Email Marketing Remains Tops For SMBs

Eye-Popping Effectiveness Stats

Market researcher eMarketer reports that the latest research on marketing trends for small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) – and in this case, retailers – shows that email marketing remains the top tactic for both customer acquisition and retention. This research, pushes back the notion expressed by some, that email is losing momentum.

See more on why you should be using email to attract and retain customers…

The research was conducted in February and March of 2016 by WBR Digital (a content and demand generation services company) and emarsys (a marketing automation services company), so the data is really fresh. The researchers surveyed 254 professionals at retail operations with revenues under $100 million.

What they discovered is that nearly four out of five executives identify email marketing as their top tactic, both for customer acquisition AND for customer retention. In looking at various other “digital tactics” to reach customers, email marketing was well over its next closest tactic, organic search, for customer acquisition, and social media, the second most popular tactic for customer retention. The margin for this improvement, statistically speaking, was huge.

We have recently seen a few surveys suggesting that email marketing is losing its pull. This could be partly due to the overall volume of email that people tend to receive. However, if you’ve built your email list properly, then your messages will tend to carry more weight than the unsolicited message – many of which are SPAM.

In looking at why email marketing remains so popular, eMarketer suggests marketers are gaining greater returns by personalizing their email marketing message – something that with other tactics, isn’t always possible. Other studies have shown persuasively that when you personalize your email messages, returns improve measurably.

In addition to personalization, eMarketer points to the many tools that make using email so much easier for the marketer. For many SMBs, email marketing is done in-house, while other more complicated methods require outside experts.

Learn more about eMarketer at: www.emarketer.com.