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According to a new study by the Direct Marketing Association, and as reported in DIRECT, email marketing delivers the highest ROI of all media available to marketers. Having just finished reading a pre-release version of WOMMA president Andy Sernovitz’ new book - Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking - he would probably argue that word of mouth marketing would have the highest ROI as you can get that going with no investments.

The DMA research shows that the return on email marketing in 2005 was $57.25 for every dollar spent, compared to $7.09 for catalog marketing and $22.52 for non-email Internet marketing. The study also projects that all the ROI’s for the different media marketing options are headed down-ward.

The same research also estimates that the commercial email market in the US was $16.5B in 2005, while the direct marketing-driven sales hit $1.806 trillion in 2005 - projected to hit $2.627 trillion in 2011!

Ouch…that sounds like a lot of wasted dollars…there should be better ways to reach people. And no matter what Set Godin says about messaging frequency vs. “being full ,” there ought to be better solutions out there to resolve the ambient findability problem in marketing!

The DIRECT article did not mention anything about the methodology used by DMA - but it is assumed that the study looked at investments vs. “new” customers and “new” revenues - which is a really bad transaction-based metric in marketing.

A more interesting metric would have been to understand how email direct marketing impacts long term customer-relationship-based revenue streams for companies. Isn’t that where the real profitability lies?

MARKETING - it’s not the transaction anymore, it’s the relationship, dummy!

[Tags: direct marketing ambient findability marketing innovation email marketing word of mouth marketing WOM]

According to ReturnPath, fewer than 1% of sending IP addresses are not sending SPAM (full research brief here via revenue)

Could any self-governance guidelines from an industry association or government regulations have prevented this total distruction of email marketing? Are other popular marketing techniques going to end in the same boat?

[Tags: direct marketing email marketing spam wom]

Excerpted from their Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2005-2006, this short report (pdf) on “the top three search marketing trends to watch” is pretty interesting.

The three trends are:

• Search engines as tv networks jockeying for audience - using search engines is the third most popular activity online, just behind email and surfing. The fact that there are only a few search engines being used reminds the author of the TV audience in the 70’s when there were only 3 channels.
• SEO still a tiny portion of total search marketing spend - only 12% of paid search budget was spent on SEO/free listing optimization (although that number is growing)
• Search marketing - a new application for press releases. This one states that if end users can now read press releases online, reporters are no longer interested in them. Companies now use search engine optimized releases to talk directly with end users.

I am surprised not to find anything blog related in the report. After all, blogs do get you higher rankings in the search engines and many companies are starting to use those as vehicles to communicate directly with end users.

[Technorati Tags: search marketing seo]

According to MarketingSherpa, the opening rate of email newsletters has plummeted by 10 points in the last year (here - free for 3 weeks or so).

The main reasons seem to be a combination of spam filters and reader boredom. The fix? Switch to irregular email broadcasts.

[Technorati Tags: email newsletter email marketing email]

WOW - Marketing Sherpa just released a paper saying that “54% of Permission Emailers Are Filtered as Spammers: Including AOL News, Wal-Mart, IBM and the Feds” by Yahoo, Hotmail, and GMail (here - free through June 19th).

I guess it’s time to switch to RSS marketing!

[Technorati Tags: email rss marketing]

Matt McAlister over at InforWorld wonders what the future of web site will be in the face of growing RSS usage (here). He is drawing an analogy between RSS and web sites and what the web did to print publications.

It’s an interesting - although a bit alarmist - perspective from a traditional publisher.

RSS is full of opportunities. If you can believe Lockergnome, they are seeing a 5:1 ratio of click throughs on rss feeds vs. their email subscribers (according to marketing studies). But beyond that, the biggest opportunities for RSS may be in area of content personalization.

[Technorati Tags: rss email publishing]