Digital Marketing Ideas

Why Retail Loves E-Mail – eMarketer
The link above is to a pretty good article at eMarketer discussing the use of e-mail by retailers during 2008.
An interesting take away from the article is that retailers increased their email quantity from 8.8 per month in January 08 to 14.6 per month in December! Another strong point was that 90% of the top retailers increased their holiday email volume as well.

“Retailers ratcheted up their e-mail marketing campaigns to aggressively compete for consumers’ dwindling spending dollars,” says Jeff Grau, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Retail E-Mail: Online Marketing Strategies. “That was due largely to the fact that e-mail is cheap to administer and delivers an ROI far superior to paid search, catalogs and other marketing media.”

Still, with all of the increased volume in email marketing, it still only accounts for 1.5% of direct marketing budgets in the US!

However, between email marketing and PPC marketing, that is changing rapidly. Spends in both categories so far in 2009 are up versus the same period in 2008. Why, you ask? Because email and PPC marketing are measurable, testable, traceable, more cost effective, and much more customizable than traditional marketing (both brand marketing and direct marketing) and advertisers can do more for less.