Ireland - Sales 1800 80 60 60
Ireland - Support 1800 80 61 61
UK Sales - 0800 904 79 55
UK Support - 0800 085 6388
All other countries - +353 23 8829880

Welcome to Email Marketing Insight 2009, a research project into Irish Marketers, use of email carried out in collaboration with the Marketing Institute.

Executive summary

In this year's survey, email marketing remains an essential part of Irish Marketers, marketing mix with over 79% of respondents stating that email marketing is either "important" or "very important".

Email marketing is increasingly used by Irish marketers to achieve key sales and marketing goals such as maintaining and improving customer relationships, driving sales and generating new leads. But email marketing is also used by Irish businesses to communicate internally.

There is a marked improvement in the level of personalisation and segmentation used by marketers in email campaigns.

We noted in this year's survey a substantial increase in the sophistication of tools used to conduct email marketing campaigns. In line with this trend, we also identified a large increase in the level of metrics tracked by marketers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Some of the other major findings of the 2009 research:

• While a large increase in email marketing tool sophistication was noted in this year's survey, 46% of respondents still use their own standard email software such as Outlook to carry out email marketing campaigns.
• A 16% increase over 2008 results in the number of respondents sending campaigns "daily" to "at least once a month".
• 62% of email databases contain less than 5000 addresses.
• B2C marketers use less personalisation (30%) than B2B marketers.
• A noticeable improvement over 2008 results in open rates and click-through rates of email marketing campaigns (increased sophistication in monitoring metrics, as well as a better understanding of the importance of reputation in getting an email delivered, is paying off).
• Irish marketers plan to spend more (44%) rather than less on email marketing over the next 12 months.
• "Inbox overload" and "spam" remaining the biggest perceived challenges for email marketing.