• by Masha Geller , August 19, 2003

Arial Software today released a new email study, and despite all this talk about spam destroying the email industry at its root, it looks like the future actually holds some encouraging growth figures.

Naturally, the findings of "Email Marketing Trends 2003," are consistent with every other prediction floating around out there, including email marketing growth expectations published by Jupiter Research, Forrester Research, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the DMA, but the reasons aren't exactly what we're used to. It's all about multi-channel marketing, folks.

Arial President and CEO Mike Adams said one of the strongest points of the study is the percentages involving an increased reliance of firms on multi-channel marketing. "Email marketing is not a threat to existing marketing activities. It is designed to complement what companies are doing already," Adams said.

According to the study, companies are combining email marketing campaigns with other formats such as website offers, print media advertising and direct mail, according to the report. According to the data, 50% use email with website offers or promotions, 40% pair it with print media advertising, 30% combine it with direct mail and 10% use email with retail solicitations or campaigns.

Of study respondents, 76% reported they are planning to increase their email marketing volume in 2003, while 12% reported they will decrease outbound email volume. This indicates a strong expectation among companies conducting email marketing campaigns of a steady increase in the number of email subscribers, customers, online members and readers they will reach though 2003. These data indicate that email marketing remains a healthy industry, with strong growth projected through 2003.

The good news is firms are also reporting an increase in their sensitivity to email recipients by capping email frequency, segmenting messages to subsets of the recipient database, increasing the image recognition of outbound emails with logos or graphics and more sophisticated in-house designs and, among other things, avoiding sending emails to lists obtained from outside sources (although I'll believe that last one when I actually see the volume of spam in my inbox decrease.)