• by Ray Schultz , April 9, 2019

Email marketing budgets are going up this year — at least for some brands.

A new study by Litmus shows that 45.9% of companies will increase their email spending overall.

The same report indicates that 4.3% % will decrease their email budgets, and for 50% their budgets will remain flat. 

“That’s a great sign that many brands recognize that email is not dead after all. In fact, its return on investment is growing year after year, coming in at 42:1 on average,” writes Whitney Rudeseal Peet in a company blog post.

Apparently, some dollars are being shoveled into omnichannel integration. And less will be spent on outside agencies — 14.1% plan to budget more on outsiders, down from 16.2% in 2018, as well as spending more on internal staff.

Litmus surveyed around 1,300 marketing executives.

Here are the percentages of companies hiking their budgets:

• - Email marketing overall — 45.9% 
• - Integration of email with other channels — 48.9% 
• - Email education, conferences, and training — 36.4%
• - Email team personnel — 33%
• - Email tools provided by non-ESPs (planning, testing, analytics, etc.) — 30.7%
• - Email service providers — 20.1%
• - Email agencies, consultants and freelancers — 14.5%

Rudeseal Peet concludes: “Our research shows that the majority of brands continues to invest in the tools, teams, and resources that help bring their email programs to the next level — which ultimately allows them to reach their audiences more effectively.”