If I give you $1 will you give me $42 in return?
I won’t hold my breath that you’ll be into that, but that’s ok – Email will. Email marketing returns $40.56 for every dollar spent on it, according to the DMA. This is compared to catalogues’ ROI of $7.30, search’s return of $22.24, Internet display advertising’s return of $19.72 and mobile’s return of $10.51.
So, email rocks on and makes a ton of cash. But who cares?- no one is even using ROI to plan their budgets apparently. According to the most recent ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey, 9 out of 10 finance executives said they don’t use return-on-investment metrics to set marketing budgets in the annual budgeting cycle. Two-thirds instead take a predetermined percentage of revenue or simply adjust last year’s budget. For whatever reason, CFO’s don’t believe the numbers. So what’s the point of taking your success story to them to get more budget allocated? Anecdotally, to get budget, many marketers are doing what they were advised to do at a Brainy Breakfast, which you can re-read in this post: Get out the scissors
It’s much like the opportunity we talked about for the email channel to work harder – ‘yes we know we should, but we’re not now’ they said – that article is here.
The best way that I can add some weight to the push to increase the money that you allocate to email marketing is to weigh in with the news that we have clients whose email programs are delivering much more than that, and you can read our post which may help give you the ammunition you need to up that email marketing budget.
To further inspire you with some impressive reasons to actually look at your ROI, here are some of the latest email marketing ROI stats:
In 2013, 41% of marketers confirm inbound produces measurable ROI, and a staggering 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing. – HubSpot “2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report” (2013)
60% of respondents said that email marketing is producing ROI for their organization. – MarketingSherpa “2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report” (2013)
54% of organizations generate 20% or more of overall revenue through email marketing. – DMA “National Client Email Report” (2013)k for each $1 you spend
How much more convincing do you need? Go forth and ROI!
