• by Jess Nelson , April 4, 2017

Nearly a quarter of email marketers still do not utilize email metrics to evaluate campaign performance, according to a recent study by GetResponse. 

Email marketing technology vendors might rejoice to read the Email Marketing Excellence Report 2017, a joint study between GetResponse and SmartInsights.com. The two companies polled more than 2,500 email marketers worldwide, and the results suggest that email marketers still have plenty of room to grow in incorporating best practices into their email regimen. 

When asked to rank their “primary email metric used” to evaluate message and campaign performance, 23% of 2,510 email marketers polled responded that they currently do not focus on any type of metric to evaluate email success. The majority of respondents mainly track basic engagement rates, with 74% of respondents simply tracking email opens and clicks.

The rewards of email personalization have yet to be reaped by a majority of email marketers, with more than 50% of respondents indicating they do not incorporate any type of targeting or segmentation into their email campaigns. Only a fifth of email marketers polled by GetResponse use some form of rules-based personalization in their campaigns, such as dynamic content, while 29% of respondents use 2-5 customer data points to personalize campaigns.

A majority of respondents also asserted that they do not proactively test their email marketing in any way.

Alternatively, 27% of email marketers test subject lines and 20% test alternative offers, but only 17% of marketers asserted that they continuously test and optimize their email marketing programs.

Not surprisingly, a group of email marketers selected email as the most effective digital marketing channel, according to GetResponse’s report. Yet, the results of the study suggest that email marketers might see even better performance by incorporating more data-driven strategies into their campaigns.

Perhaps that’s why the majority of email marketers -- at 58% percent -- plan to increase their email budgets this year.