Email Marketing Survey 2008
During June and July 2008, we carried out an online survey to our subscriber base and in conjunction with subscribers to emedia marketing bulletins.
Overall it would seem that email marketing is central to online marketing for many businesses and is continue to grow in popularity. Collecting data is growing (nearly 2/3 of respondents) and marketers are still also keen to buy data in.
Although companies are collecting a range of natural subscribers, this could be relative to the size of the business, rather than success rates. emedia have published whitepapers for successful email marketing.
Points of note from this survey are:
- The need to make a more compelling argument for subscribing to your email marketing list
- Campaigns are being sent with too much irregularity. Your audience needs to expect and anticipate your communications. eg. 1st of the month - without fail.
- High percentages of correct technology to send email campaigns but still more needs to be done to reduce attachments, etc. as the main source of information being sent.
- Opportunities for higher levels of engagement using personalisation and testing.
- High compliance for unsubscribing mechanisms.
- Opportunities for more goal oriented campaigns rather than generic messaging.
- Still confusion over e-mail marketing regulations. UK E-Mail Law References.
Email marketing survey overview
Email marketing trends
- 70% of companies are currently using email for marketing
- 61% of companies suggested that email marketing has enabled their business to create sales or sales leads
- 80% of companies plan to use email for marketing in the next 12 months
Data collection / data purchase
- 41% of companies have bought in data lists, 38% of which saw value in the purchase
- Of these companies, 68% of companies would buy data again
- 34% of companies that haven't bought data lists may well do in the future
- 68% of companies collect data organically:
- 94% of these are permission based mechanisms
- 47% attract less than 10 subscribers per month
- 29% of subscriber forms contain more than 5 fields
- 57% of lists get segmented
- 13% of respondents share, sell or rent their data
Messages and campaigns
- Newsletters and Sales Messages made up 66% of all campaigns
- 61% of all email messages are sent monthly
- Tuesday is the preferred sending day of the week but only 31% of messages are sent with any regularity
- 60% of email campaigns are sent as Multipart, although 15% are sent as a PDF or image attachment
- 47% of campaigns are personalised, 65% are sent to segmented lists
- 49% of campaigns are checked against spam filters, 54% are tested in various email clients
- 7% of campaigns do not allow for un-subscribers
Email actions and successes
- 82% of all campaigns have a call-to-action
- 56% of HTML email campaigns are measured
- 32% of the call-to-actions are measured
- Mean average open rates are 21-30%
- Mean average call-to-action rates are less than 10%
- 17% of marketers split test campaigns
- 57% of marketers compare similar campaigns
Legal obligations
- 31% of respondents don't know if they comply to data regulations
- 32% of respondents are not sure of their obligations
Notes
Only fully completed submissions were used for this survey, totalling 83 ref from 120 surveys.