The Adestra / Econsultancy Email Marketing Industry Census 2013 surveyed over 1300 marketers and finds, when asked how they rated the performance of their email marketing, 61% scored themselves as ‘poor’ or ‘average’. 4% said ‘excellent’ and 35% ‘good’.
Unlike the ever-improving GCSE and A level results, it seems email marketers aren’t improving in many areas [and many must try harder otherwise they won’t go out to play], says Adestra.
Email is not a new channel, it’s been used as a serious sales tool for over 10 years, so one may assume marketers have it all under control and performance is good. Not so.
The normal metrics to evaluate performance are opens, clicks, ROI measurement and practices used, rather than asking marketers how they think they are doing. So this year is quite a revelation.
As such a high percentage of companies rate their email campaign performance as below par, there must be fundamental problems and a ‘back to basics’ approach therefore makes a lot of sense. Further data from the survey shows companies are not using much of their ESP functionality - most use less than half – which could go some way to explaining the poor results. Key for marketers is to focus on what delivers ROI – automation, segmentation, list cleansing, testing etc. Also, in the longer term, look to fix barriers to effective email marketing – ‘disconnected systems’ is the top hurdle every year.
Henry Hyder-Smith (pictured), MD at Adestra says: “Often focusing on the basics produce the best ROI improvement. The best advice is to start small, focus on low hanging fruit and quick wins – for example, subject line testing produces the best ROI figures. Build a solid foundation, then look towards more advanced techniques later.”
The flip side to this is that there are lots of opportunities to improve, techniques to master and technologies to help our time-starved email marketers. Given its high ROI stats - 66% say excellent or good - the email channel is worth investing time and effort.
The new survey also investigates resources/time spent on email campaigns. It shows by getting hung up on creative activities, marketers aren’t correctly addressing more strategic areas such as optimising their emails. Optimisation is fundamental in email marketing, yet almost one third (29%) spend no time at all on it.
An infographic that illustrates these points can be seen here.
This is the seventh annual Email Marketing Industry Census, and is the largest survey of its type in the UK, says Adestra. More than 1,300 respondents from a mixture of in-house teams, email service providers (ESPs) and digital marketing agencies took part, which took the form of an online survey in January and February 2013.
You can register to receive the full report here.
On 29th April, Adestra is running a webinar on the findings of the 2013 Adestra and Econsultancy email census. Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy’s Research Director will give his perspective on this year’s findings and trends and Reena Mistry, Marketing Director at Adestra, will then talk about what this means to email marketers and what they can do to improve.
About Adestra
Adestra says: “Founded in 2004, Adestra set out to be the most respected Email Service Provider. Today, Adestra is a market leader, with offices in Oxford, London and New York. Over 300 organisations globally and more than 4,500 marketers across most sectors, work with our technology, people and deliverability solutions to generate effective email marketing that deliver results.
Our Technology: Developed entirely in-house by our staff, Adestra’s MessageFocus gives clients an extremely scalable and configurable email service platform that consistently delivers.
Our People: We seek to provide the highest possible levels of technical customer support and intelligent, innovative consultation. In 2012 we released our customer charter, the first of any UK ESP, which is our promise to our clients. Our approach to client service has helped us to maintain our client retention rate at 98.7%; something we are very proud of.
Our Deliverability: Adestra offer a very honest approach to deliverability, quite simply there is no silver bullet. Our inbox placement rate, which peaks at 99.8% and our expertise, gives your emails the best chance of arriving in the destination inbox.”
