email marketing survey 2008

During June and July 2008 The Escape, a Basingstoke web and marketing design agency, carried out an online survey in conjunction with emedia to their own subscriber base and to emedia's Marketing Bulletin subscribers.

email survey comments

Overall it would seem that email marketing is central to online marketing for many businesses and is continue to grow in popularity. Collecting data is growing (nearly 2/3 of respondents) and marketers are still also keen to buy data in.

Although companies are collecting a range of natural subscribers, this could be relative to the size of the business, rather than success rates. emedia have published whitepapers for successful email marketing.

points of note from the survey:

The need for a more compelling argument to subscribe to email marketing lists
Campaigns are being sent with too much irregularity. Your audience needs to expect and anticipate your communications. eg. 1st of the month - without fail.
High percentages of correct technology to send email campaigns but still more needs to be done to reduce attachments, etc. as the main source of information being sent.
Opportunities for higher levels of engagement using personalisation and testing.
High compliance for unsubscribing mechanisms.
Opportunities for more goal oriented campaigns rather than generic messaging.
Still confusion over e-mail marketing regulations. See UK E-Mail Law References.

Download full results of the email marketing survey here.

email marketing survey overview

Email marketing trends

70% of companies are currently using email for marketing
61% of companies suggested that email marketing has enabled their business to create sales or sales leads
80% of companies plan to use email for marketing in the next 12 months

Data collection / data purchase

41% of companies have bought in data lists, 38% of which saw value in the purchase
Of these companies, 68% of companies would buy data again
34% of companies that haven't bought data lists may well do in the future
68% of companies collect data organically:
- 94% of these are permission based mechanisms
- 47% attract less than 10 subscribers per month
- 29% of subscriber forms contain more than 5 fields
- 57% of lists get segmented
13% of respondents share, sell or rent their data

Messages and campaigns

Newsletters and Sales Messages made up 66% of all campaigns
61% of all email messages are sent monthly
Tuesday is the preferred sending day of the week but only 31% of messages are sent with any regularity
60% of email campaigns are sent as Multipart, although 15% are sent as a PDF or image attachment
47% of campaigns are personalised, 65% are sent to segmented lists
49% of campaigns are checked against spam filters, 54% are tested in various email clients
7% of campaigns do not allow for un-subscribers