By Elmer on June 17, 2009

Forrester Research recently released its findings that email marketing spend in the US will reach $2 billion by 2014. This year, the value is around US$1.2 billion.

Some may wonder why is this so. Email marketing has been with us for a while, longer than paid search or microblogging technologies and whose effectiveness coupled with bad reputation of spam. Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst David Daniels revealed that the increase of spending will just represent wasted marketing budgets as direct marketers will waste US$144 million on inefficient campaigns, and continuously lacking relevance. Therefore, more emails will be sent out, but most of them will not reach their intended audience.

The reason for the increased allocation is primarily because of falling costs of sending emails and increased popularity of email marketing to marketers and users. Unfortunately, the US$144 million is quite a hefty amount to waste, especially if it would mean email recipients get 9,000 more marketing emails yet their response remains unchanged.

9,000 more marketing mails in 2014 means 24 more emails per day will reach our inbox. That naturally leads users to be more discriminating on what they read; it’s easy to dismiss an email if a user doesn’t understand its message clearly in say, a few seconds.

Forrester also offered its advise on what marketers should do in their future EDM campaigns:

1. Segmentation of mailing lists. Never assume that all email recipients have the same interests. The more specialized lists you have, the better. You send more emails in smaller list sizes, but to more targeted audience.

2. Increase integration with social media. This calls for more integration between emails and say, Facebook, in spreading the whole message. Other initiatives include share to social calls to action links and buttons.

3. Maintain clean lists. It’s always been an email’s best practice to keep mailing lists cleansed from bounce, non-existent, malformed and duplicate emails.

To summarize, the findings of Forrester strongly suggest that email marketing will continue to be one of the most underutilized medium of online marketing. Imagine what can US$144 million budget can do if it’s not wasted down to the recycle bin.

Photo credit: richseattle

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