• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, August 27, 2018

There’s ROI, and then there’s efficiency. Where do they converge? That’s the question behind The Cost of Inefficiency: How Operational Creep Kills Strategic Thinking in Email Marketing,” a new study from MessageGears.

A fourth of those surveyed say their email team is average or worse in operational efficiency.

Of course, efficiency has many components. One is morale. It’s clear from this report that many in enterprise B2C email are dismayed with the amount of grunt work they have to do.

MessageGears writes that “creative and strategic tasks were easily the most popular, with marketers indicating the favorite parts of their job were writing enticing content, devising ways to engage with customers, and designing customer-centric emails, while testing, reviewing analytics, and segmenting data earned low marks.”

But it adds that “almost half of marketers reported spending at least half their work time performing operational tasks instead of the creative and strategic ones that take the best advantage of their skill sets.”

That depends on other issues such as the quality of their ESP. Those that are satisfied with their service provider gave their team a 5—the highest rating. And 83% who love their ESP also love their job. But 20% of email marketers are unhappy with the tools provided by their ESP.

MessageGears has blamed this on legacy marketing cloud ESPS that ail to address the data issues faced by enterprise companies.

It also depends on resources — 75% of those whose jobs are at least half operational are on teams with low email budgets.

Overall, the study found that 68% of the unhappy people spend half or more of their time on operational stuff. But 95% of those with purely strategic roles are very satisfied.

Of the latter group, 81% would again choose email as a career. And they would be joined by 78% of those whose work is mostly strategic. But only 51% of those whose job is half strategic or less would go into email again.

What kind of training do they need? The study reports that 46% of email marketers lack a marketing degree.

Of those polled, 64% use external agencies to deploy email campaigns and 26% use on an on-premise ESP. Overall, 74% say their email process would be improved if they had an easier way to target people.

MessageGears interviewed 100 email marketers in the B2C enterprise space. Their companies send at least 10 million emails per month, and 68% send over 50 million marketing and transactional emails a month.