Seminar Report
MarkeZine Day 2026 Spring Presentation
What Is Effective Email Marketing to Increase Leads?

Last Updated: March 26, 2026

This is Tozaki from the uSonar marketing team.
On March 4, 2026, I spoke at a session at MarkeZine Day, hosted by Shoeisha, alongside our Executive Officer from the Sales Division, Mr. Yuasa.

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In this session, we discussed the themes of partial optimization versus holistic optimization in B2B marketing.

This article provides an excerpt from the content presented that day.

B2B marketing is a field that can easily fall into partial optimization if one is not careful.
This implies that goal setting within the marketing department often becomes siloed, making it difficult to achieve company-wide optimization in collaboration with other departments. Furthermore, even within marketing operations alone, partial optimization is a common occurrence. Let me provide an example.

One of the primary tasks in B2B marketing is lead generation.
I am sure you are all acquiring leads daily through various channels, such as trade shows, content marketing, and ad operations.
But in reality, are your leads actually increasing?

Of course, since you are actively acquiring them, the number of leads is likely increasing.
The issue is whether the leads that the marketing department can actually utilize—that is, leads that can be used for email distribution—are truly increasing.

B2B marketing relies heavily on email as a critical channel.
Implementing effective email marketing allows you to maximize the impact of various initiatives.
However, it is a natural reality that email distribution inevitably leads to a certain number of unsubscribes.
This is where the pitfall of partial optimization lies.

For example, consider a marketing department at a company with a house list of 50,000 contacts.
This company acquires an average of 1,200 new leads per month through events, advertising, and WEB traffic.
That totals 14,400 leads annually.

They are also dedicated to content creation, sending out a weekly newsletter promoting their content.
Furthermore, they host webinars twice a month, sending three promotional emails for each webinar.
This is a company that actively practices lead acquisition, content creation, email marketing, and webinar hosting.
If the email unsubscribe rate is 0.2%, will the marketing department's lead count actually increase?

Example of Adverse Effects Caused by Partial Optimization.png

In reality, the list only grows by about 2,000 contacts per year.
While it is growing, considering they acquire 14,400 leads annually, the growth is likely less than expected.
If this continues for one year.png

As the size of your house list grows, the number of leads lost increases even if the unsubscribe rate remains constant,
meaning your lead count will not grow as much as you might imagine. In the worst-case scenario,
you could be losing hundreds of subscribers in the background just to attract a few dozen people to a webinar.
Under these conditions, the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives will never improve.

To avoid these issues, it is necessary to implement segmented distribution.
While segmented distribution is often associated with narrowing targets to improve response rates,
it also serves the vital purpose of protecting your house list by ensuring you do not send unnecessary emails.

At uSonar, we also perform appropriate segmentation when distributing our own emails.
As a result, recipients no longer receive emails that are completely irrelevant to them,
which has allowed us to successfully reduce our unsubscribe rate significantly.

Recommended Segments.png

For reference, while our total email distribution volume increased by 23% in 2025 compared to 2024,
we were able to reduce our unsubscribe rate to 70% of the previous year's level.
By increasing the number of leads with whom the marketing department can communicate via email,
we can create a virtuous cycle where email marketing results continue to improve.

In the actual presentation, we provided deeper insights, such as how to perform segmented distribution that yields results.
If you are interested in segmented distribution using the corporate attribute data provided by uSonar, please feel free to contact us.

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Author

uSonar Editorial Department

MX Group, Editor-in-Chief

We are the uSonar Editorial Department.
We provide information on data utilization and digital technologies useful for companies primarily engaged in B2B business to consider the future of their operations.