According to India e-Marketing Outlook 2012, conducted by Octane.in, Social Media and Email Marketing will emerge as the top two online marketing initiatives that will see an increase in marketing investments in 2012, as compared to 2011. The Annual India e-Marketing 2012 is an analysis of ideas and perspectives shared by Chief Marketing Officers, Vice President-Marketing, Marketing Heads and Marketing Managers of select 380 companies in India.

According to the findings, 61.3 per cent of respondents believe integrating emails and social media is extremely important for achieving higher impact and eMarketing success. “A greater number of companies intend to use email and SMS for e-Marketing in 2012. Respondents in the two successive years have indicated maximum use of emails and SMS for Sales and Event Promotions,” the report said. Comparative analysis of data reveals that more that 80 per cent of the respondents agree that integrated (Email and SMS) campaigns influence Conversion Rates.

The report also said that there has been a major shift in the perception of behavioural targeting. For 2012, more India marketers share that this is paramount in meeting email marketing targets. Majority of India marketers (36 per cent) also wanted a code of conduct by an industry body like IAMAI while 31.5 per cent of participants who believe stronger anti-spam laws in India like CAN-SPAM would curb the SPAM campaigns.

As a direct result of the TRAI directive on usage of SMS for promotional messages, approximately 35.3 per cent of the respondents plan to increase their budgets towards email marketing by more than 11 per cent in 2012.

Reaching the Inbox (and not the Junk/Spam folder), increasing ROI and building Subscribers list are seen to be the top 3 challenges for the last two successive years.  “In 2011, we see a 6 per cent increase of dependency on email service provider (ESP) to provide assured inbox delivery of email messages (25.5 per cent respondents in 2011 vs 19.2 per cent in 2010). We see a decline in the role of IT in ensuring inbox deliverability over the last year,” said the report.

“Over the last 12 months we have been educating our clients on huge opportunities in building customer relationships through opt-in or subscriber list based email marketing. It is in this context that we wanted to step back, look at the industry and common practices as a whole over the last 2 years, and then share that perspective with India marketers as they prepare for 2012. This is our second annual report and I am happy to share that 380 marketers from leading brands in India shared their suggestions and ideas towards this marketing outlook for 2012,” said Samarth Saxena, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Octane.in.