What does B2B market research have in common with our general marketing colleagues? Well aside from serving marketers as our primary internal clients, we also rely on email as a tool for lead generation and other marketing tactics. In our case it is designed to encourage potential respondents to open up our invitations and complete our surveys.

A recent study by Pardot, a provider of marketing automation to the SMB market, shows that email marketing is still considered an invaluable asset. Email has gained favor for nurturing prospects and is an effective component to a drip campaign designed to move prospects through a sales funnel. As for lead generation, the study found that only 30% use email as their primary lead generation tactic. No mention was made of the percentage of marketers that use email as part of their retention management programs.

Some of the other key findings include:

• 58% use some form of testing to assess the impact of content upon response rates (measured as click-through rates)
• 57% test for a correlation between subject lines and open rates
• 46% test for time of day impact upon open rates

According to respondents, Tuesday is the best day to release and email (mentioned by 44%). Conversely, Friday was considered to be the worst day. Our colleagues in consumer marketing research of course may have different experiences, especially those in retail. Over half (53%) reported the best time of day for launching an email campaign is between 8 am and noon. This would lead us to consider segmenting our survey file by time zone and staggering release times to fit within this window.

According to the Pardot study only one-third of B2B marketers are making use of SPAM testing before launch. From a survey perspective, this should be less of an issue for users of the Cvent platform given its ability to test not only for potential SPAM problems, but also for rendering across multiple email platforms.

The long and short of the study, as it relates to researchers, is that we need to incorporate testing across all aspects of survey and invitation design. After all what good is a study if people do not take the time to open the invitation.

• Learn more about Cvent's Content Analysis scoring to prevent your emails from ending up in SPAM folders
• Check out how Cvent's Rending Test works so you can proof your email in different email clients before sending out your survey invitations