What percentage of your B2B marketing efforts rely on email today? How heavily do you expect email campaigns (in their various forms) to drive your qualified leads and sales pipeline contribution this year, quarter or month?
Email isn’t going away anytime soon, of course, but it’s an overused and heavily-clogged channel (and likely only to get worse). Yes, it still works shockingly well when executed properly, but it’s one of several channels available to you to engage with prospects and customers.
For too many companies, email has become a crutch. It’s become the easy and understood channel that gets all of their attention. But when your marketing strategy, your demand generation plan, really boils down to a bunch of emails, you’re putting way too many eggs in one basket.
Developing programs for other communication channels in isolation isn’t the answer either. If every channel has its own strategy, and separate or uncoordinated messages, it’s like you’re starting from scratch with each new touchpoint.
Creating an integrated storyline and program across multiple channels isn’t easy, but it can be highly effective. It takes much of the pressure off of email to perform, and when executed well helps to increase the overall response rate and velocity of interest and engagement with your target audience.
Assuming that email disappeared as a communication channel tomorrow really isn’t too far-fetched, after all. Let’s say you come to work tomorrow morning to find you’ve been black listed. Your outbound IP addresses have been shut down. None of your emails are getting through, with no solution in sight.
But your sales team still needs leads. You still need to fill your funnel. How would you do it?
Could be a productive brainstorm or exercise, not just as an emergency contingency for the black-list possibility but as a means of quickly identifying means of diversifying, extending and making more efficient your overall marketing efforts.
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