Email is most important channel for driving Christmas sales: infographic

Email is considered to be the most important channel for driving online sales this Christmas, according to a survey of marketing professionals by eCircle.

More than 40% of respondents said email is ‘very important’ for driving sales, followed by SEO and SEM (both 33%).

In comparison, social media is considered to be the fourth most important channel with 20%.

This tallies with data from the Econsultancy / Adestra Email Marketing Census.

It shows that more than two-thirds of companies (70%) rate email marketing as ‘excellent’ (23%) or ‘good’ (47%) in terms of return on investment. While this represents a slight fall from 2011 (72%), this is still a higher ROI than any other digital marketing channel except search engine optimisation (79%).

But without further ado, here is eCircle’s infographic...

David Moth is a Senior Reporter at Econsultancy. You can follow him on Twitter or Google+

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Reader comments (5)

  1. Avatar-blank-50x50 Seventyninepr

    11:29AM on 19th December 2012

    This is an excellent infographic. We were extolling the virtues of email marketing to a client recently and convinced them to do a newsletter. Their sales shot up by 65% as a result.

  2. Avatar-blank-50x50 Love Social Media

    9:44PM on 19th December 2012

    This is great information, but it is still important to be in front of your audience in several different ways, which is why social media still holds a great importance when it comes to the overall marketing of a company. Also, many emails sent by companies to inform recipients of the latest sale or product also connect directly to their social media pages, not just their website. Therefore, social media could have a greater effect since the two are so closely related and work off of each other.

  3. Avatar-blank-50x50 Annette

    1:12AM on 20th December 2012

    Be interesting with the mobile channel included - strange such a growing channel was overlooked?

  4. David Godden David Godden Silver

    Director at Keynet Marketing

    8:44AM on 20th December 2012

    Where's mobile marketing in this survey? It'll be interesting to see how much focus will be placed on social media marketing over the coming 12 months.

  5. Daryl Edgecombe Daryl Edgecombe

    Head of Many Things at Colourbox

    10:03AM on 20th December 2012

    This is very interesting but remember it's also very subjective - the percentages are based on what people THINK is important.

    "43% of industry experts said email was 'very important'". The only thing that surprises me about that is that it wasn't a lot higher!

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