For a decade, at least, it’s been common for online marketers to try to proclaim that email marketing is dead. But the truth, at least according to survey data published by MarketingCharts last year, is that email may be the most effective channel for driving both early engagement and later lead conversions!
We’ve never been on the “email is dead” bandwagon, but even then, this was a surprising study to come across. Yet when asked to rate the effectiveness of various content marketing channels at driving sales, businesses picked email as most effective at both ends of the funnel – including a whopping 81% naming it as their top driver of bottom-funnel sales conversions.
What does this mean for you and your ecosystem?
How Email Still Factors Into Lead Generacontent marketingnly won by a nose, alongside several other strategies including direct website lead generation, SEO-based search referrals, and social media mentions. So when it comes to lead generation, a broad-spectrum strategy embracing multiple forms of content marketing is still going to be the best policy.
However, this absolutely cements email as a central pillar in these efforts! You and your partners should be putting effort into gathering email addresses from a wide range of sources. This could be everything from website landing page offers, to direct collection at trade shows and other live events. If you can pick up a little extra data to help you categorize and qualify or disqualify the leads, all the better.
A centralized database tracking leads, which all your partners can contribute to, will make this even easier.
Where the data becomes truly surprising is the value of email in pushing leads through the bottom of the funnel. As mentioned above, 81% of companies named email as an effective way of doing this. The next-closest runner up was website hits, at 50%. Direct phone calls came in third, at 45%. From there, it was a steep drop-off in effectiveness.
So, what that means for your ecosystem is that, once a lead has been qualified and moved a couple notches down the funnel, it’s vital to keep them on a drip-feed of email content! This also makes a strong argument for investing in an email automation system. As a vendor, you would be in the position to make an investment in this system, and open it up for use by your partners. You’d increase conversions, and make yourself more valuable to your partners!
LogicBay Streamlines Content Marketing
We designed our LogicBay system to streamline marketing, outreach, and inter-ecosystem communications. Contact us to see how it can improve your bottom line!
