Being a direct marketer is challenging: channels, so much data, and so little intelligence or talent to figure our how to work out an efficient multichannel strategy. According to the Direct Marketing Association’s released ‘2015 Statistical Fact Book’, four out of five marketers will expand their budgets towards digital this year and the majority of them (at about 45%) will focus on social media marketing as their biggest area of opportunity. Coming in second was email, at 40 percent of marketers.  But another table in this annual treasure trove of PowerPoint fodder shows that marketers find email to be not only their most effective Internet tactic, but also the most easy to execute. The most challenging?  Social media—though the channel finished third (behind websites) as “most effective.” It is found out that poor data quality was the main difficulty between marketers and a complete customer view, according to an Experian Marketing Services study that is included in the book. It was followed by siloed departments, inability to link between different technologies, and not to mention lack of relevant technology. Not surprisingly, another study by Mondo showed that three out of top five hires marketing departments are looking to make this year are in social media, data analytics, and mobile strategy. “Understanding how to build out the tech stack is a much bigger challenge today than it was just a few years ago,” O’Keefe says. “There’s a lot of leaning on agency partners. Big retailers are borrowing staff from supplier partners, but they still lack the broad knowledge.” So, while direct marketers will be spending more time and resources attempting to harness new technologies and burgeoning channels, they also will continue to ride hard an old workhorse: email. “Email marketing continued to deliver exceptional ROI because people continued to respond positively to the commercial messages that reached their inboxes. They simply liked what marketers sent,” Return Path CEO and DMA board member Matt Blumberg wrote in an introduction to the book’s email section. Another notable development in this year’s Fact Book was a higher intention on the part of marketers to step up responsive design efforts, largely due to a change Google made in its algorithm that favors mobile-friendly sites in search results. Although mobile marketing strategies are a must in a time when more than half of searches are initiated on devices, the channel remains expensive. O’Keefe cited a Merkle study showing that the cost of clicks produced by mobile ads increased by 20% in Q4 2014, while the price of tablet clicks rose by only 4% and desktop clicks by 11%.