Thursday, October 2, 2014

Is E-Mail Marketing Favored Just Because It's Easy?

Surveys and studies consistently rate e-mail as the most effective digital marketing method, far outpacing mobile, content marketing, social media, and paid search. But a new study by Marketing Charts adds an interesting spin, showing that marketers also rate e-mail as the least difficult form of digital marketing. The implication is that a lot of e-mail marketing may occur simply because marketers find it easy to do, and the larger volumes (generating more leads and sales) then fuels the belief that it is also a more successful digital channel. For example, e-mail was rated as the most effective marketing tool by 54% and as most difficult to implement by just 11% of digital marketers in the Marketing Charts study. In contrast, while social media was rated as most effective by 43%, a larger 49% also rated it as difficult to do. Similarly, content marketing was judged effective by 38%, but 42% also rated it as the most difficult method to master. And mobile/SMS marketing fell even lower on the success scale, with just 9% rating it as an effective marketing method and 34% categorizing it as difficult to execute. It is worrisome to think that perceived difficulty may be scaring marketers away from potentially successful marketing methods! As a Business2Community post by Graham Jones points out, independent analyses by firms such as HubSpot have shown that content marketing is the single most successful online method of generating sales -- yet marketers still place its effectiveness behind that of e-mail. As Jones warns, "Sometimes, a business benefits when you concentrate on the more difficult tasks, rather than the easy ones." For more data from the Marketing Charts study, go to http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-successful-just-plain-easy-01022936

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