Email marketing “important” or “very important” to 90% of organisations

The vast majority of marketers in the UK (90%) feel that email marketing is important or very important to their business, according to the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) 2010 Annual Client Email Report.

The report highlights the fact that for most of the DMA’s members, email remains one of the key platforms for investment. More than half of those surveyed said they dedicated some 10% of their total marketing budget towards email marketing campaigns, yet more than a third claimed they allocated more than 30% of their total ad budget.

Additionally, this figure seems set to grow in the near future, with over half of respondents saying they expected their email budgets to increase. According to the survey this increased spend will generally come at the expense of direct mail (48%) and print/press advertising, though an “unprecedented variety of channels” will bear the brunt of increased email spending this year.

“The 2010 report shows that email marketing remains of great strategic importance to most organisations surveyed despite many attention-grabbing claims that social media heralds the ‘death of email’,” said Dr Dave Chaffrey of Smart Insights Ltd in the report’s conclusion.

However the report also highlighted a surprising lack of best practice among many organisation’s targeted email marketing tactics and their strategies for ongoing, bulk email marketing campaigns.

For example, just 42% of respondents used welcome messages, described by the DMA as a “must have component of even the most basic email marketing programme.” Additionally, nearly half of (48%) organisations do not control their email processes centrally – an inefficiency which risks legal compliancy and effective management of frequency, branding, marketing integration and tactical advances.

Meanwhile, it appears that a significant number of marketers have yet to truly engage with permission marketing guidelines.

Whilst list hygiene practices are more widespread than previously reported, 15% of respondents still do not remove hard bounces from their lists. Furthermore nearly a third of organisations do not ‘suppress’ unsubscribes – i.e. add these users to a separate list used to ensure their addresses are not included in other marketing lists.

“Like parents who love their teen more than anything and yet still despair of the silly choices they sometimes make, we can’t help but be dismayed by some of the data found in this report,” says Matt Blumberg, Chairman and CEO of sponsor company Return Path. “The problem here is that there is a fundamental disconnect for marketers in the UK when it comes to the elements that lead to success with email.”