E-mail Popular, but Disappointing for Some: CMO Survey

Search engine optimization, e-mail, and e-mail newsletter marketing are by far the most popular digital marketing methods among C-level advertising executives, according to a study released last week by Forbes.

However, e-mail came in relatively low in the area of meeting or exceeding marketers’ expectations, according to Forbes.

In the survey conducted during February and March, 74% of the of 112 respondents said they use the two channels, while 58% said they use pay-per-click search, making it the third most popular digital marketing method, according to Forbes.

However, 35% of the respondents said e-mail had failed to meet their marketing expectations, according to the survey, placing the channel third last in that category. Twelve percent of the respondents said e-mail surpassed their expectations while 53% said the channel met them.

Sarah Barber, senior vice president of marketing for Walter Karl Interactive, an infoGroup company whose siblings include Yesmail, said she suspects that many of the marketers who weren’t satisfied with e-mail failed to formulate a plan before they started collecting names.

“We deal directly with these e-mail marketing programs and the messaging strategy is often forgotten about or left for last, an afterthought at best,” she said. “What so many marketers fail to realize is that the strategy should come first and then the technology considerations need to match it instead of the other way around. Would you bake a cake and look at the recipe after it comes out of the oven?”

Tops in the expectations department was search engine optimization with 35% saying it surpassed them, 51% saying it met them and just 14% saying the channel hadn’t met them, according to Forbes.

The bottom channel in the expectations category was ad networks, with 9% of respondents saying the networks surpassed their expectations, 42% saying they met them and 49% saying they hadn’t met them, according to Forbes.

Meanwhile, for companies with digital ad budgets of $1 million or more, e-mail and e-mail newsletters came in third in terms of popularity, with 71% of the marketers from those firms indicating they use it.

Search engine optimization and pay-per-click search were first and second with 86% and 82% of marketers from companies with $1 million-plus digital budgets saying they use the channels.