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Email marketing has been an important tool for B2B marketers over the past decade and more so in the past few years. However, while generic email marketing solutions help marketers to send large number of messages to their lead databases they lack in many aspects that are critical in

. Here are the main reasons I believe B2B marketers must not use basic email marketing solutions for reaching out to their prospects:

1. Email marketing solutions are built to send out disconnected one-off email messages to prospects without integrating history of what has been sent to which prospects and how they have responded.
2. Email marketing solutions give basic insight on opens/bounces/clicks but fail to measure ongoing engagement of a lead with a message by tracking activity into the future in terms of email opens, links clicked, web site visits and so on that allows marketers to know which prospects are showing interest months after their initial message may have been sent.
3. Email marketing solutions fail to generate an activity or interest stream for every lead based on all the email campaigns that may have been sent to the lead to show how a particular lead has responded to those campaigns and to gain insight into their potential interest.
4. Due to #3 above, it is not possible to personalize email marketing campaigns which leads to a board based reach out approach which is not effective.
5. Email marketing solutions are not structured to help marketers build a conversation which is key to generating interest in B2B. A conversation can only be built by using historical tracking to define future reach out.

Don’t get me wrong. Email marketing has its own place, but in B2B lead generation its time for email marketing to give way for rich but simple to use &

solutions that help marketers build a conversation.