A recent sur­vey shows that brands are ramp­ing up their spend for mar­ket­ing chan­nels where they can best engage the con­sumer. Email leads as the “dar­ling” con­duit for com­mu­ni­ca­tions and dri­ving cus­tomer loy­al­ty. Sec­ond is social media, and tying it all togeth­er is the mobile device.

Mar­ket­ing bud­gets for 2015 are reveal­ing how brands pri­or­i­tize their chan­nels for the com­ing year, and this gives clues into what that means for con­sumer engage­ment and demand.

StrongView, a com­pa­ny that offers prod­ucts and ser­vices for cross-chan­nel mar­ket­ing, released find­ings of its annu­al “Mar­ket­ing Trends Sur­vey,” which polled near­ly 400 busi­ness lead­ers across sec­tors.

These busi­ness lead­ers indi­cat­ed they would increase spend in the fol­low­ing areas in 2015:

1. Email mar­ket­ing: 61 per­cent
2. Social media: 49 per­cent
3. Mobile mar­ket­ing: 40 per­cent
4. Search, includ­ing SEO and PPC: 38 per­cent
5. Online dis­play adver­tis­ing: 37 per­cent

StrongView says this is indica­tive of what the con­sumer is respond­ing to, and that it’s no sur­prise email, mobile, and social are at the top.

“Over the past sev­er­al years, we’ve seen con­sumers increas­ing­ly use their mobile devices to inter­act with brands across email, social media, and mobile apps, so it’s no sur­prise that those three chan­nels top the list for increased invest­ment,” said Jason Klein, direc­tor of mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions at StrongView.

And, there’s a rea­son email it set to be the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of more resources in the com­ing year, accord­ing to Klein.

“Giv­en that email gen­er­ates a high­er ROI than any oth­er mar­ket­ing chan­nel, and is a pre­ferred method for com­mu­ni­cat­ing with brands, more mar­keters are focus­ing bud­get increas­es there,” he said.

Social is a dri­ver for con­sumer engage­ment, and Klein said it’s attract­ing bud­get for one big rea­son: brands have “proven how build­ing com­mu­ni­ties can lead to brand loy­al­ty and advo­ca­cy.”

Tying it all togeth­er is the smart­phone device, and Klein said the incred­i­ble adop­tion of smart­phones paired with amount of data they pro­vide to brands “make it a chan­nel that’s impos­si­ble for mar­keters to ignore.”

Email Continues To Be A Brilliant Way To Build Loyalty

Ear­li­er this year, StrongView released find­ings of anoth­er study it con­duct­ed that high­light­ed how brands gained the all-impor­tant cus­tomer loy­al­ty.

In the study, email emerged as the most effec­tive way to dri­ve cus­tomer action, with 51 per­cent of brand enthu­si­asts report­ing their last pur­chase was prompt­ed by email com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and 45 per­cent of non-enthu­si­asts report­ing the same.

Addi­tion­al­ly, on Black Fri­day and Cyber Mon­day, brands saw email mar­ket­ing as a dri­ver for ecom­merce hol­i­day suc­cess. One report by Cus­to­ra showed:

• Email mar­ket­ing account­ed for 27 per­cent of sales on Black Fri­day.
• Email drove 24 per­cent of orders on Cyber Mon­day.

Which Type Of Email Communications Is Most Important In 2015?

The StrongView trends sur­vey showed email cam­paigns which attempt to engage the con­sumer through trig­gers and trans­ac­tions (42 per­cent), as well as life­cy­cle pro­grams (41 per­cent) and newslet­ters (35 per­cent) were among the top ben­e­fi­cia­ries for increased spend in 2015.

When it came to life­cy­cle pro­grams, busi­ness lead­ers said they would increase resources for emails that dri­ve cus­tomer loy­al­ty first, with 45 per­cent stat­ing increased spend there.

Time and again, we see that email com­mu­ni­ca­tions are an impor­tant dri­ver for stay­ing in touch with the cus­tomer, dri­ving loy­al­ty, and show­ing results for the bot­tom line.

You can down­load the full sur­vey results from StrongView here (PDF).

Are you invest­ing more in email mar­ket­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with your tar­get audi­ence and build loy­al­ty in 2015?