Brunner: Moms' preferred brand communication channel is email

According to a recent survey by full-service ad agency Brunner, women with children age 12 and under living at home find time to check their email accounts regularly. In fact, of the 400 or so women surveyed a whopping 96% check their inbox at least once a day.

Furthermore, 80% look forward to checking their email.

"This is great news for marketers because, despite information overload, email marketing continues to be a viable channel to engage moms," said Ken Johns, SVP, Director of 1:1 for Brunner.

"When brands understand what moms' prefer, they have the opportunity to build trust, stronger relationships and ultimately drive them to take action."

The majority of moms (85%) look forward to receiving coupons and over three-quarters (78%) prefer to receive information about sales and promotions. Coupons and promotions drive nearly three-quarters (73%) in-store and 63% print coupons for brands they want to use, or try, so they have it handy for their next trip to the store.

Over half of respondents said they tend to read emails with time-sensitive subject lines but, on the whole, 45% prefer an email frequency of one per week from any one brand.

However, emails that aren't relevant or contain content of no interest are likely to lead to moms un-subscribing. Brunner's survey found that 50% would un-subscribe if email frequency and relevancy was not to their liking.

Ice-cream giants Ben & Jerry recently decided to stop using email in favor of social marketing - a move which some see as short-sighted.

"While Ben and Jerry's may have financial motivation for dropping their email newsletter, perhaps they should have been focusing on how to make their newsletter altogether more relevant and tightly integrated with the social media programs, rather than killing it altogether," says Charles Nicholls, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at SeeWhy, in a recent blog post.

Nicholls believes that Ben & Jerry's will likely reverse the decision in due course because "email is too important a channel to ignore."

Tags: brand communications, brand marketing, coupons, email, email marketing, promotions