The rise of social media has failed to dent the popularity of email marketing, which not only remains the most favoured marketing channel – with 97% of firms using it for campaigns – but has also witnessed a resurgence of open rates and profitability.
That is the key finding of a new study by Message Systems, entitled “Marketing Channel and Engagement Benchmark Survey”. While it recognises that social media and mobile are changing the customer communications landscape, the research says email marketing still greatly outperforms social media when it comes to driving sales and delivering return on investment (ROI).
Email is the most successful and profitable marketing channel, with 63% of respondents reporting that email delivers the greatest ROI compared to only 10% for social.
“Despite recent reports that the return on investment with email marketing has been declining over the past few years, our survey found that email is thriving, and driving more revenue and conversions than any other channel,” said George Schlossnagle, chief executive of Message Systems. “In fact, nearly 70% of our customers reported that their email marketing returns have actually trended upwards in the past five years.
“Additionally, the survey findings that engagement efforts are often held back by difficulties around data sourcing and technological shortcomings fall completely in line with our market position that a single unified platform for integrating customer data and customer communications makes the most sense for today’s customer-centric organisations.”
Other notable findings from the “Marketing Channel and Engagement Benchmark Survey” include:
• Social marketing is growing, especially for engaging customers. Although most customers prefer to be contacted via email, marketers are increasingly using social media to engage with customers and interact in a two-way dialogue – 64 percent of respondents said they added social media in the past year to obtain greater engagement.
• Businesses are using SMS text more often for engaging customers versus directly marketing products. Companies plan to invest mainly in social media (44%) and email (40%), but SMS text came in a solid third (22%), to revamp customer engagement strategies in the next year.
• Nearly half – 47% – of companies have adapted social media (listing Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter specifically) as a channel for two-way customer dialogue, trailing only phone and email, and far outpacing SMS text and IM chat, both at 8%.
• Nearly 58% of respondents feel that issues around data sourcing and technological shortcomings are currently holding back their email/customer engagement efforts, or have in the past.
• A majority – 51% – of respondents do not yet offer their customers a preference centre or have the ability to track customer preferences for how they prefer to receive communication.
• 72% of respondents feel that if they were to consider adding new channels (SMS, IM, social etc.) to their engagement programme that it would be more advantageous to manage those channels on an in-sourced basis.
