Key findings of the Census included:
While email is providing a high ROI for companies across the board, there are key best practice areas that have a direct impact on ROI – particularly segmentation, testing, and systems integration - miss these out and revenue suffers. In addition, there is a low awareness in areas that can affect deliverability and reputation, one critical area being adapting email to Priority Inbox placement.
Best practice boosts ROI
Those companies who are putting careful effort into their email marketing activity are continuing to reap rewards – particularly those who understand the importance of best practice (including testing and segmentation) and integrating their email activity with other business areas.
• Companies who are practising basic segmentation are 95% more likely to rate email ROI as excellent or good compared to those who do not use even basic segmentation, nor have plans to do so.
• Only 31% of companies surveyed regularly test their email marketing campaigns. But 81% of companies who do regular testing for email marketing say their ROI from email is excellent or good, compared to 72% for those who do “occasional” testing, 65% for those who do “infrequent” testing and only 37% for those who “don't test”.
• Those who have their sales and conversion data “well integrated” with their email activity are 49% more likely to consider email as offering an excellent or good ROI.
Henry Hyder-Smith (pictured), Managing Director at Adestra, comments: “Last year’s census clearly showed a ‘back to basics’ approach is vital to develop successful email marketing, however it appears marketers are not heeding this advice. This year, delving deeper into the data, shows a direct result of using best practices is better ROI. So more segmentation, more testing, and integrating email with CRM/web analytics/sales data, results in significant revenue growth. Get the basics right and you will sell more.”
Econsultancy Research Director, Linus Gregoriadis adds: “This year, for the first time, we have shown that companies observing some basic best practices are reaping the rewards when it comes to ROI from email marketing. While one would intuitively expect this to be the case, we hope that this research prompts more companies to invest more effort in a marketing discipline which is often neglected, despite its effectiveness. Put simply, those simply performing ‘batch and blast’ techniques are less likely to see ROI benefits.”
Lack of adaptation to priority inbox features
Gmail priority inbox, along with similar offerings such as Hotmail sweep, in its basic sense is making engagement the priority. So, if a company gains a new subscriber, but does not send a welcome message, or programme, its communications automatically go to the bottom of the pile. This is why it’s shocking that only 3% of companies surveyed adapted their email strategy accordingly. Plus, only 31% send welcome programmes and only 28% have an auto-responder to website sign up / visit, meaning they are missing a vital opportunity to have their emails delivered to the top of their new subscribers’ inbox, as soon as they subscribe.
Henry Hyder-Smith, says: “With inbox prioritisation, if companies don’t change their approach, their investment in a great email strategy, powerful designs and a quality database may be for nothing – their marketing messages are simply sent to the bottom of the inbox by default. It is no longer good enough just to get delivered to the inbox, it’s now about placement.”
Simple to set up, easy to automate, it’s puzzling why marketers aren’t taking advantage of the technology available to them. Such changes can have a significant impact on open rates, but email marketers appear to have ignored this opportunity.
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. 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."
About Econsultancy
Econsultancy says: “Econsultancy is an independent community-based publisher, focused on best practice digital marketing and e-commerce. Our hub has 110,000+ members worldwide from clients, agencies and suppliers alike with over 90% member retention rate.
We help our members build their internal capabilities via a combination of research reports and how-to guides, training and development, face-to-face conferences, forums and professional networking.”
