Email delivers excellent returns for many UK firms, but marketers admit they could do a better job on strategy
It’s official—again. As in 2012, the “Email Marketing Industry Census 2013,” carried out by Econsultancy on behalf of Adestra, reported that at least two-thirds of UK marketers achieved “good” or “excellent” returns on investment (ROI) with their email programs. Only search engine optimization scored higher by this measure, with 75% of respondents rating it good or excellent in terms of ROI.
This high level of satisfaction with email is partly due to marketers’ increasing expertise in areas such as email list segmentation, message content, targeting and automation. Such improvements mean that many of today’s email communications are quite sophisticated, and reflect the profile data or purchase histories of individual consumers, for example.
Not all the news is good, however. Fifteen percent of UK firms polled by Adestra said their campaigns were “poor.” These failures can have many causes. Fully half of survey respondents said the quality of their email database was a main barrier to effective marketing; 43% admitted to a lack of strategy; and 41% confessed they didn’t devote enough time to email.
Despite such obstacles, email performs well because it is adaptable to so many purposes, including brand building, customer acquisition and retention. Most companies polled by the UK’s Direct Marketing Association (DMA) for its “2013 National Client Email Report” said that several types of email messages helped them achieve their business goals in 2012.
Regular newsletters were the type of mail mentioned most often in this context. But at least one-quarter of firms also cited welcome and thank you messages, customer surveys, limited-time offers and news alerts as contributing to their success.
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