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.

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?