The effectiveness of the age-old outbound marketing practice of sending out unsolicited promotional emails to customers is declining at an alarming rate. The reason is a growing tendency of ad avoidance amongst the email users. With spam filters becoming savvier and the email users themselves marking most of these emails as junk, this marketing tactic is in danger.
Naturally, advertisers and marketing professionals have started depending on inbound marketing to get their customers as well. Recently, FRACTL and MOZ conducted a survey called Consumer Perspectives on Marketing Effectiveness which revealed some interesting facts about how the customers perceive outbound and inbound marketing. They surveyed over 1000 people online. The respondents, the majority of whom were within the age group of 18 and 34 answered 13 questions on how they perceive the different marketing and advertising media, and whether they preferred the traditional marketing tactics or online marketing.
The following are some of the important findings of the survey:
What influences buying decisions?
1. Traditional advertising is still the best way to attract. It grabbed the attention of around 60% of the respondents, followed by emails and social media ads.
2. 6% of the respondents depend on traditional advertising, 34.6% on email marketing 27.4% on Social media posts and 24.8% on social advertising for making their purchase decisions.
3. Online ads are not as effective as people think them to be. 53.8% reported that they did not click on any ads within the past week. Social media ads were faring the best with 24.4% respondents clicking those, and sponsored stories got clicks from 18%.
4. 4% said that paid search has a negative influence on them. PPC ads were clicked by less than 10%, and 16.5% clicked mobile ads. In fact, 54.3% and 48.1% said that they do not rely on mobile ads and display ads respectively.
5. For inbound marketing, search, content and customer reviews are the major influencers of buying decisions. So these are great ways of catching the attention of the online customers.
6. 88% said that before purchasing a product, they rely heavily on online searches to find out about the company. They also base their purchase decisions on customer reviews (85%) and online articles (89%).
The costs of using the different tactics:
The survey uses the CPM model of pricing, which measures cost per thousand impressions.
- Not surprisingly, online advertising cost much lesser than traditional advertising through TV, newspaper magazines, radio, etc.
- Amongst the traditional channels, direct mail has an extremely high CPM of $ 583, but with the median ROI of 12 – 14%, this cost is well worth it. Local prime-time TV and magazines have a CPM of $33.85 and $14.00 respectively.
- Facebook advertising was found out to be the most cost-effective social media marketing method with a CPM of just $ 1.54.
- Paid searches follow a CPC model, and the cost varies depending on the targeting options used.
You can read the entire report on Consumer Perspectives on Marketing Effectiveness by Fractl and Moz for the detailed findings of the survey.
Related Post: How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
