SMEs are clear about this and are betting heavily on email marketing

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Nearly 15% of the marketing budget is allocated to email marketing on average within SMEs, according to a study carried out by Edge Research and which will soon be made public. Email is ahead of events and fairs (14%) and personal contact (13%), with all three at the top of the list in budgets.

On the other hand, traditional actions such as outdoor advertising (3%), radio (4%) and TV (5%) manage to capture the smallest percentages.

But although email marketing manages to capture the largest percentage of budgets in all segments and types of companies, it is not homogeneous. Thus, the study shows that, although email costs less than other activities, it is the smallest companies that use it most profusely. Email marketing accounts for up to 18% of budgets in companies with revenues below 5 million dollars, compared to 12% of those with revenues between 30 and 50 million. The most expensive channels, such as television advertising, get a higher percentage of budgets in larger SMEs, with 8% compared to 2% in smaller ones.

The study also shows a parallel with the confidence of marketing managers in their ability to manage the different channels. Thus, the percentage of responses indicating that they are reasonably comfortable with their ability to maximise the potential of the channels, top the list with personal contacts (80%), email marketing (8%) and events/fairs (72%), which are also the channels that get the greatest weight in the budgets. At the other end of the spectrum in terms of confidence ratios are radio advertising (37%), outdoor advertising (38%) and television advertising (38%) and they are the ones that get the lowest percentages of the budget.

Given their confidence in their email marketing skills, it is not active phone number surprising that 56% of marketers surveyed expect to increase their use of this tool, second only to social media (60%).

A previous study by Vocus, published in September 2012, already analysed the increasing efforts of SMEs in the use of social media in their marketing actions, with 7 out of 10 companies within this line, either maintaining the same level (45%) or increasing it (27%). This percentage is not far from another study by Ad-ology that we recently talked about , and which concluded that 1 out of 5 SMEs want to allocate more resources to advertising on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

The increasing rate of email openings on mobile devices is an important element when it comes to justifying the use of email in companies' marketing strategies.

In the second half of 2012, the percentage of email opens on these devices rose to 41%, up from 36% in the first half of the year. Mobile phones accounted for 29% of all opens, up from 26%. The number of opens on tablets increased by a modest 1 point to 12%.