Email Marketing effectiveness: Budgets Still On The Rise

While the effectiveness of email marketing is no longer in question, one pertinent issue remains for thought leaders in the marketing community – will the channel experience any innovation? Furthermore, does it have to? It’s an interesting question, especially considering that Email marketing is truly the Apple of the marketing world; it’s always strong, effective and simple-to-use. One difference though, Apple products are expensive, email marketing is not? And one more similarity, though Apple will release their well flaunted Apple watch soon, many have still called for more innovation from them, and the same can be said about email marketing. Many marketers still wonder what innovations can further maximize the performances of their email campaigns, and though it’s a difficult question to answer, there are many ideas regarding how progress will come about.

According to Shawn Myers, VP of marketing at StrongView, in 2015, ?the real opportunity will be for email marketers who can go beyond leveraging mere profile and purchase data to understand the current context of each customer at the moment of open, and dynamically deliver relevant messages accordingly.? A great point, especially because it’s massively clear from StrongView’s 2015 Trends Survey that, ?marketers consider email the fulcrum of their digital marketing campaigns.? In fact, according to that survey, 54% of brands will increase their email marketing budget in 2015, and a third will increase it by 10% over their 2014 spending. This news seems to make perfect sense, especially as TV media power dwindles. The study also projects that there will be more investment in lifestyle email marketing, like Loyalty and Welcome programs.

After email marketing (61%), Social media (49%) and mobile marketing (41%)  are the other two in the top three that brands expect to invest in in the upcoming year. While those are highs, there will be lows for print advertising, direct mail, and radio/television advertising, where spending will surely decrease. The study also showed that marketers all seemed to agree that leveraging data from multiple channels is their their biggest concern going into the future – coordination among marketing channels, and developing relevant and engaging programs came in second and third. Though marketers will try to use data to their advantage, the study found that web behavior (31%), Sentiment (20%) and life stage (19%) all fall under the title of data that is unable to be leveraged. It comes as no surprise that marketers will most likely look into ways to use such data for their benefit in 2015, how they go about doing that will be a question to us all. But, it does give us an idea of what kind of innovation is needed for email marketers going forward 🙂