Recently email marketing service provider Silverpop announced the results of a survey it conducted in late November.
The survey of 300 email marketers found that 88% of respondents said the recession continues. Furthermore, three-quarters said it's hurt their business. Silverpop also asked the respondents when they think the recession might end. 36% of them answered ‘not anytime soon’.
Good outlook for email marketing budgets
However, the outlook for email marketing remains good. Four out of 10 respondents said that their email budgets will increase in 2010 and 47% said they would stay the same.
For 52% increasing customer loyalty is priority number one for 2010. Next comes driving incremental revenue with 51% of respondents.
Among the main challenges in email marketing the Silverpop survey found "inbox clutter" with 37% of respondents.
Silverpop refers to data from Forrester Research that estimated a while ago that consumers will receive more than 9,000 email marketing messages a year by 2014. 22% of email marketers also said they will struggle with "providing timely and relevant content."
Silverpop also refers to MarketingSherpa that has reported that lack of relevance is main reason people unsubscribe to email programs.
Jean-Paul De Clerck is a 360° interactive marketing consultant, founder of the Fusion Marketing Experience and owner of conversionation. You can connect with him via Twitter.
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Creating a Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire for Email List Owners
I agree that the outlook is now somewhat more positive for email marketers. I also agree that customer loyalty and retention will be hot topics in the coming 12 months. My own clients have just passed through a year of challenges and most are acutely aware of the difficulty of gaining new customers in today's hyper-competitive climate. So what's needed?
Although many offline businesses are busy implementing loyalty metrics and programs designed to improve retention, email marketers seem to be stuck focusing on deliverability and behavioral analytics like open rate, unsubscribes, click through, etc. Obviously these list metrics are important - I'm not suggesting that marketers should ignore them.
What I am suggesting, is that these measures should supplemented with survey based information.
I'm a big fan of Fred Reichheld's Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a starting point for an ongoing customer satisfaction 'discussion' with your subscriber or customer list. While not perfect, it goes a long way toward starting a true conversation with customers or subscribers. By asking just a couple of questions in a brief online survey, list owners can gain new insights into the strength of their relationship with their customers and how best to work on improving those relationships.
I've written elsewhere, in The Customer Satisfaction Questionnaire Blog, that the process of assessing the quality of your list is inexpensive, fast and easy to implement. Doing so on a regular basis will provide a source of feedback that will help you prioritize your product/content development efforts and offer a robust metric that can be tracked over time.
Andy Perkins