• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, December 14, 2023

With 2024 about to spring upon us, it may be worthwhile to review The 2023 State of Email Report from Litmus. 

It has been a good year for email teams — 41% of marketers say email is their most effective channel, with social media a distant second,tied with paid search/ads at 16%.  

But not all email users are adhering to best practices, and this is limiting their effectiveness. For instance, only 35% employ a freelance or full-time email designer. 

Another 31% report that design is done by an email developer and 32% say it is done by a marketing designer, while only 2% say design is outsourced. 

This isn’t just about making things look good — email design is a “highly technical field with lots of intricacies that require an expert to handle,” the study notes. 

For instance, “an email has 300,000 potential renderings," the study says, adding that the marketing team "needs to be working with a designer who can create emails prepared for all 300,000 of those iterations.”

Here’s another issue: only 20.8% say their ESP is very highly integrated with other marketing channels and 9% say they are very highly linked. While 40% claim they are adequately integrated, 20.1% say the integration is poorly done, and 6% admit that this is very much so. 

“Those are some pretty hard stats for improving the function of your email program with integration.

The takeaway? Integrating your ESP and your email program at large with the rest of the marketing department should be priority in 2024, too.  

Lest you think this study is skewed, it says that 47% are not Litmus customers.  

Litmus concludes: “In a world where 87% of marketing leaders say email is critical to success but 36% aren’t measuring ROI, investing in your email marketing program is more important than ever.” 

What to do? “Email is a powerful marketing channel that is primed to become even more relevant than ever before in 2024 — so it’s up to us to set the stage and empower email teams with the tools they need to succeed.”