Richard Fouts

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Richard Fouts
Research Vice President
2 years at Gartner
23 years IT industry

Richard Fouts guides digital marketers on best practices for evaluating and deploying emerging digital marketing techniques to ensure marketers make fully informed decisions about their marketing investments. With extensive experience in brand management and marketing communications ... Read Full Bio

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Is email marketing over?

by Richard Fouts  |  July 30, 2012  |  4 Comments

Yes, if you use it as a generic outbound tool. No, if you use it as a partner to outbound marketing.

For example, a Survey by Pardot finds that nearly 70% of B2B marketers don’t think of email marketing as a primary lead generation tool. Why? The answer is fairly obvious, but I’ll review it anyway.

Email marketing, from your buyer’s perspective, is outbound spam. And – they will do anything to avoid it (TiVO, spam filters, caller ID, junk folders and the DELETE KEY are all evidence that buyers don’t want to hear from you). After all, the term junk mail didn’t come from nowhere. Marketers still send junk mail, they just do it electronically.

The Pardot survey shows a majority of B2B companies (65%) allocate less than 25% of their budgets to email marketing, while only 9% are devoting more than 50% of their budgets to email efforts. The survey also indicated that 70% of B2B marketers do not consider email marketing to be a primary lead generation tactic. Why not?

Marketers, hip to buyers that don’t want to hear directly from them, are moving more investment dollars to inbound marketing, then using email to move new leads through the sales process or to re-engage dormant leads.” So while email is alive and kicking, it’s just being used a different way.

For example, the survey also shows more than 60% of B2B marketers use email for drip nurturing. Of those, 65% personalize their messaging to align with how a prospect responds.

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4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Rocio Ramos   July 31, 2012 at 2:29 pm

    Thankfully both my gmail an work email have an amazing SPAM filtering system that eliminate all of my email marketing blasts that get sent to my email. Unless it’s a site or product I use regularly, I really don’t want to see it. I agree that email marketing now works best for partners or an existing customer base.

  • 2 Richard Fouts   August 10, 2012 at 1:08 am

    Thanks Rocio. You’re representative of the general sentiment….email marketing is often the equivalent of SPAM.

  • 3 Monitoring Email Marketing ROI 101 | Intuitive Strategy   March 1, 2013 at 3:27 pm

    [...] According to research by Gartner, consumers stuck a fork in traditional email marketing a while ago, but that doesn’t mean it is dead. Email marketing should just be approached differently, Gartner found. Email marketing is useless as a generic outbound sales tool, but it is relevant if used with outbound marketing to move leads through the funnel, according to Gartner. [...]

  • 4 Monitor Your Email Marketing | A Sales Representative   April 12, 2013 at 1:27 am

    [...] According to research by Gartner, consumers stuck a fork in traditional email marketing a while ago, but that doesn’t mean it is dead. Email marketing should just be approached differently, Gartner found. Email marketing is useless as a generic outbound sales tool, but it is relevant if used with outbound marketing to move leads through the funnel, according to Gartner. [...]

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