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Email Marketing Insights
Kara Trivunovic
Sr. Director of Strategic Services
Kristin Hersant
Vice President of Corporate Marketing
October 29, 2009
New Research Shows Email Marketing Still Delivers Impressive ROI
According to the DMA's newly released Power of Direct Report, commercial email now returns $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. Granted that's down $1.31 from last year, but it's still double the ROI of search advertising, which is the next most effective channel with an ROI of $21.85 for every dollar spent.
The fact remains that email remains a powerful direct marketing channel that generates real results. Despite the Wall Street Journal's infamous proclamation of email's demise, consumers continue to embrace it to communicate with friends and businesses. In fact, when it comes to sharing marketing offers and overall communications with businesses, consumers overwhelming choose email over social media. A recent MarketingSherpa study showed that 78% of consumers share online information via email, versus 22% who prefer social media, and a Harris Interactive poll found that an even higher percentage of consumers choose email to communicate with marketers over social media.
These statistics point to the health of email, but they don't mean that social media isn't experiencing tremendous growth in adoption and utility. Instead of choosing one channel over the other, marketers should look at ways to use them together. There are already natural connections between the two. A recent Nielsen study found that the more people use social media, the more time they also spend with email. That's not too surprising when you consider that social networks rely on sending their members email to keep them updated of new content updates and other changes.
When it comes to social media marketing, StrongMail has also seen a big impact from integrating social media into existing referral campaigns. By making it easy for consumers to share referral rewards with their networks and then track the results of their efforts, these integrated campaigns have generated significantly higher results than relying on email alone. Using this approach, CSN Stores generated a 3X lift in performance over its previous email campaign.
The bottom line is that email remains an extremely prevalent and useful communication tool that is well suited for direct marketing; however, marketers would be remiss not to see how social media can help augment their existing email marketing campaigns. Remember, when it comes to choosing an effective direct marketing strategy, it doesn't have to be an either/or scenario. Leverage email and social media for both their intrinsic and combined strengths, and your bottom line will thank you.
Posted by: Kristin Hersant at 1:29 PM
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Kara and Kristin, thanks for the email marketing info. I referenced you on my blog post at http://tinyurl.com/y8jwhen. Be sure to share your thoughts if you'd like.
Cheers
Comment by Eric Siegmann – December 18, 2009 5:55 PM