Report: Email Provides Best ROI for Retail Marketers
Digital ad spend is growing. Marketers need to know how to optimize what they're spending. So at GetResponse, we’ve conducted a study to help marketers improve the effectiveness of their email marketing, discover benchmarks for specific industries, and help compare and identify where to improve.
In the report, we assess the current state of email marketing based on a research study surveying 2,510 email marketers from a range of business sizes and industries around the world. Here’s a look at our findings for the retail industry.
Email Marketing Delivers Highest ROI
In our poll of retail marketers, 18 percent cited email as the channel that delivered the strongest return on investment for their company. SEO (17 percent) was a close second, followed by social media, which delivered a 16 percent ROI.
Our research found that search pay per click (13 percent), as well as social PPC and affiliate marketing (12 percent each) were the “middle of the pack” channels. Marketers said that content marketing (7 percent), direct mail (5 percent) and display advertising (4 percent) provided the weakest ROI.
ROI Compared With Budget
Based on the numbers we found, retail marketers are now adjusting their budgets to reflect the channels and techniques with the best ROI. Fifty-one percent have increased their email marketing budget, while 41 percent have dedicated more money to their SEO budget.
Retail marketers have also increased their marketing budgets by 45 percent for search PPC, 53 percent for social PPC, and 28 percent for affiliate marketing. According to our data, marketers increased their spending by 41 percent for content marketing, 24 percent for direct mail, and 31 percent for display advertising — even though these three channels had the weakest ROI.
28% of Retailers Don’t Have Metrics to Measure Email Marketing
This study also sought to figure out which email metrics retail marketers use, and how they measure success. A surprisingly high percentage of marketers (28 percent) said that they don’t currently have any metrics that they focus on. Twenty-three percent use lower-funnel conversion metrics like revenue, sales, downloads or event attendance to determine success, while 21 percent use high-funnel engagement metrics such as opens and clicks. Twenty percent say that an increase in subscribers is their leading metric, while only 8 percent of marketers use mid-funnel conversion metrics such as form-fills (e.g. subscriptions, lead generation and inquiries).
Our report found that retail marketers regard email as the most valued channel for increasing ROI. The next step is to identify exactly which metrics help measure email marketing success the best, as well as how much of their company’s total budget they should realistically devote to the channel.
Michał Leszczyński is the content marketing manager at GetResponse, an email marketing and automation company.
