Email and Social Marketing Top Budgets

A new StrongMail survey in late November, conducted by Zoomerang, reflects the attitudes of  business leaders in regards to their planned marketing budgets, priorities and challenges for 2011. The data reveals an optimistic marketing outlook, with half of businesses planning to increase marketing budgets, and another 43% keeping them steady. And, for the second year in a row, email marketing and social media marketing remain the top targets for increased spend.

Survey Highlights

• 93% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2010
• 41% of business cite lack of resources/staff as primary email marketing challenge in 2011; 41% data integration; 36% email deliverability
• 52% of businesses cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2011 email marketing initiative; 49% improving segmentation/targeting; 43% integrating email and social media
• 65% of businesses plan to increase marketing budget for email; 57% social media; 41% search
• 71% of businesses plan to integrate email and social media in 2010

According to the survey, half of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2011, and another 43% plan to maintain current levels. Only 7% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, a significant improvement over the 11% reported in last year’s survey.  Despite budget increases, respondents indicated a lack of resources/staff to be the biggest email marketing challenge in 2011, representing a potential demand for outsourced marketing services. Integration with customer data and email deliverability rounded out the top three email marketing challenges for 2011.

Email marketing and social media will be the top areas of investment in 2011, followed by Search, Direct Mail and Tradeshows/Events are the top targets for decreased spend. This is a marked improvement over last year’s survey, says the report, which found marketers reducing spend in these areas by 42% and 44% respectively.

The most important email marketing initiatives for 2011 are increasing subscriber engagement, improving segmentation and targeting, and integrating social media and email marketing. On the latter point, a full 71% have already integrated email and social, or plan to 2011.

Among social media initiatives, Facebook is the biggest priority, followed by viral/referral marketing programs. Marketing via Twitter and implementing social media management technology tied for third place. Awareness building is the primary goal for social media marketing initiatives, followed by loyalty acquisition and reaching new audiences. As is the case with any new channel, social media marketing is seen as least effective at generating leads and revenue.

Ryan Deutsch, vice president of strategic services at StrongMail, concludes that

“… marketers… are focused on increasing subscriber engagement through increased relevancy and automating lifecycle communications (in 2011)… though struggling with insufficient resources, this challenge can be overcome with the right marketing partner… ”

To review the release, please visit Strongmail here, or full survey data in PDF format may be found here.