According to Econsultancy’s “2012: Email in Action” study, the majority of responding marketers see social media as a challenging competitor for email. A similar majority thinks young people are abandoning email as a primary channel.
The study, conducted with the Email Experience Council of the DMA, starts by explaining email as two channels: 1) “one that’s precise, highly effective and unique,” and 2) a “blunt instrument that attempts to compensate for relevance with volume.”
“At organizations that practice the first, email continues to rank as the tactic with the highest return and as the best way for communicating with customers and prospects over the long-term,” Econsultancy noted. “For organizations still ‘batching and blasting’ the results have ebbed, deliverability has dropped, and list growth is slowing.”
According to the study, 55 percent of client-side marketers are using lead source to personalize and segment their mailings, while 53 percent are using demographic data.
Also, nearly one in four marketers has plans to implement some form of behavioral analysis for email personalization in the next year.
Twenty-five percent of marketers think competition with social media for recipients’ time and attention is very challenging, while 50 percent think it’s somewhat challenging. Meanwhile, 21 percent of marketers think getting the budget and attention email programs deserve is very challenging, while 44 percent think it’s somewhat challenging.
Eighteen percent of respondents think young people abandoning email as a primary channel is very challenging, while 51 percent think it’s somewhat challenging. Seventeen percent think integrating email with other marketing channels is very challenging, while 44 percent think it’s somewhat challenging.
Meanwhile, 19 percent of responding marketers think measuring and proving the ROI of email marketing programs is very challenging, while 40 percent think it’s somewhat challenging.
Regarding email budget distribution, 31 percent goes to email service providers, 19 percent goes to content creation, 14 percent to lists, 12 percent to agencies (creative and strategy), 9 percent to analytics, 8 percent to data hygiene/deliverability and 7 percent to other.
For B2C lead generation, email newsletters have an open rate of 25 percent, a click-through rate of 11 percent and a conversion rate of 1.8 percent.
Econsultancy also found that 60 percent of agencies’ clients who use them for email are increasing their usage of the channel.
Source:
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8896-changes-and-challenges-for-email-marketers-in-2012-report
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