58% of marketers to increase spend on email marketing in 2017

A new survey of both B2C and B2B marketers found that email is the channel in which more than half will increase investment this year, followed by social pay-per-click.

by Helen Leggatt

The GetResponse study, 'Email Marketing & Beyond: Global Industry Benchmarks 2017', involved 2,510 digital marketers globally from a range of business sizes and industries. B2C respondents made up 41.8%, 19.1% are from B2B organizations and 39.1% manage both B2C and B2B.

Across all channels, email marketing was the one that marketers said would receive the highest boost in investment. More than half (58%) of marketers said they would increase email marketing budgets in 2017. Social pay-per-click comes in second, with 50% of marketers stating they would increase the budget for this channel this year.

Meanwhile, only 31% of the marketers surveyed said they would be increasing spending on display advertising in 2017, about the same number as those who expect to increase spending on direct mail (32%).

In terms of ROI, 18% of those surveyed said email marketing delivered the highest ROI, closely followed by social media marketing (17%).

Research by Coherent Path reveals that many retailers feel pressured to send more and more emails because, says James Glover, the company's CEO, they "get addicted to the ROI". Indeed, the research found that 76% of marketers rely on email for revenue and, as a consequence, more than half send at least 3 emails each week. Ten percent send more than 5 emails a week.

Yet, new research commissioned by Engage Hub found that 90% of consumers have cancelled email communications from retailers in the past of which nearly half (46%) did so because of the high frequency of messaging. A quarter (24%) of respondents claimed to receive an email every day from some retailers which 15% claimed to receive even more.