E-Mail Marketing Fits the Bill


E-mail is proving itself to be one of more cost-effective marketing tools available. Still not convinced? Recent research findings may change your mind.


Please Note: You are viewing the unstyled version of MarketingFind.com. Either your browser does not support CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) or it is disabled.
Verticalscope NetworkFind a Merchant Provider - Merchantselect.comWebsite Marketing - Merchantselect.comFind a Host - TopHosts.ComAustraliaCanadaDeutschlandFranceUnited KingdomUSA

E-Mail Marketing Fits the Bill

Almost everyone would agree that in a very short space of time email has become an integral part of people’s lives. Checking email is probably the first thing we all do when we access the Internet, leading to the phrase we’ve seen and heard countless times — email is the Internet’s killer application.

The market analyst group IDC reports that over five billion emails are sent and received everyday with the figure set to increase to 14.9 billion by the end of 2002. That this will hit 35 billion daily by 2005, is enough to make any marketer salivate. And if that doesn’t do it, the surveys touting email reach surely will.

Here are some of the findings:

  • An estimated 94 per cent of US Internet users have email, accounting to 35 per cent of the total US population (eMarketer).
  • Forrester Research reports email use accounts for over 35 per cent of all time spent on the Internet and estimates that 50 per cent of consumers will be communicating via email by 2002.
  • A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey found people spending 84 per cent of their time on the Internet for email. According to a survey by NFO WorldGroup, 83 per cent of consumers access email for work purposes at least once a day; 82 per cent access email for personal purposes at least once a day and 53 per cent check email at least once a day for school purposes.

It follows from these figures that companies would be spending (or definitely should be) a significant amount of their budgets on email campaigns. Again the surveys are encouraging.

DoubleClick projects email marketing budgets to increase by 17 per cent in 2002 — a gain of 9 per cent from 2001. DoubleClick also reports that 61 per cent of marketers plan to increase their email marketing budget in 2002, with only 5 per cent intending to decrease it. Research from e-Dialog (a provider of email marketing products) backs up the DoubleClick data, with 55 per cent of marketers saying their companies will increase the email marketing budget this year.

But, you ask, what do the numbers tell us about how effective email is? And tell me something about the small and medium sized businesses, not just the big boys.

Our friends at e-Dialog in their 2002 E-Mail Marketing Benchmarking Study, based on responses from 300 marketers across industries, tell us some favorable things.

Thirty two percent of respondents ranked email as their most effective marketing vehicle and 82 percent placed it in the top three. Moreover, 48 percent of those surveyed revealed that email is the main marketing vehicle for their firm.

To add fuel to the fire, two-thirds of the 700 companies surveyed by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) said their sales in 2001 increased as a result of using email marketing. Medium-sized companies had the best results, with 59.8 percent seeing an increase from last year. Large companies reported a 47.1 percent boost and small companies indicated that their sales rose by 42.6 percent as a result of email promotions. Note that twenty-nine percent of respondents revealed sales remained the same, and five percent said sales decreased.

Furthermore, the DMA study found that of the companies surveyed, 15 per cent of their total online sales came from email based promotions last year. Additionally, 13 percent of respondents reported that they allocated their total marketing budget to email marketing. The smaller companies showed the highest percentage of budget allocation at 21.4 per cent while the larger companies allocated 13.4 per cent. Medium-sized companies allocated 7 per cent of their total marketing budgets. Almost two-thirds of all companies polled said they were able to manage their email marketing in-house.

Enough already, you say. What does this cost anyways? Glad you asked. Cost is one of the major factors driving email marketing’s growth. Low cost, that is. Research firm Forrester says, for 2002, 430 billion marketing emails will be sent in the U.S. at a cost of $2.0 billion, and the average cost of sending a single email is less than half of one cent. Less than half a penny! It’s more costly to send newsletters and rich media emails but the unit cost is projected to remain under a penny per post, reaching only 0.72¢ by 2006. That’s far less than direct mail, right?