Business-to-business marketers may not be ready to replace direct mail with e-mail. But they’re moving closer.
That was the consensus at the Winterberry Group’s business-to-business breakfast yesterday at New York’s Marriott Marquis hotel.
“A lot of good e-mail lists are coming to market now from companies like Cahners, IDG, Bill Communications,” said panelist Steve Roberts, president of list brokerage Edith Roman Associates, Inc., Pearl River, NY. He also observed that many b-to-b firms are not cutting their postal budgets, but are simply adding e-mail to them.
E-mail lowers acquisition costs significantly, and speeds up the reporting time for campaigns from about 12-weeks to as little as five days, added Jim Hathaway, business development director at Grafica Group, a Chester, NJ-based interactive marketing agency.
And as the economy continues to slow, more marketers may increase their e-mail marketing usage, he added.
E-mail, the panelists argued, is certainly being helped by newer technological enhancements. Rich media and hypertext markup language (html) formats are boosting responses as much as three times those of plain text messages–as long as recipients have enough bandwidth on their computers to receive them, said Roberts.
But the euphoria over e-mail won’t last forever, Roberts warned. Response rates are going to decline from e-mail, he predicted.
“We’re seeing rising response rates from postal mail for the first time in years,” Roberts continued. Besides, Roberts has found that offline lists are better for prospecting.
Other larger issues are looming for B-to-B marketers. For one, Internet taxation, which at present is still largely unresolved, said panelist Phillip Clark from BtoB Magazine, New York.
The other is privacy, which affects the B-to-B community though maybe not as strongly as the consumer market, noted Hathaway.
Roberts largely dismissed privacy as a serious issue for the B-to-B community. “We’ve run tests of [permission-based] opt-in and opt-out lists and we’ve seen virtually no difference in response rates.
Just the same IBM has been using been requiring customers to opt-in twice before it e-mails anything to them, noted Clark.
But the computer giant may not be representative of B-to-B e-marketers. “Double opt-in is too rigorous,” asserted Roberts.
Approximately 65 business-to-business marketers attended the event.
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