Why email continues to be highly valued with impressive ROI

2012 was an amazing year to live and work in Britain. We had the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee; the Olympics arrived in London and England crashing out of another major tournament on penalties! For those of us excited by the goings on in our inbox, what would the impact be? How did busy environment actually impact campaign results, email tactics and email marketing’s position within businesses?

Source: National client email report 2013 by the DMA
Executive Summary

Email continues to be highly valued with impressive ROI

• Email marketing remains critical to business, with 89% of respondents declaring email to be “important” or “very important” to their organisation
  
• Email marketing’s ROI is strong: it returned an estimated average of £21.48 for each £1 spent in 2012
  
• For roughly a third of respondents, email marketing accounts for 50% or more of all digital business revenue
  
• Click and conversion rates are the factors that marketers rate most often as important to achieving business goals
  
• More budget and in-house resource set aside for email marketing – but marketers still feel constrained
  
• Budget allocation to email marketing increased slightly in 2012, with 15% more marketers spending at least 30% of their budget on email than in 2011. Over half expect their budget to increase across 2013
  
• More organisations are managing email marketing in-house, with staff hours dedicated to email marketing rising accordingly
  
• Marketers are more comfortable with email marketing basics than in 2011, but there is still a need for more customised, advanced training and education opportunities
  
• The disconnect between email’s value and email’s position in the organisation continues, with internal resources and budget the top two constraints to success cited by respondents: marketers need to better communicate email’s value internally
  
• Customers respond positively as email tactics mature
  
• Just over half of respondents reported open, click and conversion rates improved in 2012. Even more expect their numbers to improve in 2013. Only less than 12% reported any decline in these metrics
  
• Despite relatively low volumes, trigger email campaigns accounted for 21% of email revenue. Over 75% of email revenue is now generated by alternatives to generic one-size-fits-all campaigns
  
• Marketers are making use of a far wider number of email marketing approaches, but there is still significant room for improvement. For example, just under half still don’t send a welcome email
  
• Marketers finesse their list-building and usage strategies
  
• Marketers are getting better at using different techniques to build their lists. Organic website traffic and transactions remain the top two acquisition sources
  
• Marketers are also increasing their use of segmentation: the number segmenting into more than six different audiences rose 28% in 2012
  
• The growth of diverse email streams has also encouraged marketers to develop strategies for maximum email contact levels. Some 11% more have such a strategy than in 2011
  
• Maximum contact frequencies have risen significantly, with the number of organisations never sending more than one email a month to subscribers almost halving to 14%
  
• More sophisticated integration of email with other channels
  
• Marketers are using email for an increasing range of objectives beyond straightforward revenue generation, including retention, engagement, acquisition and brand awareness
  
• Marketers report that the best other channels to integrate with email are online marketing, social networks, direct mail and mobile marketing – both for ROI and profitable relationship building

Full report can be found at www.dma.org.uk