List Marketing

This year, many marketers' lead prospecting aims are focused primarily on finding new customers, while relatively few are looking only to retain current or reactivate former customers, according to Chief Marketer's 2013 Prospecting Survey [download page]. Marketers are ramping up their use of prospecting tools across the board, and while email remains the most common prospecting channel (86.7% using this year), some of the biggest changes are reserved for content marketing, retargeted ads, and website registration/opt-in. Read more »

As part of its Q4 2012 Email Marketing Quarterly Benchmark Study [download page], Experian Marketing Services has analyzed the best time of the day to send emails, cautioning that the data is retrospective rather than controlled, and that optimal deployments likely vary by industry, and even by brand. But that doesn't mean it hurts to take a look at the results. And those seem to suggest somewhat of an inverse relationship between email volume and performance. Read more »

Email volume rose 5.4% year-over-year in Q4, according to [download page] the Experian CheetahMail 2012 Q4 email benchmark report. The travel industry continued to see above-average growth, of 21.4%, as two-thirds of travel brands increased their volume during the quarter, while media and entertainment brands curtailed mailings by 17%. Each of the 7 verticals tracked increased their email volume quarter-over-quarter, with the overall increase at 26%. Read more »

A survey of 123 marketers and 1,002 consumers on marketing practices and how they relate to permission has revealed a significant gap in perceptions regarding implicit permission (purchases, contents, product demos, registrations). The study, by RegReady, found that 77% of marketers believe that a consumer purchase does constitute marketing permission. But three-quarters of the consumers polled felt very strongly that making a purchase does not constitute permission to market to them on their mobile device, and 80% shared that sentiment about marketing via email. Read more »

22% of marketers surveyed by Experian Marketing Services say they use pop-up windows on their website to collect email addresses, with the majority only showing them to new visitors. The Experian study [download page], which examines a range of email subscriber acquisition and engagement tactics, finds that the most common ways of capturing email addresses on websites (excluding checkout) are on a dedicated email page (58%) and on the home page (56%), with fewer doing so in the header (15%) or footer (38%). Read more »

45% of business leaders expect to increase their marketing budgets in 2013, according to [pdf] survey results from StrongMail. Email marketing and social media are top of the spending agenda, with a majority 55.5% and 51.8% of those respondents expecting to increase spending on those channels, respectively. Not far behind, roughly 4 in 10 plan to spend more on mobile (42.8%) and search (SEO/PPC - 39.8%), while traditional channels such as direct mail (15.4%) and PR (13.9%) sit at the bottom of the list. Read more »

Surprise! Americans would generally rather receive marketing information from brands via postal mail than over the internet or by email, per survey results from Epsilon. (Actually, that's not a big surprise: Epsilon found the same thing last year.) That general preference for postal mail extends even to smart device owners, although they are more likely than those who don't own such devices to prefer receiving information online or over email. Read more »

SMBs are using a number of different tactics to draw new business, according to [download page] a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Act-on Software, but digital marketing continues to take a backseat to tried-and-true face-to-face tactics. Asked which techniques they use to acquire new customers, at least half indicated they were using 14 of the 15 identified. Leading the pack are personal relationships and networking (95%), tradeshows and industry events (89%), and in-person events (86%). Read more »

86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing, and the vast majority of those (84%) are leveraging social media (other than blogs), finds a new report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs. That puts social media on par with website articles as the most-used content marketing tactic by B2C marketers. Social gets the nod over articles for effectiveness, though: 57% rate their use of social media as "effective" or "very effective," compared to 53% for website articles. Read more »

For email marketers, one of the main challenges is cutting through the clutter. Here's why: according to [pdf] a Blue Kangaroo online survey of more than 1,000 US adults aged 18-64, a whopping 43% said that more than half of the new emails in their inbox the week prior to the survey came from marketers (including daily deals, retail newsletters, and sales alerts). In fact, 8 in 10 respondents said that more than 20% of their new emails came from marketers. Read more »