Survey: Email Marketing Provides The Best ROI

There’s building for the future — that is, doing the foundational work that will pay untold dividends down a strictly-sunny road — and then there’s planning for the future.

Planning requires keeping the rainy-day forecast in mind and taking necessary precautions. And with the current concerns of a recession looming, those planning considerations are being revisited or reconsidered all over the globe in many industries.

A recent survey of more than 1,300 marketers and other professionals all over the world found that, in the event of an economic downturn, email marketing was the most durable channel.

Source: Mailjet by Sinch’s Special Report: Email in an Evolving Economy

The study, conducted by Mailjet by Sinch, found that marketers specifically found email marketing to be the channel that provides the best ROI, with 59.9% choosing it as one of their Top 3 options (followed by digital marketing and social media).

In turn, that return-of-investment that email marketing provides ultimately puts it far down the list of channels that marketers would reduce or eliminate if forced to cut their budget. Only 13.1% would cut email marketing, putting it 8th behind traditional advertising (41.6%), digital advertising (26.1%), event marketing (22.8%), and others.

Source: Mailjet by Sinch’s Special Report: Email in an Evolving Economy

“Whenever you send an email, you’re delivering a message to your existing customers and subscribers,” the study says. “These are people who know you and have given you permission to communicate with them in their inboxes. Since you have a history with these people, you can be more certain about the kinds of results you’ll get from email marketing. Most marketers know that it’s much easier to convert the people who are already on your list than it is to try and find new customers. To put it another way, marketers understand that customer retention is just as important as customer acquisition. And that may be even more true during an economic crisis.”

According to the survey, almost 40% of companies plan on keeping their marketing budget the same over the next 12 months, with 22.6% increasing their budget. (The remaining slice split fairly evenly into camps of either foreseeing marketing cuts, already experiencing cuts, or not knowing their company’s situation.)

When looking at actual email practices, respondents as a whole said that personalization (39.1%), list building (37.3%), and list cleaning (29.1%) were the most likely practices to contribute to success. From the marketer perspective, however, list-building and subscriber acquisition took the highest priority, with 45.7% of marketers putting that practice in their Top 3.

Source: Mailjet by Sinch’s Special Report: Email in an Evolving Economy

“Marketers were also more likely than other job roles to choose lead nurturing (24%) as a practice that will lead to success in the coming months,” the study says. “Of course, the process of nurturing a lead occurs once a subscriber is acquired and identified as an ideal prospect. So, these practices are very much connected.”

Discovering all that email marketing can open up can be a boon for any business. To find out more about email’s evolving economy, download Mailjet by Sinch’s study here. To find out how an all-in-one CRM can help those efforts, request a Marketing Manager demo below.