Salesforce State of Marketing Report

Salesforce published their State of Marketing report last week. The report was compiled after receiving 5,000 responses to their questionnaire. Reading the report it is clear, email is critical to businesses. 73% of marketers believe email marketing is core to their business, 71% felt mobile marketing was core, and 66% of social media marketing was core to their business.
Other interesting figures are, 47% reported that the click-through rate as the most important email marketing metric and 23% didn’t know what device emails are read on.
Comparing the 2015 responses to the 2014 survey, email as a primary revenue source increased from 16% to 20%, email as a critical enabler of products and services increased from 42% to 60%, and email as an indirect impact of business performance decreased from 42% to 20%.
It is clear that email as a marketing tool will see increase usage in 2015. The report isn’t just reporting responses, it has several good recommendations such as doing a spring-cleaning of your email list and suggests sending a re-engagement campaign that invites subscribers to update their preference. This would give users the ability to opt-out as they may only have been interested in holiday deals and making it easy to opt-out will help prevent users from reporting the email as spam.

Email newsletters are most often used but may not be the most effective. Consider using mobile opt-in emails, abandoned cart emails, anniversary emails, and browse re-targeting emails.

The report does a great job at compiling the information in an easy to digest layout and even breaks out the responses by country and then by business types. Download a copy of the report at Salesforce.com.
 

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ISP filters are good for marketers

A throwback post from 2010 Attention is a limited resource.
Marketing is all about grabbing attention. You can’t run a successful marketing program without first grabbing attention. But attention is a limited resource. There are only so many things a person can remember, focus on or interact with at any one time.
In many marketing channels there is an outside limit on the amount of attention a marketer can grab. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere. With email marketing, there are no such costs and thus a recipient can be trivially and easily overwhelmed by marketers trying to grab their attention.
Whether its unsolicited email or just sending overly frequent solicited email, an overly full mailbox overwhelms the recipient. When this happens, they’ll start blocking mail, or hitting “this is spam” or just abandoning that email address. Faced with an overflowing inbox recipients may take drastic action in order to focus on the stuff that is really important to them.
This is a reality that many marketers don’t get. They think that they can assume that if a person purchases from their company that person wants communication from that company.

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Content marketing

beddingpic There are a lot of mailing lists I’m on simply because I can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. Every week or every few days mail shows up in my inbox. I may look at the subject line, I may even open the message. But most of it is not interesting. It’s yet another sale at Sur La Table. It’s another promo from Macheist. Virgin America wants me to book a flight. All of these messages are useful and all, particularly if I’m trying to book a flight or looking to replace the dish I broke last week. But many of these companies send content that’s so close to the same, it’s not worth a whole lot of my attention.
I don’t think I’m that unusual in this respect. People are used to getting offers and so they know they can sit back and wait until they’re ready to shop and they’re ready to buy.
This is why content marketing can be such a win. It’s different, it’s new. It’s worth my time to dig into the email and read it. We recently bought some sheets from a company and they added me to their mailing list. Every week now, I get an email with lovely pictures of relaxing bedrooms and articles on how best to sleep and wash my sheets and replace my pillow cases.
From a consumer perspective, it makes me want to have a showroom bedroom with lots of comfy linens. From a marketing perspective I appreciate the hard work and dedication that goes into generating both the lovely pictures and the useful content. But I wonder if the effort put into the content generation provides a decent return on investment.
 

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Email saves trees!

The arrival of my first spam email was a bit of a shock. I’d been on the internet for years by that point and had never seen junk mail in my inbox. Of course, the Internet was a very different place. The web was still a toddler. There was no email marketing industry. In fact, there wasn’t much commerce on the web at all. Much of the “surfing” I did was using gopher and ftp rather than the fancy new web browser called NCSA Mosaic. To share pictures we actually had to send printouts by postal mail.
It wasn’t just getting spam that was memorable (oh, great! now my inbox is going to look like my postal box, stuffed full of things I don’t want), it was the domain name: savetrees.com. Built into the domain name was an entire argument defending spam on the grounds of environmental friendliness. By sending spam instead of postal mail we could save the earth. Anyone who didn’t like it was morally corrupt and must hate the planet.
Why do I mention this history? During a discussion on a list for marketers earlier this week, multiple people mentioned that email marketing was clearly and obviously the much more environmentally sound way to do things. I mentioned this over on Facebook and one of my librarian friends (who was one of the people I was email friends with back in those early days) started doing her thing.
She posted her findings over on the Environmental News Bits blog: The comparative environmental impact of email and paper mail. It’s well worth a read, if only because a lot of companies have really looked into the issue in great detail. Much greater detail than I thought was being put into the issue.
I shared one of the links she found, the 2009 McAfee study, with the email marketing group discussing the issue. (You may want to put down the drinks before reading the next line.) It was universally panned as marketing and therefore the conclusions couldn’t be trusted.
Anyone who pays any attention knows that nothing we do and none of the choices we make are environmentally neutral. Plastic bags were supposed to save trees from becoming paper bags, but turned into an environmental mess of their own.
Simple slogans like “email saves trees” might make marketers feel better, and may have gained Cyberpromo a strong customer base in the early days. But the reality is different.

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