Direct Marketing Association Report Indicates Internet Marketing Increasing

By admin • March 12th, 2009

The demand for direct mail marketing remains strong, but clearly marketing online is gaining momentum with businesses looking to cut costs and reach broader audiences. Over 32% of the reportâ€™s respondents are considering running pilot projects in social networking while nearly 26% are examining them for blogs, followed by 25% for user-generated content.Â Results have backed up these plans. Just over 12% of marketers have run successful pilots with social networking compared with slightly more than 3% that were unhappy with the results. Similar positive spreads occurred for blogs: nearly 12% versus almost 5% and for user-generated content: approximately 10% compared with approaching 3%.Â

There are bold variations in the direct marketing verticals on new media interest and piloting. Education marketers are particularly strong adopters of podcasts, RSS Feeds, and online videos. For example, over 60% are either using podcasts or considering using these within the next year. Â At the same time the report noted that a significant amount of financial services marketers were skeptical about using new media and have concluded that the channel is not effective for their markets.

Of all the channels outbound call centers that provide telemarketing had the highest average response rate (4.41% for house lists and 2.92% for prospect lists), followed closely by catalogs (3.95% house lists and 1.85% prospect lists) and direct mail marketing (3.65% house lists and 1.65% prospect lists).Â Yet telemarketingâ€™s relative effectiveness in generating response outcome comes as no surprise, said the report. As the highest-cost media, this channel needs high response to justify its high expenses.

E-mail, despite the bad press on spam, seems to be shining through. Statistics for this channel are stabilizing, with open rates in the low to mid teens for house lists, click-through rates in the high single-digits, and conversion rates in the mid single-digits.Â Â Thanks to such numbers e-mail is now 12.6 % of marketersâ€™ budgets, third only to direct mail and Internet marketing. 57.1% of respondents expect increasing their e-mail budgets, while just 8% plan to decrease them. According to the DMA report, the reduced cost per view continues to be email marketing most significant advantage, when comparing with traditional marketing channels.Â Â While 35% of direct marketing budgets remain allocated to direct mail, the largest single portion, the reports says the trend is away from print media and towards digital media like e-mail but also including mobile marketing, Internet marketing, and paid search. Fewer respondents expect to increase direct mail spending (27.2%) than decrease it (33%). Read the complete article >