E-mail Marketing=PR for Efficacy. How Can This Be?

BtoB Online’s special issue Lead Generation Guide 2008 is a really nice overview of our space. (Warning: “Space” is one of those cliche business terms I began using a few years ago to mock business-speak, and somehow it’s become part of my regular business lexicon. I can’t seem to shake it. Be careful what you mock!)

Striking stat (from the “lead generation tactics use and effectiveness chart,” right): Close to 90% of the firms surveyed by Forrester Research said they use e-mail marketing as a lead-gen tactic. But just over 20% identified e-mail marketing as “highly effective.” Go here for a full version of the chart.

That’s a huge disconnect and a big waste of money. Almost everyone uses it, only one in five is happy with the results. It was the biggest disconnect on the chart, although PR came very close: About 80% said they used PR and around the same number, 20%, indicated PR is “highly effective” for lead gen.

E-mail marketing, which is highly measurable, in the same boat as PR as a lead-gen tactic? How can this be?

I say it’s not because e-mail marketing isn’t effective. That’s just demonstrably untrue. Rather, it has to be about measurement and integration. Marketers aren’t looking at the right metrics, or more important, aren’t using their metrics to get smarter about what they do going forward. They’re “letting the trees kill them” by focusing only on tactical metrics in a vacuum, without any integration or relation to everything else they’re doing. So, for example, they keep looking at open rates and nothing else, then wonder why they can’t prove the efficacy of an e-mail campaign. Or they aren’t set up to have visibility all the way through their pipleline to see which campaigns drove conversions that eventually became sales. Or, I don’t know…they haven’t set goals in the first place?

I can’t imagine another scenario in which this disparity would happen. Can you? Leave a comment.