Second quarter results for direct marketers reflect improvements in sales, profitability and ROI, according to the Direct Marketing Association’s recently released Quarterly Business Review for the second quarter. The picture isn’t quite as clear for direct marketing related spending, however. Investment in direct and digital marketing activity remained steady or grew during the second quarter, according to 83.3% of those who responded to the survey. For the third quarter, 41.7% of direct marketers expect to increase their marketing spend while 46.5% say budgets will remain steady. Marketers cited improved data analytics tools and processes as the leading driver of new or expanded direct and digital marketing activity. And, while digital channels such as e-mail, social, search, mobile and online display continue to command a major portion of new marketing investment, they were joined in the second quarter by new investments in non-catalog direct mail and teleservices. Marketers dedicated the largest portion of outsourced spending to direct response broadcast while search programs and catalog services attracted the next largest portion of outsourced spending. Profitability increased during the second quarter, with 53% of marketers and 53.6% of marketing services providers indicating they had better profits during the second quarter when compared to the same period last year. However, a majority of respondents said that profitability did not change when compared to the first quarter of 2010. In terms of sales, 53.4% of marketers reported a year-over-year increase in direct marketing related sales and 40.1% saw an increase from the first quarter of 2010. From an ROI perspective, performance improved during the second quarter for social, e-mail, search, teleservices, direct response broadcast, non-catalog direct mail and direct response print. The report is based on two online surveys that were conducted in July and includes responses from 292 marketers and 240 service providers.