State of Marketing 2015: 73% of Marketers Say Email is Critical to their Business

Marketers are looking for valuable insights and tactics to inform their marketing this 2015. Fortunately, Salesforce has published its second annual 2015 State of Marketing report. Salesforce surveyed more than 5,000 marketers from around the globe to understand their challenges and priorities for the year. Interestingly, one of the most relevant findings from the study concerns email marketing, which continues to be a top marketing strategy for companies.

Along with social and mobile, email remains an effective platform for marketers, with 73% of them agreeing that email marketing remains core to their business. This means that marketers are able to drive more traffic to their sites with the use of email marketing. With increased traffic, their products and services can be viewed by more people; hence, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Furthermore, 60% of marketers believe that email marketing is a “critical enabler of products and services”—up from 42% who held the same opinion in 2014.

“Email’s growing importance coincides with the increased popularity of smartphones, which offer consumers a constant inbox in their pocket,” the report said. Approximately one third of marketers reported that their subscribers use mobile devices to view emails “at least 50% of the time”. As a result, half of the marketers surveyed said they will be increasing their email marketing budget this year to cater to the greater number of email subscribers and mobile users.

The study further revealed that more and more marketers (92%) consider email marketing to be a significant source of ROI. [See Figure 2]

Salesforce also asked marketers “to share which email campaigns they use and how effective they find these campaigns.” While some email marketing campaigns are used more often than others, there appears to be a disconnect between the usage rates of email marketing campaigns and their effectiveness.

For example, marketers commonly use newsletters for their campaigns, but are they really effective? As shown in Figure 3 below, most marketers (63%) make use of newsletters, but only 66% find them very effective/effective. The report explained that “when it comes to email, many marketers aren’t trying new campaigns that rank extremely high in effectiveness, instead relying on old standbys.” While mobile opt-in campaigns were rated the most effective, only 26% of marketers use them.

Salesforce’s study also mentioned the increasing relevance of social media and mobile devices in creating a “cohesive customer journey”. Seventy-four percent of B2C marketers plan to increase their spending on social media advertising, as well as social media marketing in 2015. Meanwhile, 67% of B2C marketers plan to invest on location-based mobile tracking, and 66% on mobile apps in 2015.

To learn more about the social media and mobile plans of marketers for 2015, read our story here.

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