Quebec Companies Are Not Leveraging the Potential of Email Marketing

The third edition of the multiple-media.com Barometer, a monthly survey carried out by Montreal web agency multiple-media.com about the use of web technologies by Quebec companies with 50 + employees, Quebec businesses underestimate the potential of email marketing: those who do use email marketing (47%) hardly exploit its full potential and only 18% of those who don’t use it intend to do so in 2010.

Even though mass email is slowly gaining ground as a marketing tool, its overall image is not highly positive, mainly because it is often associated with spam. Yet email marketing offers enormous potential for personalization and adjustment to recipients’ needs. Not to mention effectiveness: the Direct Marketing Association, in the US, estimates that in 2009 email marketing generated an average ROI of $43.62 per dollar invested.

“At a time where specialists agree that personalized mass email is the most effective marketing tool to generate online sales and is one the best ways to develop brand loyalty, it’s quite obvious that the information about this marketing tool is not getting to Quebec companies”, said Renato Cudicio, President of multiple media.com, who also signed this third edition of the multiple-media.com Barometer.

The latest multiple-media.com Barometer Survey at a glance:

• Most businesses who do email marketing simply use it to disseminate “electronic flyers” (57.4%) to existing customers (67%), thus missing out on its considerable potential for business development and customer relations.
• Few companies exploit email marketing potential for personalization (27% say they use it “sometimes”)
• Few companies measure the ROI (Return on Investment) of their email campaigns (50% say they do so but in most cases the means they use do not seem adequate)
• Best practices are ignored by most: for example, rarely are emails monitored and adjusted, from one campaign to another (34%)

Finally, few companies (55%) of companies say they use anti-spam techniques and only a minority seems to use adequate measures

The multiple-media.com Barometer
The multiple-media.com Barometer was created to generate a better understanding of how Quebec companies integrate Web technologies into their marketing communication strategies. Every month, multiple-media.com takes the pulse of medium and large Quebec companies through telephone interviews with Marketing and IT executives. The maximum margin of error is 6.9%, 19 times out of 20 and multiple-media.com has partnered with BIP, a marketing research company recognized for its precision and extensive experience, to carry out these surveys.

multiple-media.com
multiple-media.com offers integrated Web strategy, content and application development services, and differentiates itself, since its creation in 1997, through the higher quality of its client services, the reliability of its solutions, and the excellence of its productions, which efficiently integrate blend communication and technologies. The Montreal agency has developed several Web applications, including MMCM, a powerful proprietary Web CMS suite that allows non-technical users to securely build and maintain multilingual websites and portals in real time.