Articles

March 2007 - E-marketing Minute - Direct Marketing

What avenues do your peers plan to use in their direct marketing efforts in 2007?

According to a poll conducted by Target Marketing magazine, more direct marketers plan to increase spending for online methods. E-mail leads the pack of most-used media with 52 percent of marketers expecting to increase their spending. Next is direct mail (41 percent expect to spend more), search engine marketing otherwise known as paid search (40 percent), search engine optimization (37 percent) and direct response space advertising (24 percent).

Other interesting results from Target Marketing's poll:

Direct mail was reported to be their best return-on-investment generator of new customers (32 percent), e-mail is second (22 percent) and catalogs are third (10 percent).

For customer retention, on the other hand, 35 percent of the marketers polled say e-mail marketing has a better ROI, followed closely by direct mail (31 percent) and outbound telE-marketing (10 percent).

Target Marketing conducted this survey in January by e-mailing its questionnaire to 19,000 of the magazine's print subscribers who have opted in to receive e-mail messages from the magazine. The article is available as a pdf on their Web site, http://www.targetmarketingmag.com.