News Focus: Online - Email is future of marketing

by Suzanne Bidlake, Direct Response 14-Jun-06

The low cost and high speed of email look set to make it as popular a marketing medium as direct mail in 2006, according to a new report from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

Volumes of email marketing are poised to increase by 43 per cent this
year, according the DMA's National Email Benchmarking Report. Such a
rise would boost the number of emails sent from 3.2 billion last year to

a figure approaching five billion - roughly the total number of direct

mail items dispatched in 2005.

But email could have already overtaken mail as a favoured direct
marketing tool, said Richard Gibson, chair of the DMA's Email Marketing
Council Benchmarking Hub. The survey only includes marketing messages
emailed by 75 per cent of outsourcing operations, and not those sent by
companies such as Amazon and Ebay to their customers, which would swell
figures significantly.

The DMA also revealed that opt-out rates are falling. More than half of
the Email Service Providers (ESPs) sampled for the benchmarking report
recorded an average opt-out rate of less than 0.5 per cent for
acquisition campaigns in the last quarter of 2005. More than two-thirds
reported the same rate for retention campaigns. In the corresponding
period in 2004, just 40 per cent achieved that rate for either type of
campaign.

"The continued growth of email marketing reiterates its importance as an
effective marketing channel - in terms of both driving current customers
to websites and acquiring new ones," said Gibson.

"This positive feeling in the supplier market reinforces the confidence
that client marketers have in email marketing, and we should expect to
see an increase in both the number of clients using email marketing and
in the average mailing volumes of existing email marketers."