If you need statistics about the potential potency of multi-channel communications in business-to-business marketing, this blog post is for you. Pitney Bowes recently surveyed 4,000 B2B marketers—divided equally throughout the U.S., U.K., France and Germany—to uncover current B2B thinking regarding marketing channel choice and business communications in today’s complex and challenging communication environment. Here is a summary of the research (in four quick bullets!)
- Direct mail comes out as the top stand-alone channel. In the U.S., 19 percent of companies feel that stand-alone direct mail generates the most business for them, and in the E.U., 12 percent of companies report this.
- In comparison to stand-alone direct mail, 10 percent of U.S. companies favor solo e-mail campaigns (8 percent E.U.) and 7 percent rely on stand-alone search engine marketing (6 percent E.U.).
- More respondents favor integrated marketing as the best approach. 30 percent of U.S. firms cited a combination of mail, e-mail and web campaigns as generating the most business for them (27 percent E.U.).
- 58 percent of U.S. firms and 53 percent of E.U. firms feel that concentrating solely on electronic media would seriously damage their ability to generate leads.
Here’s the perplexing question: why are these percentages so low? (Especially the multi-channel approach.) I wonder if companies who are communicating in multiple channels, don’t have them coordinated, and therefore don’t perceive themselves to be using multi-channel communications. Hmmm… post your comments below if you have thoughts on this.
