Eighty-five percent of marketers and marketing service providers expect that their budgets for online direct marketing will increase in 2007, according to a new study by Alterian, a marketing software
provider.
For the study, Alterian surveyed 540 marketers, agencies and marketing service providers in North America and Europe last October. The majority of respondents--about
69%--said they specifically planned to increase e-mail spending. "E-mail marketing has quickly become the most popular form of online marketing today," the study stated. About four in 10
marketers--38%--said they planned to increase their use of personalized landing pages, while around 33% said they planned to increase use of banner ads.
But despite the planned surge, online
spending remains relatively low compared to spending in traditional media. Sixty-one percent of respondents reported expenditures of less than $500,000 annually on online marketing, compared to 28%
who reported spending more than $5 million on offline campaigns.
U.K.-based marketers were more bearish on offline ads than their North American counterparts--with 25% of British respondents
reporting that they intend to decrease their offline budgets, compared to 7% of North American respondents. North American marketers and agencies were more in favor of integrated marketing, with 50%
of North American respondents favoring an increase in both online and offline spending, compared to 22% of U.K. respondents.