On average, companies are spending one-fifth of their online marketing budget on email marketing (second only to website spend), according to the “Email Marketing Industry Census 2007″ (UK) by E-consultancy and Adestra. 

Despite the high level of investment, 81% of email marketers say they are not using email marketing as effectively as they can, compared with 13% who say they are, the study found.

What follows are some additional data from the statistics segment of E-consultancy’s April 2007 roundtable discussion on email marketing, which included info about the latest statistics, market trends and useful resources in email.

Almost half of email marketers surveyed (47%) do not know what their company’s Return on Investment from Email Marketing is.

Excluding those respondents, more than half of respondents (55%) say their ROI from email is at least three times. Almost a third (32%) say their ROI is five times or more.

More than half of Company Email Marketers (57%) said their organizations were using less than 50% of their email systems’ functionality

Less than a third said they are using more than 50% of their email systems’ functionality.

Organizations are being held back by their inability to integrate email with other sales and marketing activities: Three quarters of respondents said there is “some integration but room for improvement”; one in ten said there was no integration at all; only 12% said “they are on top of this.”

8% of email marketers use a Fully Managed Service, 27% use an ASP / Hosted Service, 30% an in-house system and 30% use a mixture of these methods.

Aside from broadcast of email, the most commonly used ESP services cited are Measurement & Analytics (47%), Personalization (33%), Segmentation (23%).

About half of respondents (49%) work for organizations spending £10,000 or less on email marketing annually.

15% of respondents say they are spending more than £50,000 per year on email marketing.

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• Email Marketers: Relevant Content, Deliverability Most Important
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