Dive Brief:
- About 73% of marketers say they get excellent or good ROI from email marketing, up from 66% last year, according to the results of Econsultancy and Adestra's "Email Marketing Industry Census 2016."
- The report found that organizations are only spending 15% of their budgets on email, while the average proportion of sales attributed to email comes in at 23%. The study surveyed 1,100 agency and in-house marketers.
- The study found that marketers are increasingly turning to third-party systems to manage email programs, and personalization and segmentation are two email marketing tactics that are on the rise.
Dive Insight:
It has become a wearying refrain, but like clockwork, marketers will hear the words, “email is dead,” at least once every year. But every year email keeps chugging along, doing the yeoman’s work of digital marketing.
Placing that canard where it belongs, Email on Acid’s 2016 Email Marketing Insights Study from earlier this year found that 71.8% of companies plan on spending more time on email production, and 86.7% report increasing marketing budgets. On top of that, email is appealing to the tough-to-reach youngest generations: Previous Adestra research found that 68% of teens prefer to be contacted by email versus 7% for both text and push notifications.
The fact remains that email is the linchpin across all other digital marketing touch points – maybe an app gets signed into via a social media log in, but that social media platform requires a valid email address for a sign-up before that user could ever become part of the community. Email remains the best way to get someone into a prospect or user database, and is often considered the most valuable form of lead generation for B2B marketers.
But the report found that marketing budgets don't always reflect the importance of email, suggesting that marketers could spend more on email and see a healthy return. With organizations only spending 15% of their budgets on email while attributing 23% of their sales to the channel, "marketers may not be taking full advantage of the potential benefits that email can bring – from driving revenues to building long-lasting relationships that go beyond the sale," the report said.