The Truth About B2B Email Campaigns. Contacts Verses Responses.

The Truth About B2B Email Campaigns. Contacts Verses Responses.:
At SIGMA, we discovered a few truths in examining ways to improve the ROI of email campaigns for our clients. We thought sharing this info might be of use to those out there trying to run successful email marketing campaigns.
The first truth is that the objectives of our lead generation email campaigns are to elicit a response, and then develop leads into a company.
We have modified our success metrics, and we are now continually examining our campaign performance by company: how many company responses and leads did the campaign generate, what % of the companies in our target universe responded, etc.
The other truth is that the more decision influencers from a company you include in the campaign, the better your chances of generating a response and then subsequently a lead into the company.
The simple truth is that the effort to obtain additional contacts for an email campaign is well worth it when compared to the overall cost of the campaign. So for “high-value” prospect companies, we counsel our clients to obtain as many email addresses as possible of contacts into the decision-influencing team.
Indeed these truths are simple, but they have profoundly impacted our email efforts. Previously, we simply looked at response and lead rate per total pushed out. This gave a false and misleading evaluation of the campaign’s ability to generate “company” leads.
We also establish our contact target universe in a new way. We have continued to value-rate companies in a target universe. This is mainly used to provide a cutoff point for determining which companies to include. Now we segment the target universe into A-through-E-value tiers. For the higher-tier companies, we seek to maximize the number of valid contacts we have into that company. We are going deeper and wider into the higher-value companies. We have transitioned from touching as many companies as possible to touching less companies but touching them more effectively. This has had the effect of improving our company response rate by ~3x.

Recent Email Campaign Response Rate

The table shown here is from a recent campaign that demonstrates that the greater the number of contacts touched in a company, the higher the response rate tends to be for that company. So a company with 4 to 9 contacts per company had a 7x response rate, compared to one from a company that we only had a single contact for.
These truths can, and should, be applied to your B2B email marketing campaigns. With business silos the way they are today, and company structural organizations, it’s critical to appeal to multiple decisions makers inside a single organization.