Email Marketing vs. Search Marketing
January 28th, 2008 | Marilou BarsamA recent marketing survey, conducted by Datran Media to online marketing professionals, revealed that 80% of marketers call email the best performing online medium. The survey even has email beating out search! The survey also indicated that 82% of the marketer’s surveyed plan to increase their email marketing spends in 2008 by 82%.
In terms of success, I have seen that one medium doesn’t necessary outperform the other - in order to receive optimal results the two mediums need to work together. What is your company’s plan in terms of allocating budget towards email vs. search in ‘08?
Have you found that one medium outperforms the other?
January 28th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Not sure there’s a correlation here… the two mediums have significantly different behaviors and occur at very different times along the process a consumer takes from prospect to purchaser. Email is, very often, contingent on already having a relationship with the consumer. Search doesn’t require that relationship. I tend to see Email as more of an upsell and retention tool - where search is more of an acquisition tool.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
It’s interesting to see the numbers you posted about Karen.
And I agree with you that a one-two punch is generally more effective than either tactic standing alone. Integrated marketing is the ante these days vs best practices, for sure.
I was just reading B2B magazine’s latest data about trends, too. What do you make of online marketers’ projections about what they’ll be investing in years from now? When I encounter such survey questions I try to skip them because I think the prudent — and totally unsexy — answer is ‘it depends!’
Our advice to clients in say 2011 about the most effective marketing allocations depends on things like ESPs’ relationships with the biggest domains; whether chat overtakes email for peer-to-peer communications, as the experts predict; on whether a niche engine like business.com continues to gain market share from Google…
How would you predict you’ll be advising clients on say email vs search marketing in 2011?
June 6th, 2008 at 5:27 am
It depends on how well you use both, really.
If your web strategy (let’s not limit ourselves to search marketing, let alone PPC marketing) leaves much to be desured, then of course your email has good chances in outperforming it.
The survey, in this matter, doesn’t really show any relaible data.
Given that it also depends on each particular case (web-savviness, competitiveness, etc), then you can probably only gauge the ROI of email/search by your own experiences.