One in Five Merchants Shuns Marketing E-mail
The most surprising statistic from Multichannel Merchant’s Outlook 2010 survey isn’t that 79.7% of the nearly 400 respondents used e-mail to promote their business. It’s that one in five did not.
Even so, e-mail was second only to respondents’ own Websites in terms of popularity as a marketing tool. Likewise, the cross-channel merchants who participated in the survey deemed e-mail metrics second only to Website metrics in terms of business importance. Nearly three-fourths (73.8%) said site-related metrics had become more vital to their organization during the past year, while 56.1% said the same for e-mail metrics.
As for the types of e-mail metrics tracked, sales were the most popular, with 68.4% measuring them. Click-throughs were close behind, measured by 65.9% of respondents, followed by open rates (56.3%). A shameful 12.1% admitted to not tracking any e-mail metrics.
Not surprisingly, larger companies were more likely than smaller ones to track e-mail metrics. Although 5.3% of businesses with sales of at least $10 million said they didn’t look at any e-mail metrics, among respondents with sales of less than $10 million the figure was an unhealthy 17.2%.
Along the same lines, whereas only 4.0% of the larger respondents said they didn’t send any type of e-mail, 11.6% of the smaller participants confessed as much. But while the larger businesses were more apt to use trigger e-mails (69.5% versus 42.5% of the smaller respondents) and reactivation e-mails (61.6% versus 37.2%), smaller companies were more likely to use e-mail as a prospecting tool. Whereas 50.3% of respondents with sales of at least $10 million sent prospecting e-mails, 57.5% of those with sales of less than $10 million did.
More than two-thirds (69.3%) of respondents said that, in addition to deployment and handling opt-outs, their e-mail service providers offered data and analytics assistance. ESPs also handled file maintenance and hygiene for 55.2% of respondents and consulting services for 31.1%. Again, larger businesses were more likely to employ ESPs for such services. For instance, 62.2% of respondents with sales of at least $10 million had their ESPs handle file maintenance and hygiene, compared with 49.3% of the smaller businesses.
There are plenty more stats where these came from—covering not just e-mail but revenue and profit expectations, e-commerce, catalog marketing, and more. You can download four exclusive research reports based on the data at http://multichannelmerchant.com/outlook2010/. (E-mail statistics are included in the “Marketing” report.) While you’re there, you can download any or all of four 30-minute Webinars in which industry pros analyze and explain the data. The e-mail-specific content is included in “Session 1: Marketing,” with commentary from Silverpop’s Loren McDonald and consultant George Hague.
