Digital Impact, Inc. today released the conclusions of its "Trends in Direct Marketing Study," a comprehensive qualitative report based on interview responses from senior marketers in Fortune 1000
companies. Among this sophisticated group of marketers, findings showed that email is viewed as a highly strategic aspect of their overall marketing and communications and will be more tightly
integrated with other forms of direct marketing over the next several months.
As one respondent said, "Most marketers are shifting to email from direct mail...because it gets responses faster and
is easier to measure. Our strategy is to convert offline names to email as soon as possible."
Conducted by a third party, the interviews targeted the most senior marketing executive responsible for
direct mail at companies with minimum annual sales of $1 billion and in most cases exceeding $10 billion. The study revealed that most sophisticated marketers view email marketing as a strategic
initiative, which, when done well, plays a critical role in building relationships with clients and prospects.
The study also established that while most marketers want to integrate online and
offline marketing efforts, they face many hurdles, including data management and analysis, and organizational issues.
"Email had been the sole province of the online marketing group, but we
realized that we need to integrate our marketing efforts and so we moved the email group to the regular marketing group and now all the channels can be supported from a centralized organization," said
one respondent.
However, despite these challenges, marketers are committed to leveraging the potential of email marketing to drive revenue and deepen relationships with existing customers across
channels.
According to another respondent, "We're going through a revolution in thinking that email can do more than just bring people to our Web site...We collect email addresses in stores to use
them to alert people to what's going on in the store. We follow-up catalogs with relevant emails...The channels are integrating more closely."
David Kleinberg, senior vice president of marketing at
Digital Impact, said the study further validates the important role of email marketing in the development of integrated marketing initiatives at Fortune 1000 companies."