Spark The Surge – India e-Marketing Outlook 2013

Highlights

1. For the third year running, customer acquisition is the primary goal for marketing initiatives with more than 50% of Indian marketers opting for it over customer retention or brand awareness.
2. More than half the marketers who are planning to acquire new customers in 2013 will focus on Email Marketing to achieve their goal – whereas for increasing brand awareness nearly 32% of Indian marketers will rely on Social Media, Videos or Webcasts.
3. Social media continues to surge in 2012-2013 with 65% of the respondents willing to provide an investment boost to the channel as opposed to 37% last year. This is despite the fact that marketers are still getting more customer engagement from email marketing than social media; 39% in 2011 vs. 36% in 2012.
4. Three quarters of all marketers surveyed believe that in 2013, up to 50% of all Email Marketing messages will be viewed on mobile phones. A majority of them (92%) are actively creating Mobile Marketing strategies to adapt to the change.
5. For 68% of the companies represented in the survey, Email marketing contributes up to 30% towards the overall sales revenue. Additionally, close to 61% the companies will give their Email/Mobile Marketing budgets a boost of 5%-20% for the year 2013.
6. Up to 94% of Indian marketers are planning to adopt one or the other segmentation technique in their upcoming e-Marketing campaigns in 2013. Segmentation using interest based preferences was the top choice with a third of the respondents opting for it.
7. Almost 50% of the respondents feel that increasing Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Conversion-Rate (CR) is the biggest challenge that they face in email marketing. Last year the biggest challenge was to prevent emails from going into the junk folder.
8. More than half the companies doing e-Marketing campaigns in India rely on professional ESPs (like Octane) to ensure that their emails reach the inbox. Meanwhile, our findings also indicate almost a 50% drop in the number of marketers who feel that Email deliverability is out of their control (15% in 2012 survey to 7.80% in 2013 survey).