New data from GigaOm Research aims to help digital marketers understand the tactics in use across the marketing funnel, spanning awareness, customer acquisition, conversion and retention.
The survey of 300 U.S. digital marketers revealed that social media, a highly utilized awareness-building tool, is also useful for customer retention. The GigaOm research also indicated that content marketing is especially useful for awareness and retention, but email is the channel used most consistently across the marketing funnel by survey participants.
Other highlights of the marketing tactics and retention study include:
- Nearly 60 percent of companies plan to increase their digital-marketing spend in 2014
- Email is the "digital workhorse" and the most effective relative to other digital tactics (56 percent identified email as the most effective)
- Social spending is set to increase, but marketers believe it is difficult to prove ROI for social media marketing.
- Referral marketing is the digital-marketing "dark horse", with 39 percent of marketers using it regularly, but 43 percent of those who do use it acquire more than 35 percent of their new customers with it.