• by Jess Nelson , January 6, 2017

“Email marketing” and “online video marketing” comprised more than three-quarters of the online and digital activities of marketers, according to a month-long study by True Influence. The study suggests that email marketing was the most read-about and sought after marketing tactic among professionals in the industry during the busy holiday season. 

True Influence examined the intent signals of marketers between November 15 and December 15, 2016 using proprietary software. The company also used a baseline database of over two years of online behavior to compare research results to, and uses this comparison to examine whether interest is increasing or declining. 

The data comes from the company's DaaS solution, InsightBASE. InsightBASE monitors the online behavior of employees at American companies, such as white paper downloads and website visits, which True Influence dubs "intent" data. Basically, InsightBASE tells users what type of content industry professionals are consuming.

Video and email marketing were the two most searched-for marketing topics among marketing professionals, according to True Influence’s report, compromising 78% of total intent signals.

Email marketing was the top keyword during the study, generating more than 5.5 million intent signals, according to True Influence. Online video marketing followed closely behind in signal count, but the two marketing keywords outranked "marketing management software" by four million intent signals each. Marketing automation and location-based marketing rounded out the top five trending marketing topics.

A blog post describes factors that explain why email was the most sought-for topic, as well as the importance of predicting consumer and buyer behavior and the challenge that marketers face with fixed budgets and little room to experiment with marketing.

Another reason that email may reign supreme is that it’s still the best bang for the buck, meaning that it has the highest return on investment per dollar spent. Email had a median ROI of 122% in a June 2016 study by the Direct Marketing Association (now the Data & Marketing Association), quadrupling the performance of social media, direct mail and paid search campaigns.