Email Marketing ROI

Email marketing is taking online marketers by storm thanks to the incredible ROI it promises.

“ ... email [marketing] ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008, more than twice the ROI of other mediums including search and display.” - Datran Media's second annual survey of online marketing professionals (conducted Dec. 2007)

Of all the respondents to the survery:

• 55 percent expect ROI from email marketing to be higher "than any other [marketing] channel
• 67 percent state "email has helped boost sales through other channels."
• 80 percent indicate "email was the strongest performing media buy ahead of search (70.6%) and display (37.6%)."
• Among the lowest ROI generators were mobile (1.2%), RSS (2.4%), Cable (7.1%), Broadcast (10.6%) and Print (16.5%).
• 80 percent send targeted email campaigns
• 82.4 percent expect to increase use of email marketing in 2008 compared to 2007
• 55.3 percent expect email marketing ROI to be higher than other channels in 2008
• 25.9 percent expect email ROI to be 'roughly equal to other channels'
• 71.8 percent think that search complements the email marketing channel followed by display advertising (51.8%), direct (41.2%) mobile (24.7%), broadcast (17.6%) and cable (10.6%)
• 80 percent plan to employ email to send newsletters followed by 78.8% to drive sales, 70.6% to enhance customer relationships, 67.1% to increase upsell or cross sell opportunities, 64.7% to increase brand awareness and/or lift, 50.6% to send transactional messages and 52.9% to send messages to reactive dormant customers.
• 63.5 percent plan on integrating marketing messages in transactional emails in 2008.
• 69.4 percent currently use and/or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing.
• Of the companies that currently send targeted email campaigns, 63.5% target based on demographics and/or geography, 56.5% target based on actions, 4.12% target based on psychographics or interests and 20% don't send targeted campaigns.
• 90 companies participated in the survey including OgilvyOne Worldwide, Avenue A/Razorfish and Stamps.com
  

Email marketing serves as an excellent way to keep in touch with customers in industries where otherwise the contact would only happen once or twice a year.