E-Mail Marketers Focus on Recipients’ Interests, Behaviors

Small- and medium-sized businesses are taking up their arms to battle against the self-defeating clutter plaguing inboxes in 2009. Personalization and targeting are the names of the game in 2010.

According to the “2010 Email Marketing Trends Survey,” conducted by GetResponse, 53.8 percent of respondents said they will use personalization and targeting to combat the effects of inbox clutter, while 52.4 percent intend to improve message titles and subject lines, and 37.7 percent plan to increase customer loyalty with special offers, gifts, etc.

Additional methods include identifying the best time to send e-mails (28.3 percent) and split testing to send the best content (25.9 percent).

To improve e-mail relevancy, 59.4 percent of respondents said they plan on segmenting their e-mail lists based on interests, while 34.9 percent plan to use recent open- or click-rate activity to section-off their lists.

Meanwhile, 32.5 percent said they will segment their e-mail lists based on demographics, 29.7 percent said they will use purchasing history, 17.9 percent said they will segment based on subscription date and 5.7 percent said they will use another segmentation technique.

Only 8.5 percent of small- and medium-sized business respondents said they won’t use any segmentation method in their e-mail campaigns this year.

When it comes to behavioral targeting, 44.8 percent of respondents said they think it can result in a “significant” increase in e-mail marketing effectiveness, while 31.1 percent said they think it can result in a “moderate” increase and 21.2 percent said they weren’t sure.

This same study found that video e-mail marketing is set to see increased attention in 2010, as 64.0 percent of respondents said they didn’t use it last year but plan to use them this year.

Training courses was seen as the most effective type of video e-mail by 28.8 percent of respondents, followed by product demos with a 22.0 percent response, product promotions with a 19.1 percent response and customer testimonials with a 17.8 percent response.

In addition, 47.8 percent of respondents thought that integrating e-mail marketing and social media is “extremely important,” while 31.0 percent said it is “rather important” and 12.1 percent said it is “not that important.”

Sources:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007551

http://www.getresponse.com/documents/core/reports/2010_Email_Marketing_Trends_Survey.pdf