As you plan for 2010/11 with crash/recovery/crash/recovery circling around meeting rooms worldwide, budgets remain a battleground.
If you need statistics to help you to demonstrate the importance of a well-funded email program – here they are.

Head’s up – the data says: Keep email off the chopping block.

If the recent StrongMail “2010 Marketing Trends” survey is correct, online marketing spending will be up in the coming year. According to the report, 89% of respondents said they will either maintain or increase the amount of their marketing spending in 2010, with 50% of businesses saying they would allocate additional dollars to their marketing efforts. The survey, conducted online Nov. 17–25, surveyed 1,057 business executives.

What will they be spending their dollars on? Social media and e-mail marketing are the top two areas, with 69% of respondents saying they will be increasing e-mail spending; 59% saying they would be increasing social media efforts; and 69% saying they would be integrating social media and e-mail marketing. Among their goals, marketers reported a desire to increase relevancy by adopting segmentation and targeting, cited by 46% of respondents.

New technology that makes it easier to perform A/B testing, should become more important in 2010, she said. “It’s always challenging to come up with two sets of creative, but with subject lines, everyone can do some form of A/B testing,” she said. “These new tools will enable marketers to test on the fly and optimize for winning subject line as a campaign is in flight.” (Blog note: Our new SmartMailPro has A/B split testing tools built in).

Of course, marketers will also strive to make better use of what they already have available to them, Hersant said, with 68% of respondents saying that they plan on making better use of the data they already have.

Silverpop has revealed in a survey that in spite of recession email marketing budgets will increase in 2010. It also found that social media is poised to play a bigger role in 2010.  Four out of 10 marketers reported that their email budgets in 2010 would increase, and nearly half revealed that their budgets would stay the same.  Most of the respondents have agreed that the recession is badly affecting the business and it is likely to continue this way or time to come. More than half of the marketers (52%) have prioritised customer loyalty as top goal for email marketing.

Overall, spending on email marketing in the US will balloon to $2 billion by 2014 — a nearly 11 percent compound annual growth rate — according to a new forecast by Forrester Research Inc. A high return on investment, and growing consumer use of social email accounts will fuel the use of email by Direct Marketing professionals.

And the Small Business sector – far and away New Zealand’s biggest segment -  were asked by VerticalResponse, Inc.on their planned usage and spend for email marketing, social media, search engine marketing and online banner ads for  2010.

Here’s a snapshot of where SME owners said they would and would not be spending their budgets.

• 74.1 percent will increase their email marketing spend.
• 68.3 percent will increase their social media spend.
• 23.8 will avoid search engine marketing.
• 54.2 percent will not invest in banner advertising.
• 79.6 percent will not run television ads.
• 72.7 percent will be not run radio advertising.

Retail and eTail email is consistently critical.  And even those who were already planning to spend, were last year spending more than that.  65% of retailers are planning to spend more on email than originally planned. – Forrester Research and Shop.org, “Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report” (2009)

As ever, we have to turn to the US for these statistics, but the point is clear, and there are plenty more numbers where these came from.

Here at our place we see the smartest clients working their email programs harder than ever.

Best practise strategy and execution, segmentation and always, always relevant content is king, no matter what your budget.