Email Marketing Survey.

In preparation for the Email Insider Summit happening this week, we sent out a survey to the attendees asking about various issues facing them. While I will be presenting the details at the Summit itself, I thought I would provide some of the more interesting results here.

In general, the majority of the respondents were marketers, with others identifying themselves as agencies and vendors. It was interesting to note the issues that are important to the marketers themselves when compared against the issues that vendors and agencies, who are presumably servicing the marketers, find important.

In addition, we were able to recalibrate the results based on the responder’s identification as either a B2B or B2C marketer. Here are some of the responses:

It has always been my perception that agencies are much more concerned with the public perception of email than the marketers themselves. I have spoken with agencies in the past that discourage the use of email because they believe the email channel itself effects brand equity. When we asked the question “What is the biggest threat facing email as a marketing channel?,” 21% of those responding felt that “public perception” was the biggest threat — but when we broke the answers out, only 13% of the marketers felt that way, while 50% of the agencies and 33% of the vendors felt public perception was a threat.

When asked a similar question about “What is preventing email from occupying a larger percentage of your marketing budget?,” only 12% of the marketers responded that “Concerns about public perception of email as marketing channel ” was the main reason, while 16% of the vendors felt that way. Meanwhile, an astounding 100% of the agencies felt this was an issue. For the marketers, the biggest thing holding back their email programs was lack of confidence and experience internally in the deployment and management of email campaigns (good news for agencies and vendors, one would imagine).

The other interesting tidbit was that while 25% of all respondents reported that “Buy off from upper management” was preventing their email marketing budget from growing, in another question, 94% said that upper management supported their email marketing efforts!

What does this say about the relationship between agencies and marketers when it comes to the email channel, and how are they so far apart on the issue of public perception of the email space? I don’t have an answer, but it will be an interesting topic to explore this week at the Summit. I’ll let you know what we come up with.

by Bill McCloskey
Bill McCloskey is the CEO of Email Data Source Inc., developers of Email Analyst.
Courtesy of http://www.mediapost.com