4 Email Marketing Trends Seen in the B-to-B Inbox

November 9, 2011 By Heather Fletcher

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Trends in B-to-B email marketing show that the channel aiming to communicate with this specific audience is perhaps one of the most integrated, current ones around. Plus, the communication flow is circular.

Just based on their own habits, professionals are demanding that messages delivered to them flow through content delivery mechanisms convenient to them. Otherwise, they're not delivered.

Those delivered messages also have to be engaging, or they'll be ignored.

The engaging messages then have to be integrated with other channels, or the sender's reputation might suffer. Which leads back to deliverability.

Providing more insight on these trends are:

• Tyler Garns, director of marketing at Gilbert, Ariz.-based marketing automation software provider Infusionsoft; and
• Maria Pergolino, senior director of marketing at San Mateo, Calif-based B-to-B marketing automation software provider Marketo.

1. Content delivery mechanisms have to be convenient for on-the-go professionals. Pergolino says: "Mobile rendering of emails becomes an even hotter topic. Marketers can no longer ignore how their emails appear in mobile browsers. With the majority of decisionmakers viewing emails on their phones, marketers must consider how their content reads on iPhones, BlackBerry [devices], iPads, Androids and other mobile devices."

Professionals are also expecting the content to change channels according to their delivery needs. Garns says: "There is a shift in the way marketers deliver content from physical media to online channels. B-to-B email marketing programs are a channel for delivering protected content to paying and non-paying subscribers."

2. "Deliverability is based on reputation and social popularity," Pergolino says. "Today's top email marketers put heavy importance on their email reputation to ensure best delivery, but in the future this will not be enough. Instead, email clients will look to social popularity in delivering and prioritizing email. We are already seeing signs of this with Google's Priority Inbox. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, and is soon to be a much bigger focus of deliverability."

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