also may help explain why 39% of all Direct's survey participants say they use appending to get their customers' e-mail addresses, compared with just 22% last year.
“Our inquiries in the append space, particularly on the B-to-B side, have really gone through the roof,” says Scott Hardigree, vice president and CMO of database marketing services provider Teramedia.
