With the benefits of mobile ringing in the ears of organisations worldwide, 2013 was the year email marketers really turned their attention to it. Over one fifth more companies optimised email for mobile as they took a more strategic approach to incorporating it into their email activities, reveals The Adestra/Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census 2014 that surveyed over 1,100 marketers.
This year’s survey indicates that mobile email has become the new reality and marketers are integrating it into their workflow. The same trend occurred with social media; as new technologies become mainstream, the hype dies down, and they are perceived as just another channel in the mix.
The Year of the Customer
Where 2013 was the ‘year of mobile’, could this year be dubbed ‘year of the customer’? If we are entering the ‘age of the customer’, as predicted by Forrester, 2014 may well be the year marketers start to truly focus on the end-user. This demands that the successful marketer both understands the data and knows how to communicate with the customer. As email marketing is a mature channel delivering proven results, it’s a great place to start developing a culture of customer obsession. In a nutshell, it’s about using the available technology, human insight, and taking advantage of the email provider’s advice and support. Not convinced? Read on for key insights from companies that are using it successfully.
In terms of Return on Investment, research shows that there is no better digital communications channel than email - 68% of companies rated it “good” or “excellent”. This marks a 3% increase since last year, surpassing search engine optimisation for the first time since 2009. Furthermore, email is also the best channel on which to focus your budget as companies attributed 23% of their total sales to this channel. This is despite the fact they only spent 16% of their marketing budget on email.
The 2014 Email Marketing Industry Census also found that email send volumes have risen, despite previous indications of a decrease in growth. The proportion of companies sending more than one million emails per month has doubled since 2007, while the proportion of companies sending more than 100,000 emails has risen from 32% in 2007 to 50% this year. This implies that as more emails are sent through targeted, personalized, and automated programs, they become more relevant – and increased relevance equates to more revenue.
However, there are still significant areas for improvement in this mature channel. Such areas are campaign performance and automation, with over half of email marketers rating their own performance as ‘average’ or ‘poor’. Also, implementing marketing automation is a struggle as half deemed it ‘unsuccessful’.
Achieving results with Automation
Companies understand the opportunities of automation, with 83% of companies declaring ‘more relevant communication’ as one of its main benefits. Over 7 in 10 organisations are also aware that it can help ‘increase customer engagement’ and facilitate ‘more timely communication’ with customers. Nearly all companies have access to marketing automation capabilities provided from their email providers.
Despite the widespread availability of automation technology, most companies appear to be taking a timid approach towards it. Subscription or sign-up to website and automated response to website visit/sign-up are the most used triggers. Only 19-27% of companies report using other triggers or behaviours, which may be affecting the success of automation programmes. To illustrate this, only 4% of companies have described their automated campaigns as ‘very successful’, while 47% rated them ‘quite successful’.
Agencies, on the other hand, are more positive about the success of automated email marketing, with 7% reporting it as ‘successful’ and 58% as ‘quite successful’. They also show greater usage of different types of automated triggers.
Email’s role in the Future
Marketers appear optimistic that email marketing will survive the supposed threats to its existence. Not only that, but they believe it will thrive in a fully integrated, personalised, yet not completely automated ecosystem. What’s more, two-thirds believe email will continue to be one of the highest channels for delivering ROI.
The vast majority of companies agree that email will be fully integrated with other marketing channels, and that all email communication will be completely personalised by 2019. However, marketers appear undecided on what this integration will look like. Although almost half of marketers think there will be ‘one single technology platform for all marketing including email’, one third of companies disagree. Despite this, there appears to be the understanding that email will be part of a broader marketing product, as email’s value becomes more intrinsically linked with other marketing channels.
So while email is perceived as a ‘mature’ channel – there’s still a long way to go to optimise its efficiency, interpret and make use of all the valuable data available. Equally, accepting that we are entering the ‘age of the customer’, there’s a lot of work to be done to determine what that actually looks like and how companies can implement strategies to exploit their new customer obsession.
Read the full results at www.adestra.com/emailcensus.
By Steve Denner, Director at Adestra.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus