UK DMA Releases 2007 National Client Email Marketing Study

The UK DMA just released its 2007 National Client Email Marketing Study. Here are some of the highlights:

• Regular newsletters are the most common type of email messages used by over 70% of UK email marketers but only 24% apply any purchase segmentation to their newsletters.
• Tactical campaigns also seem to be popular with marketers – breaking news alerts (42%) and limited time offers (40%) suggest email is widely used for fast-turnaround, short-term activities.
• Very few marketers are deploying action or event-triggered campaigns, which may deliver the highest ROI.
• Marketers’ choice of provider is driven by 2 key needs - product functionality and delivery. Price comes out as being less important than product robustness, reputation and customer service.
• Despite the significant development in the adoption of email marketing, it has not yet caught up with the reach of other direct marketing tools, with companies, on average, having email addresses for only 50% of their database.
• One of the most surprising findings of this report is that almost a quarter of marketers do not engage in any segmentation or personalisation activity, and less than a fifth are using behaviour to trigger a message that could be timely and relevant.
• Well over half of marketers surveyed are tracking their campaigns success, with 59% calculating the revenue generated and 52% tracking the customer journey from open to purchase. This will enable them to evaluate their ROI for each campaign and make informed decisions about how successful the channel is.
• There is a difference in performance for acquisition and retention campaigns, as is seen in off-line direct marketing, with in-house customer lists generally performing better than rented external lists.
• Eight out of ten marketers will be spending more on email marketing than they spent in the past year. Just over half of these will not be taking money from another channel to fund their email marketing, so we are seeing a net increase in client spend in these organisations.
• For the 44% who will be re-allocating existing budget it will be coming from the budget previously allocated to direct mail. This equates to 33% of all marketers spending less on direct mail to fund their 2008 email marketing plans.
• 39% of marketers have found that they have been very successful or successful combining email with direct mail and 34% have had similar success combining email with telemarketing.

Members of the UK DMA can download the study for free, non-members pay GBP 500