Digital marketers spending less but targeting more: Report

Australian businesses must try as many different digital marketing methods as they can in order to decide which produces the best return on investment, industry giant Responsys has warned, on the back of a new report that more organisations are embracing social platforms.

The Responsys Big Australian Report, which surveyed more than one billion email, mobile and social messages in the year to June 30, 2011, along with 350 Enterprise marketers, found that use of mobile channels has increased five-fold, while use of social channels has increased tenfold.

“The Australian marketplace has taken a huge leap forward, and in the last few years has made a strong move in the use of data, and more sophisticated data,” says Responsys Asia-Pacific vice president Simon O’Day.

“Consumers have changed,” the report states. “Today, they fast forward through TV commercials. They’ve put down the newspaper. They junk unsolicited email. Because they have new options that better fit their digital lifestyle.”

“They can choose which marketing messages they receive, when, where and from whom.”

The survey found that 77% of large Australian companies are using social networks for marketing, with 63% significantly increasing their focus on Facebook and Twitter. And 30% of companies are sending mobile messages, mostly as reminders or confirmations of purchases.

Over the past year, there has been a 300% increase in the number of emails opened on mobile devices.

O’Day says while these trends indicate Australian businesses are becoming more savvy with technical methods of marketing, they also show that companies are becoming far more responsive to what works and what doesn’t.

“The key to the report, I think, was that we had more than a 100% increase in the amount of actual campaigns or events, but only about a 30% increase in volume. People are actually targeting more, and sending less.”

There has been a 33% increase in email volumes, despite campaigns increasing by 115%. The message volume for SMS and MMS messages has increased by 300%, while campaigns incorporating social elements have risen by 1,000%.

O’Day says businesses need to start thinking about whether a particular marketing method is working as well as it should. If not, he says, businesses should switch from text messages to emails, or from Twitter to Facebook, and experiment with different methods.

“The technology in these areas allows the marketer to be more sophisticated.”

“I think businesses just need to pick a few things and try them. Try a welcome program, or something like that. You don’t have to be sophisticated at the highest level, because the increased rate of your click throughs can be two to three times more just by trying those simple things.”

The report also profiles the average digital marketer. They usually have between five and seven years’ experience, primarily sends campaigns on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and sends emails and messages through Facebook and Twitter.

Marketers are also evenly split between male and female, and is now 10 times more likely to include a social element into their campaigns compared with a year ago.

In contrast, the report profiles digital consumers, stating that there are now over 10.4 million Australian Facebook users, 13.4 million Australians are online for an average of 18.8 hours a month, and that 81.6% of those spend close to five hours on social networks a month.

However, the report found that only 14% of businesses are sending messages according to customer preferences. “In part, this is because only a relatively small percentage of companies are asking the consumers what they want”.

“16% of companies send all messages via all channels. We would expect this will drop as sophisticated targeting increases.”

O’Day says businesses must begin testing new methods in order to determine what will succeed, or risk wasting their time and become more like “old school marketers” that have not responded well to consumer trends.

“Test and review, test and review. This is common in any market and needs to be done,” he says.