Retailers Flock to E-Mail
According to recent figures released by e-mail marketing strategy and creative services firm Smith-Harmon Inc., retailers ramped up their promotional e-mail campaigns in December, building on a trend that began in September.
- Smith-Harmon’s report, titled “Retail E-Mail Year-End Trends for 2008,” showed that U.S. online retailers sent out an average of 14.6 e-mails in December, a striking increase from 11.3 e-mails in November.
- This continued an upward trend that began in September, when retailers sent out 9.5 e-mails, up from 9.1 e-mails in the previous month. In October, that number increased to 10.2 e-mails.
- During the holiday season, only 10 percent of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. sent out the same number or fewer e-mails than usual, while 90 percent sent out more e-mails.
- Forty-seven percent indicated that they increased the number of e-mails sent by less than 50 percent, while 28 percent indicated that they sent out between 51 percent to 100 percent more e-mails during the holiday season.
- Eleven percent indicated that they sent out between 101 percent to 200 percent more e-mails, while 4 percent said they sent out more than 200 percent more e-mails.
Jeff Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer, said this “was due largely to the fact that e-mail is cheap to administer and delivers an ROI far superior to paid search, catalogs and other marketing media.”
Still, according to eMarketer, e-mail marketing only accounted for 1.5 percent of sales generated by direct marketing campaigns, and receives just 0.4 percent of all advertising spending on direct marketing, as of January 2009.
In terms of return on investment, e-mail campaigns had an ROI of $43.52, while all direct marketing campaigns had an ROI of $11.74, according to eMarketer.
A recent survey of marketers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers, 93 percent of respondents said they were going to make cuts to their budgets in January and February, compared to 87 percent in July and August 2008.
- Nearly 37 percent expected cuts of more than 20 percent.
- Eighty-seven percent of respondents expected to make cuts to departmental travel and expense restrictions, while 77 percent expected to cut advertising campaign media budgets.
- A separate survey conducted by Reardon Smith Whittaker found that 63 percent of advertising agency executives said the economy had a somewhat negative impact on their agencies, while 14 percent said it had a very negative impact.
