I recently saw results from a survey done by our friends over at Bredin Business Information, a company that specializes in small business research. Although there weren’t a huge amount of participants in the survey, I thought it was very telling for the state of email marketing and social media.

According to Bredin Business Information:

Our most recent survey asked SMB marketers how effective their email newsletters are in the “always on” era of Twitter, blogs, forums and social networks. The net: email newsletters
continue to work well.

Of the respondents, 58%currently have an email newsletter for small and medium businesses. Here’s their take:

  • Performance is on target. 53% of respondents rate their newsletters as performing on or above overall goals. 48% say their newsletter performance is improving slowly, and 38% report no change in performance – in other words, roughly nine out of 10 newsletters are holding steady or improving, even as social networking dominates the B2B press.
  • Well perceived. 48% of respondents say that their email newsletter program has become seen within their company as more important in the past year or two; another 48% report its perception is unchanged. Only 5% of respondents say their newsletter is seen as less important.
  • Strong by comparison. When all survey respondents were asked to rate the performance of a variety of online marketing tactics, email newsletters ranked fifth out of 13 options. 74% of
    respondents rated newsletters as somewhat or very effective, compared to banner ads (80%), SEO (78%), educational resource centers (76%) and SEM (75%). LinkedIn and YouTube were least effective, both 24%.

So how is your newsletter doing? The summer months have been pretty slow all around but brace yourself for the last quarter of the year. It’s right around the corner.

© 2009 – 2012, Contributing Author. All rights reserved.

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