Surprising Stats From Marketing Experts (& What They Mean For You)

One of the biggest highlights of HubSpot's annual INBOUND conference is the sheer volume of data and statistics that are shared by the presenters. As marketers, anything that is measurable and quantifiable should get our attention, and the week’s sessions were filled with interesting numbers.

Don’t get me wrong, I can certainly appreciate a more thought-provoking opinion session, but at the end of the day, it’s still one person’s opinion. It’s still shaped by individual experience. Data has no such bias. As a result, I found myself gravitating towards data-oriented sessions.

But so much of what we do involves interpreting that data and organizing it into actionable items. Your email open rate is 22%—great, so what? You had 25 people click on your CTA this week—why does that matter? Understanding the “why” behind the figures is just as important—if not more—than the numbers themselves.

With that in mind, here are some of the more intriguing figures uncovered by the speakers at INBOUND and what they mean for your business.

“For every $1 spent on Google Ads, businesses earn $8 in revenue.”

Kasim Aslam’s fast-paced session, “Google Ads Hacks | Tips & Tricks to High Performing Google Ads Campaigns for eCommerce and Lead Generation” was full of incredible information, but this nugget from the very beginning really stood out.

In 2017, Google had more than 7 million advertisers spend just over $10B on advertising on the platform. And obviously, some campaigns may have completely tanked, while others may have done exceptionally well. But on average, for every dollar spent, advertisers earned $8 in revenue.

Financial advisors will tell you that when investing, you want to aim for an ROI above 7%. In advertising dollars, a 5:1 ratio of revenue to spend is considered the middle of the bell curve of the advertising range. So if you can make $8 in revenue for every dollar spent? Yeah, that’ll work.

Keep in mind, though, that this is not automatic. Turning your advertising budget into revenue requires properly creating your ads, targeting the right keywords and the right audience, and having something of value to offer. If you don’t have these three items well defined, your ads probably won’t come close to that ROI.

“Email aliases that match the subject of the email have increased open rates 34% (B2B) to 37% (B2C).”

Our team doesn’t even try to hide our enjoyment of and appreciation for Jay Schwedelson’s session, “Email Myths Busted: What’s REALLY Working Now!” Elizabeth Juran does a fantastic job of recapping his presentation, but let’s take it a step further.

Most email marketing systems (including HubSpot) allow you to change the sender’s “from” name—not the email address, but the name of the sender. By matching the sending alias to the content of the subject line, you’re establishing relevancy and essentially segmenting your messages. These messages come from the same email address, but look as though they’re coming from two separate accounts. 

So what does this mean for you? This allows for you to have a dramatic increase in your sending volume. You can send out more messages because your messages appear to be segmented. In addition, you can begin to determine if there are certain segments of your audience that respond better to certain facets of your business by how they interact with these differing “from” names, and better target those individuals.

Looking at it even further, Nancy Harhut dropped in this staggering statistic during a debate with Jay on which is more important, the subject line or the content of an email: depending on the platform, anywhere from 45% to 68% of recipients open an email based on the from line rather than the subject line. 

“71% of marketers believe brand perception is more important to growth than brand awareness.”

What’s interesting about this figure is that the conclusion reached by the marketers in question is actually wrong. From Ty Heath and Jon Lombardo’s session, “How B2B Brands Grow: Great Marketing Drives Sustainable Growth for Companies,” it’s far more important for your brand to be known than what people think about your brand.

If you run a B2B business, think about it: at any given moment, as many as 95% of your clients aren’t actively in the market for your products or services. But when that shifts and those companies do begin to search for your product and service, are they going to know that your company even exists?

Most of your advertising dollars are going to be spent putting your business in front of buyers who aren’t ready to buy now. But when buyers are ready to enter the market, it’s already too late—they’ve already got some idea of the potential solutions for their needs. If you’re in the B2B space, you simply must be available to consumers so that when they’re ready to buy, yours is the product they think of.

And finally, one last note from Jay Schwedelson:

“7% of people use the peach emoji as a fruit. The rest use it for other non-fruit uses.”

Pretty sure that’s self-explanatory.

Follow Along With More Timely Marketing Tips

Need help in deciphering what the numbers mean for your business? Connect with us today. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get even more actionable takeaways delivered right to your inbox.