E-mail Marketing is Best Performing Marketing Tool, says Survey

Datran Media released its 2nd Annual Marketing & Media Survey, which showed that the second best-performing online ad medium is search, right behind email marketing. In December, Datran asked 2,000 industry leaders "which advertising media buys perform strongly for your company"? 80% said email marketing but right behind them was search at 70.6%.

I question the integrity of the sample. Just who are these industry leaders -- are they e-mail marketing vendors? Search marketing is by far today's marketing medium of choice -- spending continues to skyrocket and marketers rave about its higher ROI than e-mail. For the near term, I recommend that e-marketers continue to pursue search for effective lead generation. More specifically, pursue campaigns with targeted display ads and keywords leveraging Google and Yahoo as portals.