Two Thirds of Companies Prospect with E-mail: Chief Marketer Survey
As a component of the 2010 Chief Marketer Prospecting Survey, we asked marketers to tell us what channels they were using last year to uncover new sales leads, and which they would use more intensively in 2010. After asking some general questions about their strategic aims in prospecting for the coming year, our survey homed in to ask about some specific acquisition tools—namely, e-mail, direct marketing tactics such as mail, social media and viral marketing.
(Editor’s note: A fuller discussion of all the data revealed by the survey, including tabs for business type, annual revenue and industry verticals, will be available at the www.ChiefMarketer.com Web site when the print magazine is published, on approximately Feb. 7. Simply register at the site with your e-mail address and click on the link provided.)
Asked to list all the types of media they used to generate leads in 2009, more respondents checked off e-mail than any other single channel. More than 88% said they used e-mail for prospecting at some time last year, outdistancing those who reported using direct mail (85%), telemarketing (82%), print advertising (80%), marketing through affiliates (74%) and all types of online social media (71%).
A surprisingly high proportion of respondents (66%) said they use currently use e-mail as a prospecting tool, and another 11% overall said they will begin to do so this year. By contrast, 13.5% said that while they have tried prospecting with e-mail in the past, they are not currently doing so. Only about 10% of those polled said they have not used e-mail to generate prospect names and don’t plan to do so this year.
Respondents from B-to-B companies were much more likely than average to report that they are currently using e-mail as a prospecting tool (74%), while only 6.7% said their companies had not used e-mail for leads but planned to start in 2010. By contrast, those polled from pure B-to-C companies were somewhat less likely than the average response to have used e-mail to find new leads last year (61%) and more likely than average to report plans to use e-mail for prospecting this year (15.8%).
Asked to check off all the ways they get their names for e-mail prospecting, the largest group of overall respondents by far (73%) said they came directly from the prospects themselves via newsletter registrations and other opt-ins—beating the second most common response, third-party-owned opt-in lists, by a very wide margin (23.4%). Slightly more than 21% of the general response group said they get names for e-mail prospecting from purchased lists, while only 9% said they use names acquired through automatic e-mail harvesting.
For the most part, these proportions held for both B-to-C and B-to-B respondents, and for companies in all three annual revenue categories: those with sales of $5 million or less last year, sales of $5 million to $49.9 million, and those with sales of more than $50 million. The responses were also similar among the industry verticals responding to the survey (manufacturers, service providers, media publishers, communications & utilities and associations and non-profit groups). There was one significant outlier: respondents from the banking and financial services sector reported that they were much less likely than average (59%) to acquire names for e-mail prospecting from newsletter registrations and other direct consumer sign-ups and more likely than average to rent third-party lists (33.3%) and to purchase lists outright (about 28%).
Chief Marketer also asked those who are currently using e-mail for prospecting to break out their tactics, and the results suggest a willingness to try both broad, undifferentiated mailings and more tailored communications. The majority (61%) said they use targeted mailings customized by some information acquired about the recipient. But almost as many (55.8%) said they have used mass e-mail blasts. Only about 38% of the total response said they send out single message triggered by user behavior. Again, those proportions largely held no matter what the business type, size or industry segment.
Those who told Chief Marketer they don’t use e-mail for acquiring customers reported that they were deterred from doing so by three obstacles, in almost equal proportions. Almost 33% said they did not use e-mail for prospecting because of a lack of available names for mailing, while 32% said they didn’t use the e-mail channel for generating leads because their prospects don’t want to be contacted that way. And almost the same number of respondents (31.8%) said their companies shied away from prospecting via e-mail out of fear of earning a “spammer” label from either customers or service providers.
Only 15% said they were held back from e-mail prospecting by a lack of expertise, while 14.5%% said the cost of e-mail prospecting was too high for the promised return on investment.
Finally, we asked how many of those polled were making their e-mail communications shareable within social networks, to leverage the lead-gen potential within their opt-ins’ social groups. The data indicates a relatively strong intention to investigate this tactic in 2010. While only 22% of respondents currently make any of their e-mail communications shareable to social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, 31.6% said that they plan to implement an e-mail/social networking link this year.
If they indeed follow through on the plan to integrate e-mail and social media, that will more than counterbalance the 43% of respondents who said they have not used shareable e-mail and do not plan to use it in 2010.
