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DMA Research: Levels of Expertise Explain Divergent Email Marketing Strategies

Despite email marketing's success in producing 11.7 percent of total offline sales and 23.5 percent of online sales in 2007, a study just released by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reveals a surprisingly wide variation in email marketing practices, metrics and performance among marketers, including a large number who still avoid email altogether. The research, "Actionable Insights into Email Marketing," attributes much of the variation among different practices, metrics and results to marketers' level of self-reported competence or expertise levels.

Responding companies were also categorized as marketer or service provider; business-to-consumer (B-to-C), business-to-business (B-to-B), or both and by company size.

DMA's new email marketing research also finds some surprises at the tactical level, including:

  • Although three in four email campaigns aim at customer retention, one in four are used to acquire customers. That frequency is greater in 2007 than in 2006, which was greater than in 2005.
  • Especially popular acquisition practices include company announcements (68 percent), company newsletters (65 percent), special discounts (63 percent) and one-time offers (63 percent).
  • In assessing challenges, service providers and client-side marketers have a disconnect. Service providers rank deliverability as the most challenging aspect of email marketing. By contrast, marketers see segmentation/targeting, integration with other channels, and list building as more challenging than deliverability.
  • When marketers do use email in concert with other marketing channels, two out of three use special offer codes to integrate the channels.
  • B-to-B companies trail their B-to-C counterparts in the use of email marketing. B-to-C marketers forecast that they will allocate 11 percent of their total marketing budget to email marketing in 2007, while B-to-B companies predict allocating 6.5 percent.

The report's topics include budgeting; permissions; list building, sharing, maintenance, segmentation and targeting; authentication and deliverability; and performance metrics - communications and financial.

The research was conducted online in November 2006.

The new report and accompanying CD, "Actionable Insights into Email Marketing, 2007 Edition," is sold at http://www.the-dma.org/bookstore.


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