Eighty-five percent of respondents to this year’s annual Chief Marketer Lead Generation Survey plan to use email in 2011 as a prospecting tool, compared to 80.2% in 2010.
The highest portion of respondents—44%—said they will use email to focus on retention as well as building awareness outside their customer base in an effort to prospect; 41.5% of respondents will focus primarily on finding new customers in their email efforts, while 10.1% will primarily focus on retaining current customers or reactivating former buyers.
Over half of respondents—57.6%— currently generate new customer leads via email. Nearly a fifth (18.5%) will try email prospecting for the first time in 2011, while 6.6% have used email in the past but will stop or reduce those efforts this year.
Email has never been part of the prospecting plan for about 17% of respondents, and they have no plans to try it. The biggest reason given for not using email for lead generation was a fear of looking like a spammer to prospects and ISPs (37.4%).
Other reasons for avoiding email prospecting included a feeling that open rates were too low to be effective (18.1%), too expensive/not enough ROI (22%), too hard to cut through mailbox clutter (26.4%), can’t deliver effectively to mobile devices (4.7%), other lead gen options more appealing (30.3%) and can’t acquire sufficient email contacts to be effective (19.9%).
Companies that do use email to prospect are overwhelmingly getting those names directly from prospects via Web registrations or other opt-ins (76.1%). Twenty-five percent are renting names from brokers or compilers and 23.2% are using lists controlled by third-party affiliates. Only 6.6% said they used addresses collected via automated harvester software.
Why are companies using email for prospecting? Not surprisingly, the ability to track and measure response and the low cost were the most popular responses (51.7% and 73.7%, respectively).
Other popular reasons included the ability to test and optimize content and offers (29.2%), mass reach (33.8%), personalize offers and content (44%), target by geography, demographics and other criteria (27.1%), trigger by user behavior like cart abandonment (10.9%), drive Web traffic (35.3%) and share via social networks or forward to a friend (17.5%).
To download the complete results of the 2011 Chief Marketer Lead Generation Survey, click here.
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