Posted by Gareth Cutter on 2nd December 2008 to
Industry E-consultancy have followed up 2007's Customer Engagement Report with a 2008 edition published last week. Containing the results of a survey of over 1,000 organisations, it brings us up to date with the most recent trends in on-line marketing and provides a unique insight into the marketing attitudes of companies today.
The most telling figures are that although social media networks, blogs and other Web 2.0 features are expected to be utilised more heavily in 2009, with a reported 41% expected to increase expenditure, they still lag behind email marketing. Over 60% of organisations said that this would be their channel of choice for promoting their businesses in 2009 and will see a definite increase in expenditure.
This comes off the back of a widespread increase in attempts to improve on-line customer engagement. Over three quarters of those surveyed commented that they're finding it increasingly important to tailor messages to recipients and that the returns of doing so were 'improved customer loyalty' and 'increased revenue'.
We can surmise from this report that email marketing is still the most trusted media for broadcasting marketing messages directly on account of its strong return on investment (ROI): marketers can broadcast messages and track who follows them. Social media, although becoming more popular, is a less defined process and is still being treated with some hesitance on account of it's comparatively uncertain ROI.
It will be interesting to see how big a role social media has to play in 2009 - but based on this study, we can reasonably predict that 2009 will be another successful year for email marketing.
