The Email Research Center

Today we released the results of a collaborative research project with Econsultancy looking at how marketers are allocating marketing budgets in 2010. I want to thank the team at Econsultancy. Linus Gregoriadis (@linusgreg) runs a great research team out of their London office and was a pleasure to work with on this project.

While 46% plan on increasing their overall marketing budgets in 2010, 66% are planning to increase budgets across digital channels. Running a crosstab analysis on the changes in overall budgets compared to changes in digital budgets, we found 28% of marketers are shifting at least some of their overall marketing budgets from traditional to digital channels.

A big part of the project was to understand not only how marketing budgets are being shifts, but why these shift are happening? The factors fueling this shift were a bit of a surprise. Reports that marketers are facing increased pressure to demonstrate positive ROI during the economic downturn led us to believe ROI would be the main driver fuelling a shift into digital channels. The findings of this report suggest otherwise. ROI is a factor, but there is another motivation playing a bigger role in 2010.

Check out this 2-minute video to hear what is fueling the shift toward digital channels:



Here is ExactTarget's free brief of the report.

The full report is available at http://econsultancy.com/reports/marketing-budgets-2010