British B2B marketers embrace email

Email marketing remains an essential part of the marketing mix for British B2B marketers with many increasing associated budgets over the last 12 months.

by Helen Leggatt

Despite industry speculation that email marketing may not have a bright future, a marketing publication has found that email is the most popular tool for B2B marketers in the U.K.

B2B Marketing carried out the study in association with Newsweaver and discovered that 87 percent of B2B marketers consider email marketing as either an “important”, “very important” or “critical” part of their marketing activity. Forty-one percent of respondents expected to see an increase in email marketing budgets and volume in the future.

“The results of this survey highlight the importance of email in the B2B marketing mix,” said Joel Harrison, Editor B2B Marketing Magazine. “B2B marketers are embracing email and we will see it grow to become a key part of any B2B marketing strategy.”

Spam was shown to be the biggest hurdle for British B2B email marketers to overcome. Nearly half of those surveyed thought the rise in spam had undermined email as a business medium or that the rise in the use of spam blockers had an impact on email delivery rates.

“Individual companies can work to overcome this issue by striving to send emails that don’t fall into the perceived-as-spam category," said Denise Cox, newsletter specialist at Newsweaver. "They can do this by providing anticipated, permission-based, timely, relevant emails - rather then sending untargeted one-size-fits-all, unwanted emails.”