Email marketers sent more email last year than the year before, and most achieved better results. But they faced hurdles -- many of them process-related, according to the 2022 Email Marketing Benchmark Report from Knak.
Of the companies polled, 71% sent more emails than the prior year, versus 60% that had increased volume in 2020.
The average deliverability rate was 93%, down 3.2% from the prior year. But medium-sized firms reported a 94% rate, versus 93% for large companies and 92.5% for small ones. Overall, 37% saw their delivery rates rise.
In addition, 51% saw their open rate increase, with an average of an increase of 3% to 24%. The impact of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which took effect in September, is unclear.
And, 44% pulled a higher click-through rate. The average click-through was 10% -- a 4.4% hike over the prior year. But 19% saw their click-through rates decline. Large firms generated 11%, and for smaller firms the rate was 9%.
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Unsubscribe rates remained flat at 0.3%. Larger firms had a higher rate -- 0.5% -- perhaps because they send more email.
All that said, marketing teams faced many challenges in getting their emails out the door:
And, teams were daunted by these obstacles to email creativity:
How are marketers creating emails? Mostly templates:
The features used in emails include:
In another finding, 35% switched their marketing automation platform in the last two years or are looking at a new one. They are using:
Meanwhile, 50% built more landing pages for their emails last year, averaging 20. But 69% rarely create landing pages, and 23% rely on their web teams to do so, which prevents a personal marketing touch.
As for speed, 44% can get emails to market in hours, 39% in days, 11% within minutes and 6% in weeks.
For landing pages, 45% say they can get them to market in hours, 33% in days, 14% in minutes and 6% in weeks.
Canada-based Knak surveyed 200 marketing professionals, including operations leaders and specialists (40%), digital marketers (7%), marketing generalists (29%) and marketing executives (!0%).
Of this sample, 63% work in B2B, 29% in a bybrid of B2B and B2C and 8% in B2C exclusively. And 17% work at companies with 100 employees or less, 41% in firms with 101-1,000 employees, and 32% in organizations with 1,001-10,000+.