According to the “2010 Marketing Trends” survey done by StrongMail, online marketing spending is expected to increase this year. For the survey, over 1,000 business executives across a wide range of industries were contacted. Below are some of the highlights of the report:
- 89% of respondents plan to increase or maintain their marketing spending this year.
- 69% plan to increase email marketing spending.
- 59% plan to increase social media marketing spending.
- 69% plan to integrate social media and email marketing.
According to Hersant, below are the possible directions where email marketing will be headed this year:
Targeted Segmentation and Marketing. This could be utilized to produce a referral program with customers who are most active with their brand as they are deemed as top influencers. Tools that will help marketers examine engagement metrics and know who the most active users are on their lists are finally being released to the market. UnBound Technologies and Rapleaf Inc. are among the companies who, based on your lists, can determine which of your recipients are active on social media sites as well as the networks they are on.
As cited by 46% of the respondents of the survey, marketers reported a desire to improve segmentation and marketing.
Using Video in Email. This can help marketers increase relevancy. With videos, it becomes easier to promote things that customers are interested in. Technology that converts videos into animated GIFs also seems promising.
Relevance Engines. This is a new technology in email marketing that will become more important this year as it allows one to perform easier A/B testing.
With these new tools, marketers will be able to test immediately and create a winning subject line even in the midst an ongoing campaign.
Making Better Use Of Existing Resources and Information. As cited by 68% of the respondents, marketers plan on making better use of the resources and the information they already have on hand.
With this in mind, marketers should increase their level of personalization and targeting. Sending email messages based on the purchasing history of customers is something that marketers could be doing but aren’t.